A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America

Narrates the wild ride of the spectacular San Francisco muckraker that captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s, repeatedly scooped the New York Times, and changed American journalism forever. Launched in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts quickly morphed into a radical slick, winning a George Polk Award in 1967 for its explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition. One of its articles led Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the Vietnam War for the first time, and the magazine unsettled mainstream America by publishing the diaries of Eldridge Cleaver and Che Guevara. Ramparts' list of contributors—including Noam Chomsky, Cesar Chavez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag—formed a who's who of the American left. But the magazine's enemies were equally formidable—the CIA spied on the Ramparts staff after the magazine exposed the agency's covert activities in Vietnam. Although Ramparts folded for good in 1975, it left an important legacy.—From publisher description.