Hinckle was named editor and Bob Scheer, a budding young investigative
journalist, was hired as foreign editor. The former, who was not allied with
any political movement or ideology, was a muckraker in the Hearst tradition
and viewed sacred cows as moving targets; the latter, who maintained a
healthy skepticism of all “isms,” uncovered and sourced the earliest stories
about CIA involvement in the Vietnam War and on American college
campuses just prior to the emergence of a national antiwar movement. With
Hinckle’s taste for muck and Scheer’s remarkable news instinct,Ramparts
began to publish hot national stories ignored by most national media.
One of Ramparts’s most inflammatory stories was the confessions
of a Green Beret who quit over the secret war in Vietnam. In fact,
Rampartsdrew stories from other disaffected government and military
personnel whose consciences were bothering them, but who at that time—a
few years before the Pentagon Papers story broke in the New York Times—
could not sell their stories to the newspapers. The mainstream press was
skeptical of such antigovernment attacks and more or less followed an
“America Right or Wrong” stance. Stermer recalls that the goal of
Rampartswas to “just raise hell.”
Evergreenand Rampartswere two sides of the same coin. They
were competitors only in that they appealed to the same audience, but
enjoyed a rather a large crossover of readers and subscribers. Both
magazines were sold on newsstands in the largest metropolitan areas, and
given such visibility there was a mandate to look inviting.
Ramparts’s design was based on classical, central axis book design.
Stermer used Times Roman, with dingbats and Oxford rules to accent
pages. At the time using book design for a magazine format was unique,
and subsequently influenced the formats of Rolling Stone(which in fact
copied Stermer’s grid for its first issues) and New Yorkmagazine. Being an
illustrator, Stermer had a healthy respect for conceptual illustration and
commissioned quality work by known artists despite the magazine’s
pauper-like fees. He lured Edward Sorel into Rampartsby offering him a
monthly visual column—Sorel’s Bestiary, where the likenesses of famous
people were portrayed as satiric animals in acute attacks on sacred cows. He
commissioned Push Pin Studios, including founders Seymour Chwast and
Milton Glaser. Robert Grossman did one of his best Johnson caricatures
for Ramparts. Paul Davis did a number of covers, including one of South
Vietnamese doyenne Madame Nhu as a cheerleader for Michigan State,
where it was asserted in a Rampartsinvestigative report that the CIA was
recruiting operatives for clandestine work in Vietnam. Stermer also hired
Ben Shahn out of virtual retirement to do a portrait of the early antiwar
senator William Fulbright. In the 1960 s Shahn was under attack by the art
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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