Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Yes, the Panther stuff was painful to read in parts.  Not only were
the Panthers treated far too uncritically by the 60s counterculture in
general, but Ramparts was unfortunate enough to have what seems to have
been the craziest and most criminal of the various Black Panther
organizations in its backyard.

The passages on Cleaver also speak to the utterly repellent sexism
that was common in many radical circles at the time, which was referred
to above.  But Cleaver, as a more or less unapologetic rapist,
certainly took that to the highest (or lowest) possible level.
  

    
Which leads me to a question: Where there people on the Ramparts staff
who were highly skeptical of the Panthers?
  

    
I have to teach right now, so I want to come back to these very
important questions.  But quickly, Ramparts' connections to the
Panthers and its position on Israel were the two most divisive issues
in the magazine's short history. Views of the Panthers, especially,
help explain the defections of some Ramparts staffers to more
conservative positions. 

The Nation: not much of a connection, though it provides a great
contrast.  I'll come back to this, too!
  

    
Most of the people I interviewed said the Panthers' style was pretty
obvious.  Some believed that David was uniquely naive about that.  In
Gene Marine's earlier coverage of the Panthers for Ramparts, he was
very clear that the Panthers frightened him, and that readers should be
frightened, too.   

An earlier question here concerned what I've learned since the book
came out.  Here's one such lesson: I had a reading at Berkeley's
Revolution Books, and one of the hosts mentioned that her parents were
involved with the Panthers.  She said the first time she went by the
office, the Panthers were reading Mao's little red book.  The next time
she went by, they were reading The Godfather.  She thought that shift
was significant, though she remained a strong defender of the
organization.  

My book isn't about the Panthers--there's a huge literature about them
already.  But their story, I think, is more complex than most people
believe.  They began as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and
there really was a felt need for self defense in Oakland's black
community at that time. Yes, they set up programs to serve the
community, and they certainly were infiltrated and harassed and in some
cases killed without cause by the authorities.  But you can't tell the
Ramparts story without talking about Betty Van Patter, and her death
was the turning point for some of the Ramparts veterans, including
David.  It clearly remains a key issue for Sol Stern, too, though his
feelings about Israel at the time were already moving him away from the
magazine and its politics. 

Betty's murder was never solved, but most of the people I interviewed
about it accepted the idea that the Panthers were responsible.  That
theory gained credence from the first story produced by the Center for
Investigative Reporting--hardly a right-wing outfit.  That piece was
co-authored by Ramparts contributor and former Newsweek staffer Kate
Coleman and Paul Avery (played memorably by Robert Downey Jr. in
Zodiac).  It reported on the Panthers' illegal activity and revealed a
pattern of racketeering and gangsterism.  Here it is:

http://colemantruth.net/kate8.pdf

Much later, Kate Coleman wrote a piece specifically about the
Panthers' alleged complicity in her death. Here's that piece, which ran
in David Horowitz's Heterodoxy.       

http://colemantruth.net/kate15.pdf

I realize these issues are controversial.  So does Kate Coleman, whose
website requires that visitors receive permission to quote from it.

About connections to The Nation: A couple of people, including Gene
Marine, wrote for both magazines.  Hunter Thompson also had a foot in
each camp.  But The Nation under Carey McWilliams was regarded as more
of an Old Left magazine. 

McWilliams has already achieved a great deal there, shepherding the
magazine through the McCarthy period and converting it from a journal
of opinion and analysis into a forum for more investigative pieces.
Occasionally he turned over entire issues to Fred Cook's work on the
FBI or Alger Hiss.  McWilliams also commissioned Thompson's first piece
on the Hell's Angels and thereby helped create a bestseller and,
eventually, a celebrity.  When you look back on McWilliams's stuff, it
holds up very well.  

But McWilliams lacked Hinckle's showmanship, and even when The Nation
had a big story, it didn't get the play (from the NY Times, for
example) that Ramparts was able to arrange on a fairly regular basis. 
Perhaps for that reason, Ramparts' circulation at its peak was perhaps
three times higher than The Nation's. 
  

    
Reading "The Godfather" might have been an *improvement* over Mao's
Little Red Book. ;-)

But yeah, it did seem that the Oakland Panthers went on a weird
trajectory from political radicalism to mere thuggery.  However, I
strongly suspect that 100 Panthers would tell 100 different stories
about the organization and their own experience in it.
  

    
Right, lots of layers there, which is why I stress the complexity and
try to keep my focus on the magazine.  

A Godfather digression: I read it as a teenager and was fascinated.  
After I graduated from sports hagiography, organized crime history
became my favorite genre.  When I took Political Science 1 at Berkeley
in 1977, it was on the reading list.  And later, when I taught medieval
lit, I realized that much of it could be understood on similar terms:
turf, respect, kinship, blood feud, etc.  
  

    
Right - all timeless themes, for better or worse.

What you say about David Horowitz having been the most naive about the
Panthers is interesting.  Since he first popped up as a far-right
figure, I've been aware of his Ramparts past.  I'm sure that if I'd
been there at the time, I would have been horrified by Betty Van
Patter's murder and very angry about it.  But I don't think I would
have been very surprised by it - and certainly not surprised enough to
change my entire philosophy of life by 180 degrees.

That speaks of a degree of illusion - the illusion required to produce
disillusionment, I guess.  It reminds me of the generally leftist
folks who suddenly became raving "let's torture everyone!" right
wingers after 9/11.
  

    
That naivety is what is so amazing to me about people like David and
those leftest you mention <mcdee>. It requires such a rigid
understanding of people and the world. Reminds me of the friend who got
caught up with the Moonies. He was always looking for The True Way--a
quest which requires that you believe that there is a True Way.

That kind of naivety would make one not see the whole picture when
looking at the Panthers or any other organization. But I also think
there was a romanticism in the 60s that clouded a lot of actions and
choices made by the people involved, including the staff of Ramparts. 
  

    
Peter, there are some interesting passages on Vietnam and a member of
the intelligence community.  Can you talk about the overall impact that
had on the development of Ramparts?

Interesting note: You and I were both took Poli Sci at Cal in 1977!  I
went for the International Relations module, though.  Just a nice
coincidence.
  

    
Reading the book I was so struck by how naive I used to be. But on the 
other hand, I am still loath to entirely demonize the Panthers. There were 
bad elements and terrible errors and worse, but anyone who took the tour 
of Fred Hampton's house in the weeks after he was assassinated in his 
sleep can't deny that the Panthers were treated horribly by the powers 
that be. And perhaps that some of this, along with the extreme general 
racism in the 60s, may have shaped their bad attitude and behavior.

I remember on a trip to the Bay Area visiting John Seale, Bobby's brother, 
to drop off some newspapers or something, and finding him working at 2am 
in a drab little storefront in North Oakland along with several others, 
pasting up some flyers. They weren't thuggish at all; they seemed like 
dedicated community organizers to me. 

I remember when there was a rift, and all the badness of the Panthers was 
heaped on Eldridge Cleaver; their newspaper cover art depicted him as a 
pregnant woman with pants down around the ankles, if I recall correctly, 
and even as subscribers to the anti-Eldridge side my friends and I were 
uncomfortably aware of the deep sexism in that picture. And no one ever 
forgot the Panther saying that the position of a woman in the revolution 
should be: prone. (Of course, no one also ever forgot that "supine" was 
probably intended.) Anyway, my friends and I tended to regard the Panthers 
as deeply flawed heroes.

I don't agree with Julie's statement that naivete about such things 
"requires such a rigid
 understanding of people and the world. Reminds me of the friend who got
 caught up with the Moonies. He was always looking for The True Way--a
 quest which requires that you believe that there is a True Way."

My friends and I would stay up all night talking about the contradictions 
and nuances of all this. We were nothing like Moonies. We weren't looking 
for a "True Way," but hoping for some positive social change. We were 
veterans of the Civil Rights movement, etc.

Anyway -- I have a question but I'll ask it in the next post.
  

    
Another quality that distinguished David from many (not all) of his
Ramparts colleagues was that he wanted to make the revolution. One
person whose name hasn't come up yet is Bob Avakian, who worked for
Ramparts and later founded the Revolutionary Communist Party.  So David
wasn't the sole revolutionary, but I wouldn't apply that label to
Warren, Dugald, Bill Turner, Don Duncan, Gene Marine, etc.  (Bob is
more of a judgment call, but he says he was ousted for not being
sufficiently revolutionary.)

David said his revolutionary zeal affected his judgment, and he feels
that his lapse in judgment led to Betty's demise. That
mood--confessional and anguished--hangs over David's book, Radical Son.
And I think I detected a bit of it in Sol Stern's remarks.  Recall
that Sol wrote the first big national piece on the Panthers, something
he seems to regret now.

Many thanks for the firsthand accounts of the Panthers. They touched a
nerve, and the media played back their image to the country as a
whole, upsetting some and galvanizing others. Ramparts was an important
part of that development, but I think the image of armed black
militants striding onto the floor of the California assembly would have
found its audience with or without Ramparts.  

I'm not sure I fully understand the question about the impact of
Vietnam & intelligence on the magazine's development. But one of the
first really big pieces was the April 1966 expose of the CIA-Michigan
State University link.  That catapulted Scheer to the forefront, opened
the agency's investigation of the magazine, and really put Ramparts in
the spotlight.  Time magazine began its running commentary on
Ramparts--all negative, of course, but it actually helped raise the
mag's profile even higher.  And that story probably helped Ramparts get
the NSA scoop, another blockbuster CIA expose. 

One of my favorite lines involved a CIA agent telling his boss about
the dirty tricks he'd concocted to screw up Ramparts.  After hearing
those plans, the boss told the agent that he had "a spot of blood on
his pinafore."  

If I missed anything, feel free to jump in!
  

    
I was wondering how the Ramparts people regarded the underground press, if 
at all.

I worked on/at several underground newspapers; we felt that we were 
right there at the hub of the revolution. But in fact we were always so 
busy trying to get a weekly out that lots of what we published was just 
crap. (At the main one I worked on, the SF Good Times, the crap was fairly 
well-written and coherent, because we had some standards.) 
  

    
Wild that you mention Good Times.  I invited Norman Solomon to my
class at Berkeley yesterday, and he spoke about Good Times very fondly.
 He must have been about seven years old when he contributed the first
installment of what promised would be a serial novel. He has since
gone on to become a prominent media critic and reformer.  (His
publications include Target Iraq and War Made Easy.) Maybe that's where
he got his standards.    

Few Ramparts staffers mentioned the underground press to me.  That's
probably why I omitted that topic in the book, thereby earning a rebuke
from Dwight Garner in the New York Times.  I see his point, but it
should be noted that the Berkeley Barb, for example, published its
first issue well after Ramparts made the turn from Catholic literary
quarterly to muckraker. And as soon as Warren got his hands on the
magazine, it was always going to be a nationally distributed slick, so
the natural comparisons were always to Time, Esquire, Playboy, etc.  

But the proliferation of underground papers and their impressive
circulations probably affected Ramparts and its sense of what was
possible. And I think Ramparts' success encouraged other folks to start
their own countercultural (if not underground) publications.  Some hit
it big and are still around (e.g., Rolling Stone), and others
published only a few issues. 

One of the short-lived ones was SunDance.  I'm looking at the masthead
of its third and final issue.  The names include David Weir, Jeff
Gerth, Yoko Ono, Bob Scheer, Paul Krassner, Craig Pyes, Abbie Hoffman,
Howard Kohn, Harvey Wasserman (listed as "Wandering Historian"), Frank
Bardacke, Todd Gitlin, Daniel Zwerdling, and Abe Peck, who wrote the
book on underground publications. 

Tamara Baltar, Betty Van Patter's daughter, also worked there and sent
me this issue.  Eventually she worked at Ramparts, CIR, and Mother
Jones as well.  She grew up near me and attended El Cerrito High School
when my oldest brother was there.  She also attended the JFK speech at
Berkeley's Memorial Stadium, which is where I chose to begin the
Ramparts story.    

I'd like to hear more about the underground connections, if anyone has
any thoughts.      
  

    
 Our focus has now moved on to a new discussion, but I want to take
this opportunity to thank Peter and <mcdee> and all of you for an
enjoyable and interesting discussion.  As always, the topic will remain
open indefinitely.
  

    
I was just a bit fascinated by the Mich St - CIA thing.  It was a big
story for them.  I may have over read the Vietnam angle.
  

    
No, you're right, that was huge.  Ramparts had already run some
hard-hitting articles on Vietnam by Scheer and special forces sergeant
Don Duncan.  They also published an interview with Sen. Frank Church
that got picked up by the New York Times. But the CIA-MSU story took it
to another level.  Stanley Sheinbaum wrote the intro to the piece--he
had been co-director of the project and became a strong supporter of
the magazine (and later, Mother Jones).

Thanks, everyone.  Lots of fun for me.  
  

    
I'm not sure what year it was but Peter and Mary Collier had been
living across the street for awhile and none of the neighbors had
gotten to know them yet.  The national debate on how to get out of
Vietnam was cresting.  A lot of people were not happy that we had
essentially lost the war.  Mary Collier put a North Vietnamese flag in
their window.  I'm guessing in hindsight that it was in solidarity with
the people of Vietnam, much the same way we might show an Iranian flag
now, but it was not seen that way then.  My Mom responded the next day
by putting a U.S. flag in our window, to much acclaim from some of the
other neighbors.  

Peter, obviously sensing the tense dynamic, wandered up to my Dad
(think Archie Bunker living in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland)
the ensuing weekend while they were both working on their yards.  After
a while, they were laughing and slapping each other on the back.  My
Dad never told us specifically what they talked about but he said that
despite the questionable politics, Peter was not a bad guy.  We took
care of their dog Raleigh sometimes and I cleaned up their yard for a
couple of summers.  He gave us a copies of a couple of his books.  He
laughed when I told him that I had to read the Rockefeller book
accompanied by a dictionary.  He said that he had fought his editor on
the inclusion of a couple of those words.  

I last saw Peter at the Rockridge BART station in Oakland, sometime
around 1990, long after their move to Nevada City and my family's move
to the suburbs.  He was with his son Andrew.  He and Andrew were
returning from some sort of interview in SF.  He was very sad to hear
that my Dad had died a few years earlier.  He asked about everyone.  He
seemed very focused on his family.  I was not terribly surprised when,
in the 90's, I started hearing about his shifting politics.
  

    
Thanks Peter, and everyone else!
  

    
Thanks, hipster, for the story about Peter Collier.  Another good
reminder that these folks had personal lives, lived in neighborhoods,
etc.  Easy to forget when the political and ideological issues start to
take over.  

If anyone wishes to continue the conversation privately, I can be
reached at peter.richardson@sbcglobal.net.  
  

    
We can continue it here, if you're willing to check in every so often.

I worked with Abe Peck at the Seed, and am still friends with him. 
(Facebook friends, in fact.) I knew Abbie H. but didn't work on any 
journalism with him. The papers I worked at were the Seed, the Chicago 
Kaleidoscope, Rising Up Angry, the SF Good Times, and the Berkeley 
Tribe.
  

    

Peter, I hope you'll stick around!  You said you're reading about the
Grateful Dead these days - there's a pretty vibrant and thoughtful Dead
community here, and plenty of smart people to interact with on that subject.
  

    
Fun conversation!   

I just saw an interesting comparison of Tea Baggers to the New Left -
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/opinion/05brooks.html
The examples of anti-authoritarian commonality between populist
movements on various sides of the stream are a good reminder of
motivating forces for pushing for change.  Tho it wraps up with a
little egotistical posturing, it's work a look. He cites modern
anti-government -- but not anti-war -- protesters reading lefty
organizing literature to learn movement-building tactics.  My, my.
  

    
Brooks' article makes sense.  

It would be interesting to live to see, say 45 years from now,  books
that wax nostalgic about the revolt of 2010 in a similar vein as books
about the 1960s.  I'm sure similar claims will be made that the
activism resulted in important, lasting change in the country. 
  

    
It's such a different time.  I think we've (mostly) lost touch with
the spiritual, emotional, and cultural strivings which motivated a good
part of 60s activism.  Now it's mostly come down to (queue up the
O'Jays) money and power.
  

    
David, thanks for the comment about the Dead.  Yep, I've become very
interested in them, and of course they emerged from the same Palo
Alto-San Francisco milieu as Ramparts.  More on them in a sec.

The New Left/Tea Party connection: Well, OK.  The New Left was
supercharged by a widespread aversion to the war in Vietnam.  The New
Leftists weren't just airing their frustration with government; it was
a life-and-death issue for thousands of Americans and millions of
Southeast Asians.  As Brooks says, the differences there are quite
striking, though his main interest is the similarity. It would be a
more interesting comparison to me if the Tea Partiers were outraged by
the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan--or at least the blood and
treasure we've already devoted to that misbegotten cause.  

Speaking of Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck had David Horowitz on his radio
program yesterday. Here's the transcript. 

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/196/37378/

The occasion was the national day of action for public education.  I
participated in a demonstration in Sacramento because I'm seeing the
effects of budget cutbacks at San Francisco State University, where I
teach, and I'm watching my daughter's fees rise 32% at UC Santa
Barbara.  It's a very serious situation that deserves thoughtful
consideration.  That's not what Glenn Beck and David Horowitz give it.
It's easy to see why Beck once described himself as a rodeo clown.  

My interest in the Grateful Dead is related to my course at SF State,
which focuses on utopian and dystopian representations of California. 
Ever since the Gold Rush, California has been depicted as paradise or
hell on earth. We read John Muir, Raymond Chandler, Jack Kerouac,
Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, etc., and we watch films like The Grapes
of Wrath, Sunset Blvd, and Chinatown.   

I think Ramparts can be understood in that context; if so, David's
Radical Son would be the dystopian representation.  And though the Dead
had zero interest in David's kind of politics, their story fits even
more squarely into that conversation.  I don't think you can explain
their extraordinary and longstanding success as the nation's most
popular touring band without considering the deeply utopian chords they
struck. 

So I'm plowing through the books, listening to the music, and watching
the films.  My oldest brother was a Deadhead, so the band provided the
soundtrack to my misspent youth.  And I'm getting a huge kick out of
the Garcia stories in particular.  He was a Kerouac fan--they all
were--so I'm also plumbing those connections.  In fact, I'm also
reading Dennis McNally's Kerouac bio, Desolate Angel.  That was the
book he wrote before joining the Dead as their publicist.