The muckraker
By my count, Warren Hinckle made journalistic history three times before he turned 35. Under his leadership, Ramparts magazine earned a Polk Award for its “explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition.” At Scanlan’s Monthly, he paired Hunter S. Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman, thereby birthing gonzo journalism. And by infuriating a contributing editor at Ramparts, Hinckle ushered in Rolling Stone, which Joel Selvin, the former Chronicle critic, described as “the journalistic voice of its generation.”
Hinckle, who died in 2016, is most famous for his work at Ramparts, which began as a Catholic literary quarterly in 1962. After he took over, it ran blockbuster stories about the Vietnam War, the CIA and the Black Panthers. Even its nemesis, Time magazine, conceded that the San Francisco muckraker contained “a bomb in every issue.” Those explosions made a difference. After reading a Ramparts article at an airport, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. decided to come out against the Vietnam War.
I once asked Hinckle why Ramparts made such a mark. “Probably because the rest of the press was so s—,” he said. But Adam Hochschild, a Ramparts staff writer who later co-founded Mother Jones, described Hinckle’s winning formula: “Find an exposé that major newspapers are afraid to touch, publish it with a big enough splash so they can’t afford to ignore it, and then publicize it in a way that plays the press off against each other.” Mother Jones and Rolling Stone also mastered that recipe.
Drawing its title from Hinckle’s parochial education in San Francisco’s Sunset District, “Ransoming Pagan Babies: The Selected Writings of Warren Hinckle” — released by Berkeley nonprofit publisher Heyday — mixes book excerpts, magazine articles and newspaper columns published between 1965 and 2005. The Ramparts selections, most of them coauthored, are lucid and hardhitting, even five decades later. They cover the Freedom March in Selma, Ala.; the “Vietnam Lobby,” which pushed for a U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia; the CIA’s covert role in that misbegotten war; and right-wing repression in Oakland before the creation of the Black Panther Party.
A solo effort is “The Social History of the Hippies,” which Ramparts ran in March 1967. Hinckle’s idiosyncratic account of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture prompted music critic Ralph J. Gleason to resign in a huff. Along with Jann Wenner, who also worked for Ramparts, Gleason turned his attention to Rolling Stone, which debuted later that year. In 1969, Hinckle also decamped to start Scanlan’s, where he commissioned “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” the first example of gonzo journalism. But Scanlan’s folded after eight issues, and Rolling Stone became Thompson’s premier outlet. Wenner, not Hinckle, would make Thompson a cultural celebrity.
If his Ramparts articles targeted hot issues, Hinckle’s newspaper columns reveal a knack for mood and character. His long suit was irreverence, which he tempered with a wistful nostalgia. Years before his quixotic mayoral bid in 1987, he described his hometown as “a great waterfront city” that had morphed into a “picture-postcard corporationheadquarters.” Hinckle preferred to identify with the 19th century bohemians who created San Francisco’s rowdy literary scene. (Ironically, they identified with the Parisian avant-garde.) His world, like theirs, consisted of paper, type, ink and “the drinking press” who knew how to combine them. One can almost imagine his profiles of drag queens running a century earlier, when San Francisco earned its reputation as a wide-open town.
Hinckle’s identification with the city’s past even colored his view of Thompson:
“A television journo asked me if Hunter had ‘forged a new path’ in journalism. I thought about it and said, no, he had rather beaten his way back through the overgrown jungle of bureaucratic media to the original path of nineteenthcentury journalism, when journalism was actually a popular, participatory sport and editors swore openly and imbibed freely and spat tobacco and carried guns and cussedly attacked politicians and other editors by name as varmints unworthy of road-kill.”
With a few tweaks, this passage also describes how Hinckle saw himself.
There was more to Hinckle World than journalists, politicians and female impersonators. There were also cops. He knew their names, faces and faults, much as he knew the priests and nuns of his youth. (The CIA, in contrast, was always a shadowy principle, a large canvas for conspiracy theories.) Even before he started his career as a police reporter, he favored cop bars, especially Cookie Picetti’s Blue Star Cafe near the old Hall of Justice. But Hinckle also lambasted the police for racism, gaybashing and coddling Dan White after he killed George Moscone and Harvey Milk.
More rebel than radical, Hinckle was above all a showman who followed George M. Cohan’s vaudevillian advice: “Whatever you do, kid, always serve it with a little dressing.” “Ransoming Pagan Babies” doesn’t spare the dressing, but it also reminds us that Hinckle’s output was surprisingly meaty.