Ramparts Magazine existed from 1962 to 1975. It was a glossy and often illustrated American political muckraker that captured the revolutionary zeitgeist of the era. Ramparts was perhaps best-known as one of the most respected organs of the American New Left. The New Left can possibly best be defined as a loosely organized, mostly white student movement that advocated democracy, civil rights, and various types of university reforms, and protested against the American war in Indochina.

But the term New Left was first popularized in the United States in an open letter written in 1960 by sociologist C. Wright Mills titled Letter to the New Left. He argued for a new leftist ideology that he hoped might transcend the traditional and often dogmatic (“Old Left”) focus on labor issues, into a broader focus on issues such as opposing alienation, anomie and authoritarianism.

Mills argued for a shift from traditional leftism toward the values of the counterculture, and, echoing Karl Marx, emphasized and advocated an international (rather than nationalistic) perspective on the movement.

Mills also claimed that the proletariat (collectively the working-class referenced in Marxism) was no longer the revolutionary force; the new agents of revolutionary change in the decades after World War II were, Mills believed, young intellectuals such as college students, scholars, and editors of leftist academic books, journals, muckraking publications (such as Ramparts).

(Introduction to Ramparts Magazine, "Ramparts Magazine and the New Left’s lost voice"1)

Ramparts Magazine published a handful of essays specifically focused on Washington’s War in Vietnam. The pages that follow examine America’s War in Indochina through the lens of Ramparts’ treatment and depiction of American foreign policymakers. The first such essay published in Ramparts about the role of Washington insiders and operatives waging war was published in July 1965 in an editorial titled “The Unreasonable Question.”

The editors argued that public dissent on the war had been couched in convenient terms and questions, including: How was the United States going about the war? Should the nation be escalating or negotiating? Are American policies efficient? Was the U.S. winning the war? These were, the editors asserted, reasonable questions, asked by reasonable men. The unreasonable and “seemingly unutterable question” was, conversely, why was the U.S. in Indochina at all?

"Why", the editors asserted, was the most essential query of all. But nobody in Washington seemed interested in pondering it. The editors concluded by asking readers: Why do serious, concrete, non-Establishment proposals for peace stand so little chance of being heard and understood by American policymakers? Why—and this was to the editors the most disturbing question of all—why was there no significant number of Americans asking these questions? Was the age of consensus that complete?, the editors rhetorically asked readers. Or, worse yet, had Americans lost all capacity for moral outrage?

“The Unreasonable Question” was followed in the July 1965 edition of Ramparts by an article titled “The ‘Vietnam Lobby’” written by editors Warren Hinckle and Robert Scheer, who had recently completed an eighteen-month survey of Vietnam for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. In the essay, they presented a drawing of a dragon that represented the Vietnam Lobby. Joseph Kennedy was the head; Arthur Schlesinger was the tail.

The Lobby was, Hinckle and Scheer argued, “an unusual alliance of ex-left intellectuals, conservative generals and liberal politicians” whose primary goal was to convince the public that “free Vietnam” was accomplishing miracles and could withstand the “Red onslaught” if the United States would just stop asking questions and continue to blindly support the South’s puppet regime.

Unlike the businessmen, missionaries, military personnel, and politicians that joined the China Lobby for self-seeking reasons, Scheer and Hinckle wrote, the members of the “Vietnam Lobby” were “True Believers” in a “Crusade for Democracy.” They collectively convinced the American public (including influential policymakers such as President Lyndon Johnson) that Ngo Dinh Diem was a genuine proponent of democracy and that the best way to protect democracy was to prevent the democratic process in Vietnam.

The “Vietnam Lobby” was followed in the July 1965 edition of Ramparts by an article titled “A View from Washington” written by Marcus Raskin, a former White House assistant under President John F. Kennedy, and was also a co-Director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. He argued that what the U.S. did in South Vietnam would drastically influence Chinese activity. If the U.S., he asserted, helped in fashioning the political concerns of Southeast Asia on real issues—water, food, and electric power—the American empire would be far better positioned to blunt Chinese power because Indochina would have a rational reason for being independent from Chinese and Soviet influence.

In November 1965, fifteen months after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Ramparts published an article titled “Proposals For a War Constitution” written by Arthur I. Waskow, who was a resident fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Waskow described a document that had recently come into his possession. It was purportedly a proposal for a supposedly much-needed Constitutional reform championed by McGeorge Bundy written for other high government officials, including Lyndon Johnson.

Bundy described the U.S. Constitution as “antiquated” because it only permitted Congress and Congress alone to declare war. He thus offered proposals designed to “salve” the public’s “fears and soothe consciences without in fact interfering” with the government’s “conduct and management of the war.”

Bundy, in other words, detailed ways to mislead the American public so that Washington could wage its war unfettered from the qualms of the American people. He proposed adding “Article XXV” to the Constitution which would assert that “The Congress shall not have power to authorize in advance of the President to declare war on its behalf, except in the following cases: (a) danger of thermonuclear war; (b) danger of escalated war; (c) danger of unjust war; (d) danger to vital interests of the United States; (e) danger to vital interests of the Free World.”

Bundy’s proposed article would thus remove the power to wage war out of the hands of Congress and put it under the jurisdiction of the President. It is important to note that this was authored by Bundy in reaction to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Johnson’s de facto declaration of war, in which he had not officially declared war, which stoked especial animus amongst anti-war advocates.

Bundy’s proposed article, in short, would retroactively make legal the law that Johnson had broken in 1964 when he ostensibly declared war on North Vietnam without first gaining the approval of Congress.

In December 1965, Ramparts published another essay written by Scheer titled “The Winner's War.” The article detailed the rapid escalation of the American war in Vietnam, particularly the centrality of relentless B-52 bombing raids (each plane carried fifteen tons of bombs) on North Vietnam, which began on June 18, 1965, and continued as an almost daily occurrence. “The New War of the Johnson Administration in Vietnam,” Scheer wrote, represented a very sharp departure from the theory of counter-insurgency developed by the Kennedy brothers.

The new turn was, Scheer argued, ostensibly “an attack” on the basic assumptions of Kennedy's foreign policy. Upon coming to power, the Kennedy Administration very quickly implemented the theories of counter-insurgency that, up until 1965, had occupied a very vague and minority status within the military establishment.

The basic concept, as applied to Vietnam, held that the Vietnamese would fight against the Communist guerrillas if the U.S. could convince them of the presumed and ultimately disastrous consequences of communism for their lives.

At the same time, it was believed to be essential that the U.S. provided the counter-insurgents in South Vietnam with the military know-how to withstand guerrilla warfare and the technical and economic knowledge to implement substantive reforms, which would make life in the areas controlled by the Government more attractive than under the rule of the communist guerrillas.

Johnson, conversely, adopted what he believed would win him a quick and decisive military victory by bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age, and then worrying about the political consequences of such carnage later. In late-1965 it seemed inevitable that the U.S. military would emerge from Vietnam victorious, even to many members of the New Left such as Scheer, who quite rightly feared that Johnson’s apocalyptic bombing raids would create an impossible political situation for the Americans to solve.

In December 1966, Ramparts published an editorial titled “Presidential Papers” written by editor Marcus Raskin, who was in a unique position to observe the gradual changes in U.S. foreign policy that had led to the country’s involvement in Vietnam. Evidence, Raskin wrote, suggested that President Kennedy eventually recognized his mistake in sending additional troops in addition to advisors to Vietnam. In October 1963, Raskin explained, the White House issued a cryptic one-page statement soon after Robert McNamara returned from Vietnam.

After stating that major assistance was needed only until the insurgency was suppressed, the statement went on to say that “Secretary McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor reported their judgment that the major part of the U.S. military task could be completed by the end of 1965, although there might be a continuing requirement for a limited number of U.S. training personnel in South Vietnam. They reported that by the end of 1963, the U.S. program for training the Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where only one thousand U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam could be withdrawn.

As Arthur Schlesinger later said, President Kennedy realized that he had made a bad judgment in Vietnam and that the U.S. had to find an honorable way to extricate itself as quickly as possible. Raskin concluded by stating that Americans had become “the new imperialists.” The world knew, he asserted, that the U.S. could destroy Vietnam and China militarily, but they also saw that American souls needed “redeeming.”

In July 1967, Ramparts published another essay written by Raskin titled “America's Night of the Generals.” He noted that it had recently become possible under the law for the Joint Chiefs to feel secure for four years in their jobs, and to lobby for the military’s interest in Congress independent of the Secretary of Defense. The President also could not veto this legislation that was inspired by the Joint Chiefs, since the war had made him beholden to them. “During wartime, the generals get what they want,” Raskin wrote, “including domestic political power.” The article also illuminated the increased militarization of the American political system in the 1960s and the increased power of the military at the center of the American experience.

The theme of the military commandeering the American polity was also a central theme of an article titled “Who the Hell Is Melvin Laird, Anyway?” published in the August 1969 edition of Ramparts written by Karl Hess, a former editor of Newsweek, the principal author of the 1960 Republican platform, a co-author of the 1964 platform, and Barry Goldwater’s chief speechwriter. He argued that every one of America’s ten Secretaries of Defense had heretofore pursued the same end: the use of the military for politico-economic reasons.

The first in line was the oil-fixated banker, James Forrestal, author of the “Military Unification” scheme, which created the Department of Defense and the new cabinet post, in order to integrate the various armed forces and thereby rationalize the role of the military in the service of American financial interests. Nixon’s new Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, coined the expression “Vietnamization,” referring to the process of transferring more responsibility for combat to the South Vietnamese forces.

Hess described him as the “incarnation of institutional evil: the inevitable, historically predicted, institutional evil of delegated, non-participatory politics.” Laird was, Hess concluded, “no slavering Neanderthal fanatic of the right…” But he was a politician at the core of his being, which made him “reptilian.” Laird would never dream of destroying the world, Hess wrote, “unless he were totally convinced that it made good sound political sense.”

In March 1970, Ramparts published an essay contributed by Bertrand Russell titled “On American Violence.” He reminded readers that America was born of violence, noting the near genocide of Native Americans before, then also elaborating the U.S.’s use of the atomic bomb to emerge from World War II as the world’s hegemonic imperial superpower.

What was new in 1969 was, however, Russell wrote, that for the first time many affluent Americans were “learning a very little of this disconcerting picture” as a result of the recent publication of Seymour Hersh’s expose published in November 1969 about American soldiers wantonly murdering unarmed civilians in what came to be known as the My Lai Massacre.

Russell presciently declared that junior officers would be prosecuted for the heinous war crimes, but the “more wicked war criminals” were “the highest ranking military and civilian leaders, the architects of the whole genocidal policy.” The whole establishment, he explained, “stood condemned,” including those more moderate politicians whose every utterance was “dictated by caution and petty ambition…” The entire American people were, he argued, “now on trial.”

If there was not a massive moral revulsion at what was being done in America’s name to the people of Vietnam, Russell concluded, there was then little hope left for the future of America. Having lost the will to continue the slaughter was not enough; it was, he concluded, imperative that the people of America repudiate their civil and military leaders.

The upshot of My Lai was that William Calley was the only war criminal associated with My Lai who was found guilty. He served three years under house arrest before his sentence was commuted by Richard Nixon.

The vast majority of Americans agreed with the President’s decision to absolve Calley and, by implication, the men who murdered hundreds of men, women, and children at My Lai, which seemed to underscore the moral corruption, turpitude, and lack of accountability central to the Americans’ systemic slaughter of the Vietnamese people during the 1960s and 1970s.

In February 1971, Ramparts published an article titled “Vietnam: How Nixon Plans to Win the War” written by Banning Garrett, who noted that Kissinger, whom he described as the “Strangelove” in the Nixon Administration, seemed to be considering nuclear weapons, particularly atomic landmines, as an expedient means of ending the war.

“That the United States is now on the brink of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam is no more an occasion for wonder than that it has already crossed the threshold of systematic war crimes as defined by its own Nuremberg Tribunal,” Garrett wrote. “Imperial war tends by nature to become genocidal war because it lacks the popular base and raison d’être of more conventional conflicts.” And since, he wrote, the U.S. seemed powerless to win support among the Vietnamese and unable to garner the necessary troops from their own increasingly disaffected people, “the captains of the American empire must inevitably resort to ever more powerful technologies of destruction to stave off equally inevitable defeat.”

Nuclear holocaust thus appeared to Garrett as the limiting case in Washington's desperate effort to escape the consequences of its conflict as a global empire whose base was crumbling with a world revolution whose time had come.

In December 1971, Ramparts published an essay titled “The Rise of Henry Kissinger” written by David Landau, who was the managing editor for The Harvard Crimson. Landau argued that Kissinger, also a Harvard man, had yet to recognize that it would require little less than wholesale genocide to defeat Hanoi and the NLF in their native lands. He further noted that the regimes that Nixon and Kissinger sought to defend in Southeast Asia were among the cruelest and most totalitarian in the world. Their leaders imprisoned their political enemies, committed indiscriminate murder, and imposed a rule of terror and dictatorship on their native populations.

And it was, Landau wrote, “not out of some perverted sense of fairness or democracy” that these regimes were being defended. It was “out of a harsh, brutal calculation of what an imperialist power like the United States must do to maintain itself in the world.”

If smaller, more vulnerable men like Lieutenant William Calley, Landau concluded, could be sentenced for killing women and children in Vietnam (in the My Lai massacre), then there had to also be a higher tribunal for statesmen like Kissinger, who upheld the policies which made such atrocities possible by playing his power game so well that his policy threatened to explode the very balance of forces which he had so ruthlessly defended.

In February 1972, Ramparts published an article titled “Beyond the Pentagon Papers” written by Melvin Gurtov. He argued that the shape of Vietnam was dictated not by actual events and realities in Vietnam, such as the supposed threat of communist infiltration, but as a game of political football amongst Cold War rivals in Washington D.C. including Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, and Kissinger who had hijacked the polity and government which led to the death and/or displacement of millions of Asians and tens of thousands of American lives for no real reason other than to aggrandize themselves and/or to save face, such as Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs debacle.

Their arrogant, self-serving, and devastating miscalculations and mistakes had, Gurtov believed, exposed elements of anti-democratic fascism deeply embedded in the American polity.

In April 1972, Ramparts published an essay written by Noam Chomsky titled “Nixon's Peace Offer.” Chomsky wrote that the fundamental question central to the Indochina war had always been a relatively simple one: was the United States (or the French before it) to have a predominant voice in determining the political and social structure of Indochina, or would this question be settled by the Indochinese peoples themselves, relatively free from outside intervention? The conditions of U.S. intervention, Chomsky noted, had changed over the years, but not the essential goals, and that the basic and glaring problem facing the “Western invaders” had also changed little during the previous quarter century.

The U.S. had an enormous military force in the Pacific but little political power. Political violence was thus, Chomsky explained, inevitable. The size and money spent on American militarization, in short, dictated American policy. In other words, American militarization was the tail that wagged the dog. Nixon’s peace offer would thus be dictated by keeping the American military in Vietnam indefinitely.

Even if Vietnamization were to be a success, Chomsky argued, American weapons would continue to flow into the country and South Vietnam’s Airbases would remain open to the American Air Force and Navy, whose Seventh Fleet was patrolling the South Pacific seas.

In August 1972, Ramparts published an essay titled “Nixon's Vietnam Strategy: How It Was Launched with the Aid of Brezhnev and Mao and How the Vietnamese Intend to Defeat It,” written by David Horowitz. The Vietnamese intended to defeat what later became known as Kissinger and Nixon’s “madman thesis” by launching its own offensive on the battlefield, which was designed to undermine, militarily, the very pacification settlement that Nixon was preparing for the conference table at the next round of Peace Talks in Paris.

Horowitz concluded by impugning the Soviet Union and China for “aiding” the Americans by not more explicitly supporting the NLF and DRV and Moscow and Beijing’s “weakness in the face of Washington's campaign of terror” which, he asserted, “jeopardized the gains” that had been made “in the last decade toward putting some controls on the U.S. war machine.” It was, he reminded readers, only the immense resistance put up first of all by the Vietnamese, but also by the American anti-war movement, that forced the issue of withdrawal to the center of the American political stage in the 1972 presidential campaign. “By dealing with Nixon in the hour of his escalations,” Horowitz wrote, “the Russians and the Chinese undermined that effort, and thereby endangered world peace.”

Horowitz concluded by urging the American anti-war movement to vociferously defy the American and Soviet Empires by following the “noble example of idealistic sacrifice established by the Vietnamese people.”

In January 1974, Ramparts published an article titled “Alexander Haig: Nixon's New Go-fer” written by Thomas Oliphant, who was a member of The Boston Globe’s Washington Bureau. Haig returned to the Nixon Administration at the height of the Watergate fallout as White House Chief of Staff in May 1973.

Haig has been largely credited with keeping the government running while President Nixon was preoccupied with the Watergate fallout and was essentially seen as the acting president during Nixon's last few months in office. Oliphant, however, argued that Haig was just another blindly loyal fall guy to Nixon in the wake of H.R. Halderman and John Ehrlichman, who were also Nixon’s fall guys. Who Haig was, Oliphant argued, was inconsequential.

What mattered, Oliphant asserted, was that “the aides don't matter.” The only fact of any consequence in the White House was that Nixon remained. In hindsight, Haig proved less disposable than Nixon. For example, during July and early August 1974, Haig played an instrumental role in persuading Nixon to resign. He also remained White House Chief of Staff until September 21, 1974, ultimately overseeing the transition from the Nixon to Ford Administration, before being replaced by Donald Rumsfeld, who played such a central role in planning the bungled American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

All told, Ramparts painted a very bleak picture of the warmakers in Washington who played such a central part in America’s war in Indochina. Ramparts routinely depicted Washington’s warmakers not as genuinely afraid of communism as a pernicious evil that needed to be eradicated, but as egomaniacal company men willing openly and arrogantly lie to the American people to wage a genocidal war that served no reason or rationale other than to enrich the war profiteers who owned the American polity.

Notes

1 Ramparts Magazine and the New Left’s lost voice at Meer.