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 perhaps 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, and muckraking publications (such as Ramparts).

Ramparts Magazine published several articles about the corporation’s centrality to America’s war in Indochina. The war was big business; many of the essays published by Ramparts suggested that capitalism was the root cause of America’s imperial war in Vietnam. In December 1967, for example, Ramparts published an essay written by Don Duncan titled “Ordering Infernal Machines” about some horrendous computerized weapons made by the likes of IBM used to kill civilians in Vietnam, such as the Guava cluster bomb, which could cut a human being to ribbons. Duncan’s article presented engineers’ renderings of some of the heinous devices designed to destroy that he described, as if to underscore the mechanized banality of evil at the root of the American Military Industrial Complex.

In February 1967, Ramparts published an article written by Sol Stern titled “The Defense Intellectuals.” He focuses mostly on Herman Kahn and Robert McNamara. Kahn was a founder of the Hudson Institute and one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation. He became known for analyzing the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommending ways to improve survivability, making him one of three historical inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire that critiqued the nuclear arms race, Dr. Strangelove (1964).

McNamara was a former President of The Ford Motor Company before becoming the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 – 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He played a major role in escalating the United States’ involvement in the war in Indochina. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis. Both men, Stern argued, had created a new style of warfare. Stern, however, rhetorically asked readers if Kahn and McNamara’s methods had made society safer and healthier. “Does democracy have a better chance of surviving?” Stern prodded. It was no accident, he asserted, that the war in Vietnam had proven to be a “great blot” on McNamara's record, the one area in which his vaunted techniques had failed.

They would, “Stern concluded, continue to fail as long as he and his hired intellectuals continued to see Vietnam as merely a “problem” to be solved instead of recognizing it as a crisis in American ideology and values—a crisis which, Stern asserted, demanded that some hard questions be asked because decent values demanded them, and that some solutions be rejected not because they were invalid but because they were wrong.

The theme of America having been transformed into a corporatist and militarized state continued in the September 1969 edition of Ramparts in an essay titled “20,000 Guns Under the Sea” written by Seymour Hersh, the author of Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal (1968). “The Navy and the weapons planners in the Pentagon,” he wrote, had decided that much of “tomorrow’s arms race” would be a “Jules Verne affair,” and staged in the seventy-one percent of the world that was underwater. The universities, through the Sea Grant program, were supplying the academicians to make modern warfare seafaring.

The corporations, enticed by potentially immense profits, were, Hersh asserted, diverting research funds into the sea. The Navy, anxious to keep its share of the defense budget, was pushing its underwater missile systems. The prospects for stopping a juggernaut of these proportions were, Hersh concluded, “very dim.” To do so would be to change the processes by which the increasingly militarized American society was structured.

In May 1968, soon after the Tet Offensive and soon after President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection as the President of the United States, Ramparts published an essay titled “Sieve of Gold” written by Michael Hudson, who from 1964 – 1967 was a balance-of-payments analyst for Chase Manhattan Bank. He opened the article with a bit from a recent interview with Marriner Eccles, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, which was originally published in Forbes Magazine. “Just list some of our national problems—the very large and continuing budget deficit,” Eccles said to Forbes, “the inflationary pressures, the balance of-payments deficit, the lack of confidence abroad in our (American) dollar, the riots in our cities, the unrest on our campuses, the split among all classes of our populace and within our political parties” (Wall Street Journal, April 4, 1968.) Eccles, in short, underscored his belief that all of the problems he listed that were so central in American society in the late-1960s could be traced directly to a common source – America’s involvement in Indochina.

In the past, Hudson noted, the military compulsion of the Tet defeat would have sent many thousands of fresh troops to Vietnam to meet the new challenge. But that was, Hudson wrote, before the U.S. gold crisis. He informed readers that the European financiers were forcing peace on the U.S., and that for the first time in American history, the U.S.’s European creditors had, Hudson explained, forced the resignation of an American President. To understand the pressures behind Johnson’s decision to call it quits, Hudson wrote, one needed to understand that the Vietnam War had left “Uncle Sam holding a sieve of gold.” At the outset of 1965, as President Johnson began his new term in the Oval Office, the United States was clearly the world's greatest military power, and Vietnam was certainly among the weakest.

Yet so expensive had even so mismatched a war become that, looking back, it could be seen that only by imposing full wartime controls—increasing taxes, establishing a rigorous system of wage and price and balance-of-payments controls, and above all by sharply deflating the civilian sector of the economy—could the collapse of America's world financial power have been prevented.

The gold crisis of 1968, Hudson wrote, “finally signaled this collapse.” He also noted that the “breaking point” of America's financial power had long been looming and would have inevitably been reached even if there had not been a war in Vietnam. The tension between American military and economic power abroad and Americans’ living standards at home was too great to have been sustained indefinitely. In other words, Hudson essentially argued that rather than war being good for the American economy, it was actually terribly corrosive to all but the too-big-to-fail corporations most heavily invested in war-making. The war was concomitantly terribly deleterious for nation-states, such as the United States. In short, capitalism and the wars it made inevitable were eroding the sanctity of sovereignty in the Cold War world and undermining the power, prestige, and real wealth of the U.S.

In November 1969, Ramparts published an article contributed by Joseph Goulden and Marshall Singer titled “Dial-A-Bomb: AT&T and ABM,” which elaborated that AT&T was the prime contractor and chief profit-maker for the highly controversial Anti-Ballistic Missile System, the ABM. The Nike-X Sentinel Safeguard ABM system was only the latest and most extravagant in a series of Nike defensive missiles that had garnered the telephone company nearly $10 billion in prime contracts since 1945.

The top twenty-five U.S. defense contractors included, besides AT&T, such other stalwarts of the corporate aristocracy as Ford (which McNamara had left to wage war in Indochina), General Electric, General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey—the four largest industrial corporations in America. AT&T itself, the largest American corporation of any kind, was a giant amongst giants. Its incredible assets of $40 billion (in 1969) approached the combined assets of America's fifty largest transportation companies (including airlines, railroads, etc.), or those of the three greatest industrial giants. Its net income was a third larger than that of the fifty largest U.S. commercial banks or of the fifty largest retailing companies combined.

AT&T was also, by 196,9 the nation's sixth largest defense contractor, doing work on anti-submarine projects as well as the ABM. Yet AT&T's image was, Goulden and Singer wrote, “worlds away from the paraphernalia of war and devastation.” The essayists thus rhetorically asked readers: What could be more pacific and tamer than the phone company? It seemed no more likely a purveyor of nuclear missiles than did Macy's or the A&P. The story of demure Ma Bell’s discreet but lucrative intimacy with the “defense establishment” illuminated, Goulden and Singer asserted, much about the real nature of the military-industrial complex. But what, the essayists rhetorically asked, was the prevailing image of the military industrial complex? They explained that on the industrial side was a pack of “hustling upstart Texas yahoos and San Diego John Birch industrialists, inhabiting the new untamed wild west outlands of the American economy.”

On the military side were the “crackpot Strangelovean generals foisting their exorbitant arms-race war-games on an unwitting civilian society.” But the reality was, Goulden and Singer argued, that the military-industrial complex was centered in the old respectable heartlands of corporate power, which had provided the basic impetus and thrust behind America's trillion-dollar “postwar war machine.” The power of the complex was, they concluded, “clothed neither in brass and braid nor Bermuda shorts and a ten-gallon hat, but sensibly in a dark suit and a sober tie.”

In June of 1971, Ramparts published an article titled “A Reader's Guide to the Warfare State,” written by Derek Shearer. He noted that despite Nixon’s incessant double-speak related to transforming a wartime economy into a peacetime economy, his latest annual budget plan actually increased military spending by $6 billion in the following fiscal year alone. Also, in the two months spanning the end of 1970 to February 1971, shares of all aerospace companies climbed by an impressive 27.2 percent, compared with the 5.1 percent rise of all industrials listed in Standard and Poor's Index. General Dynamics’ stock alone has risen 52 percent since January 1970, Litton was up an astounding ninety-five percent over its 1970 low, and McDonnell Douglas rose a staggering 111 percent from its 1970 low.

Investors, Shearer explained, understood keenly that the Nixon Administration had shifted resources, not from military to human resources, but from military manpower to military hardware. But liberals in Congress, Shearer lamented, seemed “duped” into championing Nixon’s supposed shift towards a peacetime economy, despite the fact that the January 23, 1971, issue of The National Journal listed thirty-six major weapons systems that would require almost $60 billion in additional funds in the coming years. Another one hundred weapons systems on which no accurate cost figures were available were likely to add billions more to the defense department budget.

In November 1971, Ramparts published an essay titled “The Strange Economics of the Vietnam War” written by Banning Garrett, who was a member of the Pacific Studies Center in Palo Alto, California. He discovered that the Japanese were especially anxious for an end to America’s war in Indochina because they were excited about the prospect of gaining access to a new pool of highly disciplined laborers in postwar Vietnam. But foreign investors were leery of Article 22 in the South Vietnamese Constitution, which protected labor’s right to organize. To ensure that this constitutional provision did not frighten off needed foreign (and, for that matter, domestic) investment, it should, Garrett noted, be made clear in the required implementing legislation that while labor had the right to organize and bargain collectively with management to influence management decisions, labor did not have the right of direct participation in those management decisions.

The Lillenthal Report, which was researched and written before the Tet Offensive (January 1968), anticipated a swift U.S. military triumph and smooth establishment of a postwar economy that was friendly to American corporations. But that swift and decisive victory never materialized, which complicated the plans for a smooth postwar economic settlement, which were based on the assumption that the Americans would inevitably win the war. In late 1971, the Nixon Administration promised a winding down of the war. Garrett, however, like Shearer, could read the proverbial tea leaves, which indicated that Nixon had no intention of winding down the war. “Quite the contrary,” he wrote.

Nixon’s economic plan, in fact, revealed that Vietnamization was merely what Garrett referred to as the “latest scheme” in a historic gambit to safeguard existing political and economic stakes so that they would not have been made in vain. Nixon's quandary, thus, had become like that of the French before him: what the military had caused to be built. Shell and Caltex and sundry construction consortia would not, Garrett predicted, relinquish; nor would the powerful men who gave Richard Nixon his political existence permit him to give it up.

After all, he added, the waging of war brought forth the growth in Vietnam's capital plant, and recent political and military victories by the Vietnamese resistance had made it only too clear how difficult it would actually be to hold on to that investment without a military shield. And so once more, in a dance that seemed to know no finale, the plan to pacify the Vietnamese people through “economic development” proceeded apace, Garrett concluded, with the grim prospect of an even more brutal, armed, “protective reaction” lurking just beneath the surface.

In November 1971, Ramparts published an essay titled “There's a Toyota in Their Future?” written by James Ridgeway, who noted that the U.S. had various economic game plans for post-war Vietnam. But as a practical matter, Japanese businessmen, already active in South Vietnam, seemed more likely to influence the direction of economic development than American corporations and politicians. These Japanese businessmen, Ridgeway explained, seemed less interested in the vague regional plans advanced by the U.S. than in abundant supplies of cheap Vietnamese laborers who could be put to work making televisions and cars for sale in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. In all likelihood, Ridgeway wrote, the Japanese would “become important trading partners for both North and South Vietnam, and thus their presence in the South in 1971 was more tenable than that of, say, American executives.

The Japanese, he explained, could become the “vehicle for American investment.” The U.S. had several studies for postwar economic development in Vietnam. The best known was the Thuc-Lilienthal Report (1969). It stated that the war actually helped South Vietnam because physical destruction was supposedly minimal, and the economic wealth of the country had supposedly increased. As supposed proof, the report cited the network of airports, ports, and highways, all built by the U.S. military, and noted the rise of the army as a skilled labor force.

Ridgeway, however, refuted such optimism, noting that agricultural development was likely not going to be possible on the wide scale envisioned in the report because the U.S. military had poisoned the crop and forest lands. The rice markets were also glutted, and more intensive rice farming could lead to widespread unemployment. This, however, did not faze those, such as Toyota, whose executives were eager to exploit post-war Vietnam. Both Japanese and American businessmen eagerly envisioned Vietnam as a modern industrial economy, not as the agrarian society it had been for thousands of years. South Vietnam's greatest asset, to companies such as Toyota, was not its agriculture, but its abundant supply of cheap, dependable workers.

As a result, the scenario for post-war economic development seemed to look a lot like Cold War America’s: the populace could be employed making goods for export in order to earn the foreign exchange to fuel and support the military state.

Ramparts depiction of corporations taking control of the American polity and spearheading the militarization of American society and America’s war in Indochina tended to speak in generalities and abstractions. In its attempt to expose the banality of evil deeply embedded in America’s increasingly militarized and corporatist society, Ramparts was forced to also present the war in largely dehumanized terms.

However, contrary to popular historical memory propagated in movies such as Forest Gump (1994) that anti-war activists were unfairly unsympathetic to the American soldiers sent to Vietnam and referred to them as “baby killers,” Ramparts was very sympathetic to both American soldiers and the Vietnamese people. Ramparts tended to depict both American soldiers and the Vietnamese as victims of American corporations and politicians who were far more interested in power and the accumulation of wealth than the human cost and moral implications of Washington’s and the corporations’ war in Indochina.