What an incredible story Peter Richardson has told! Ramparts magazine turned the Sixties on its head with a high-octane combination of avant-garde satire and gumshoe investigative reporting. A Bomb in Every Issue is an excellent history that shouldn't be ignored. I can't recommend it enough.
--DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, AUTHOR OF THE WILDERNESS WARRIOR
A Bomb in Every Issue tells the largely untold story of the wild ride of this hugely influential magazine that achieved countless firsts: it published the first conspiracy theory about JFK's assassination, it was the first to reveal that the CIA had backed the National Student Association during the Cold War, and its article about the use of napalm on Vietnamese children (another first) caused Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the war for the first time.
Launched in 1962 as an intellectual Catholic quarterly, within five years Ramparts had become a secular magazine and won a George Polk Award for "its explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition." Deeply committed to the civil rights and antiwar movements, its contributors included Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag. It was in its pages that Che Guevara's diaries and the prison diaries of Eldridge Cleaver (which became Soul on Ice) first appeared. Although by 1975, out of money and time, it had folded for good, Ramparts left an important journalistic legacy, influencing a generation of reporters and editors that is still apparent today.

What an incredible story Peter Richardson has told! Ramparts magazine turned the Sixties on its head with a high-octane combination of avant-garde satire and gumshoe investigative reporting. A Bomb in Every Issue is an excellent history that shouldn't be ignored. I can't recommend it enough.
--DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, AUTHOR OF THE WILDERNESS WARRIOR
A Bomb in Every Issue tells the largely untold story of the wild ride of this hugely influential magazine that achieved countless firsts: it published the first conspiracy theory about JFK's assassination, it was the first to reveal that the CIA had backed the National Student Association during the Cold War, and its article about the use of napalm on Vietnamese children (another first) caused Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the war for the first time.
Launched in 1962 as an intellectual Catholic quarterly, within five years Ramparts had become a secular magazine and won a George Polk Award for "its explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition." Deeply committed to the civil rights and antiwar movements, its contributors included Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag. It was in its pages that Che Guevara's diaries and the prison diaries of Eldridge Cleaver (which became Soul on Ice) first appeared. Although by 1975, out of money and time, it had folded for good, Ramparts left an important journalistic legacy, influencing a generation of reporters and editors that is still apparent today.