The Scanlan's Monthly Story (1970-1971)

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THE SCANLAN’S MONTHLY STORY (1970-1971): HOW ONE MAGAZINE INFURIATED A BANK, AN AIRLINE, UNIONS, PRINTING COMPANIES, CUSTOMS OFFICIALS, CANADIAN POLICE, VICE PRESIDENT AGNEW, AND PRESIDENT NIXON IN TEN MONTHS

William Gillis November 2005

iii

This thesis entitled

WILLIAM GILLIS

has been approved for the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and the College of Communication by

______Patrick Washburn Professor of Journalism

______Greg Shepherd Interim Dean, College of Communication

Acknowledgments

Were it not for the guidance, encouragement, and good cheer of my advisor and

thesis committee chair, Patrick Washburn, this thesis would not exist. Many

thanks also to Joe Bernt, who like Pat took interest in the Scanlan’s project from the very beginning, and pointed me in interesting and fruitful directions; and Bill

Reader, who provided good advice about where to take this project—and my life—after completing my degree. I must thank Tom Hodson; without his efforts on my behalf, I surely would have left Scripps for another program. I would also

like to thank my friends and colleagues Andrew Huebner, Andy Smith, and

Betsy Vereckey for taking interest in the project, editing the manuscript at

various stages, and sharing ideas. Finally, a very special thank you to my

parents. Their support—financial and otherwise—made this possible.

v Table of Contents

Page

Chapter 1: Off the Ramparts and to the Barricades……………………………………1

Chapter 2: Pay the Buck and Turn the Page………………………………………...18

Chapter 3: “You Trust Your Mother But You Cut the Cards”…………………….37

Chapter 4: The Magazine the President Hated So Much…………………………..58

Chapter 5: Guerilla Warfare in the U.S.A. (and Canada)…………………………..76

Chapter 6: Farewell to Scanlan’s……………………………………………………..100

Appendix: Illustrations………………………………………………………………124

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..140

Abstract

Chapter One

Off the Ramparts and to the Barricades

In his 1974 memoir If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, former Scanlan’s

Monthly co-editor Warren G. Hinckle III summarized the magazine’s ten-month, eight-issue appearance on U.S. newsstands from March 1970 to January 1971:

During the short-lived Scanlan’s carnival I became engaged in [a] ridiculous battle with Spiro Agnew over the alleged pirating of a suspect memorandum from his office; was censored in Ireland; upbraided by the Bank of America for instructing love children how to counterfeit its credit cards; sued for one million dollars by the Chief of Police of Los Angeles; threatened by Lufthansa Airlines for an innocent editorial prank which they claimed cost them dearly, and also some other things happened.1

Few, if any, critics have accused Hinckle of understatement during his consistently controversial forty-year career in journalism. But some of the “other things” that happened to Scanlan’s were extraordinarily atypical. Besides the curious events he described above, the publication was also subject to a nationwide boycott by lithographers and printers who refused to work on the magazine’s eighth issue and threatened to sabotage it because it was “un-

American,” as well as the seizure of that issue by Canadian police and U.S.

Customs authorities. Scanlan’s also managed to infuriate President Richard

Nixon, who requested an FBI investigation into its accusations against labor leaders whom Nixon invited to a meeting at the White House, demanded a lawsuit against the magazine, and ordered an Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

1 Warren Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 363.

2 audit of Scanlan’s and its stockholders. If a magazine’s achievements can be measured in part by whom and how many it infuriated in the shortest amount of time, then surely Scanlan’s deserves to be honored.

In the midst of such special attention, Scanlan’s managed to print some of the most provocative muckraking journalism of its time. It tackled a bewildering array of topics: atrocities by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, the murder of a member of the Black Panther Party, Mexico-U.S. marijuana smuggling, the role of CBS in a failed invasion of Haiti, Mark Twain, the environment, Charles Manson, Russian pornography, the Mafia, counterfeit credit cards, and domestic guerilla warfare.

Scanlan’s also published the first examples of Hunter S. Thompson’s now- celebrated “Gonzo journalism,” and two years before anyone outside of

Washington, D.C., had heard of Watergate, it called for President Nixon’s impeachment.

Scanlan’s’ escapades as well as its content were widely covered and reviewed in mainstream newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times,

Time, Newsweek, Columbia Journalism Review, New York, and Commonweal.

Esteemed writers such as Tom Wolfe, Sol Stern, Studs Terkel, Graham Greene,

Thomas Fleming, Jerry Mander, Richard Severo, Murray Kempton, and Auberon

Waugh thought enough of Scanlan’s to write for the magazine. Scanlan’s was also an innovator. It eschewed advertising (when Scanlan’s did run an advertisement, it paid the advertiser, not the other way around), and relied completely on newsstand sales and subscriptions for revenue. It almost succeeded; before its disastrous eighth issue, the magazine was close to breaking even financially.

Longevity alone is not a measure of a magazine’s importance. Scanlan’s’ insistence on taking on and not backing down from power doomed it to an early death. But it was also that commitment to troublemaking muckraking that made the magazine great. Yes, it failed, but it failed spectacularly. The magazine, the characters who ran it and wrote for it, and its rise and fall were anything but dull. What’s more, Scanlan’s’ brushes with the U.S. government demonstrate the extent of the Nixon administration’s war on the dissident press. In later years

Hinckle liked to say that it was the magazine that Richard Nixon hated the most.

Whether Nixon truly felt that way cannot be proven, but his rancor for the magazine is well established. The story of Scanlan’s is a sobering lesson on how government power can be wielded to harass, and in some cases silence, the free press.

Yet for all its famous names and notoriety, Scanlan’s is largely a forgotten publication. Those few who have heard of it probably first came across the title, as this author did, while reading about Thompson. The two major articles he wrote for Scanlan’s, “The Last Temptation of Jean-Claude Killy” and “The

Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” were re-printed in his 1979 anthology of articles, The Great Shark Hunt.2 Today, a search for “Scanlan’s

Monthly” in an Internet search engine yields hundreds of hits, of which the overwhelming majority are Web sites or pages devoted to Thompson. Following

Thompson’s suicide in February 2005, Scanlan’s was cited in dozens of obituaries and summations of his career. As Scanlan’s co-founder Sidney E. Zion, now a

2 See Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979).

New York Post columnist, put it, “So it took Thompson’s shot in the head and the stories of his life to get Scanlan’s back in the paper.”3

Though Scanlan’s Monthly was mentioned in many Thompson retrospectives in February and March 2005, usually it was only referenced and not described, or assigned pat adjectives such as “edgy,” “maverick,” and “short- lived,” as well as “forgotten” and “obscure.”4 Even worse, its title is often misspelled “Scanlon’s”; even the San Francisco Examiner, which employed

Hinckle for years, made that mistake shortly after Thompson’s death.5 Scanlan’s also has been erroneously referred to as a “literary journal,” a “short-lived sporting and contemporary magazine,” a “feisty, short-lived weekly,” and an

“antiwar magazine.”6 Douglas Brinkley, who edited two volumes of Thompson’s correspondence and knows far more about Scanlan’s than the average Thompson eulogizer, wrote misleadingly in the introduction to one of those volumes,

3 Sidney Zion, “Searching in Vain for the Gonzo Legacy,” New York Daily News, February 24, 2005. 4 See Kyle Sheahen, “Magic Aura Defines Western Heroes,” Cornell Daily Sun, March 17, 2005 (accessed on line at www.cornellsun.com); Chris Morris, “Fear and Loathing,” Billboard, October 22, 1996 (accessed on line at www.erin.utoronto.ca/~tlauw/jcusack/artcles/article_2. html); Randolph T. Holhut, “The Gonzo Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson,” American Reporter, May 20, 2005 (accessed on line at www.american-reporter.com/2,650/81.html); Stephen Schwartz, “The Suicide of Counter-Culture,” The Weekly Standard, February 23, 2005 (accessed on line at www. cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/22/opinion/main675547.shtml); and Mikal Gilmore, “The Last Outlaw,” Rolling Stone, March 24, 2005, 46. 5 See P.J. Corkery, “Hunter Thompson: The Last Prank,” San Francisco Examiner, February 23, 2005. Robert Sam Arum made the same mistake in his 1981 book Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 164-166. 6 See Matt Shirley, “Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005,” Berkeley Beacon, February 24, 2005 (accessed on line at www.berkeleybeacon.com); “Warren Hinckle” (biography on “The Great Thompson Hunt” Web site), accessed June 14, 2005, at www.gonzo.org/hst/ friends.asp?ID=3; Arum, Gone Crazy and Back Again, 164; and Earl Shorris, “A Nation of Salesmen: Cautionary Tales from the Life of Homo Vendens,” Harper’s, October 1994, 47. Shorris’s description is perhaps the oddest, since he actually worked in Scanlan’s’ San Francisco office.

“Scanlan’s Monthly . . . folded because of financial mismanagement.”7 It is true that Scanlan’s filed for bankruptcy in 1971, but its demise was not self-inflicted; rather, it was harassment and intervention by the U.S. government that forced it to fold.

Scanlan’s continues to be mischaracterized because its story has not been told in any depth. Even its founders, who devoted almost two years of their lives to the magazine, have focused little attention on it since then. In Lemonade,

Hinckle dedicated more than 300 pages to his time at Ramparts, but a mere three to the subject of Scanlan’s. Zion, his former partner in crime, devoted about twenty pages to the magazine in his 1982 memoir, Read All About It!: The Collected

Adventures of a Maverick Reporter.8 Every few years, Zion mentions Scanlan’s in passing in one of the opinion pieces he writes for the New York Post. Hinckle has been periodically profiled in newspaper and magazine articles, and he usually says a few words, but not many, about his Scanlan’s experience. Until now, the best way to piece together a history of Scanlan’s was to read what Hinckle and

Zion wrote in their memoirs, and access Folio magazine’s Web site, where

Michael Learmonth wrote a 450-word history of the magazine in 2003.9 This thesis is the first attempt to write a thorough history of Scanlan’s, a publication that merits far more than a 450-word salute.

***

7 Douglas Brinkley, “Editor’s Note,” in Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), xix. 8 See Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 361-363; and Sidney Zion, Read All About It!: The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter (New York: Summit Books, 1982), 35-52, 62-63. 9 See Michael Learmonth, “Scanlan’s Monthly (1970-1971),” Folio, May 1, 2003. Accessed on line at www.foliomag.com on January 16, 2004.

Scanlan’s Monthly was largely the byproduct of the adventurous, agitating, publicity-seeking, and hard-drinking Hinckle (see figure 1.1).10 He has been described variously as a “large, manic one-eyed enfant terrible,” a “crusading muckraker, polemicist and political intriguer,” an “irrepressible buccaneer of the left,” the “hardest-drinking journalist in San Francisco,” a “P.T. Barnum of controversy,” the “Bermuda Triangle of publishing,” a “rascal of national stature,” and as a man “[r]esponsible for the two most spectacular train wrecks in postwar journalism” who “spent money with oil-sheik abandon.”11

Hinckle was very much aware of his reputation, and he even reveled in it.

He wrote in Lemonade:

At various times during the checkered decade past I have been called licentious, a profligate, an adventurer, a sensationalist, a wastrel, a capitalist guerilla, a boozer, a corporate wrecker, a degenerate, a wheeler-dealer, and a pirate, among other things.

There exist sufficient grounds for most of these appellations that they could be regarded as faint praise unto the truth, which is that all I am now or may be considered to be I owe to the Jesuits.12

How much influence Hinckle’s Jesuit schooling had on his adult behavior is uncertain, but what is clear is that he had already made a name for himself in the late 1950s as editor of the Foghorn, the University of San Francisco’s student

10 Warren Hinckle did not respond to inquiries requesting an interview for this thesis. 11 See David Armstrong, A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 307; Jerry Carroll, “Hinckle’s Literary Latest: Gadfly Editor Starts Up a Quarterly,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1993; “Editor’s Choice,” New York Times, January 5, 1975; Michael Goldberg, “Hinckle Tells All,” Boulevards, 1980 (month unknown), 12; John G. Clancy, “Room Service,” Harper’s, April 1981, 106; Paul Krassner in Goldberg, “Hinckle Tells All,” 15; Linda Francke, “The Rascals Go to Press,” New York, February 23, 1970, 48; BarTel d’Arcy, “The Hinckle File: A One-Eyed Man in the Kingdom of Way-Old Journalism,” Suck.com, March 31, 2000 (accessed on line at www.suck.com/daily/2000/03/31/3.html on July 23, 2004); and Curt Suplee, “Two Partisan of the Post: Into the ‘80s; Warren Hinckle: Voice of the Old New Left,” Washington Post, October 8, 1981. 12 Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 7-8.

7 paper. He achieved notoriety for transforming the Foghorn from a weekly to a daily and throwing a typewriter through a wall in one of his many fits of pique.13

In 1963, after a stint as a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, Hinckle was hired by Ramparts, a small intellectual Catholic journal, as promotion director.

Within a year, he had become executive editor and associate publisher and transformed it “from a mediocre Catholic literary quarterly into a rampaging crusader for leftist causes,” as Time put it in 1969.14 Ramparts’ circulation grew from 4,000 in 1964 to 250,000 in 1968.

Under Hinckle’s guidance Ramparts became a tireless muckraker. It exposed the CIA’s secret funding of the U.S. National Students Association, published the first John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, printed the diaries of revolutionary Che Guevara (with an introduction from Cuban premier

Fidel Castro), linked secret Michigan State University research with the CIA, and published the diaries of imprisoned Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, which were later published as the best-selling book Soul on Ice.

Ramparts also famously printed the disclosures of a former Special Forces sergeant who was taught methods of torture in Vietnam. Ramparts was a firebrand critic of the Vietnam War, and the magazine’s full-color, provocative covers often conveyed its opposition to the war as vividly as did its articles and editorials. Its December 1967 issue depicted four unidentified hands each clenching a burning draft card bearing the name of a Ramparts editor; one, of course, bore Hinckle’s name. The cover caused such a stir that the four editors

13 Goldberg, “Hinckle Tells All,” 14-15. 14 “Manning the Ramparts—Or Is It the Barricades?” Time, February 7, 1969, 42.

8 were called before a federal grand jury for alleged violations of Selective Service laws in June 1968, but the charges were eventually dropped.15 The photography inside the magazine also packed a punch. An issue of Ramparts that featured several photographs of a Vietnamese mother and her lifeless baby, killed by

American bombs, helped inspire Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to publicly announce his opposition to the war.16

Ramparts’ status as the leading magazine of the left won it enemies as well as friends. The CIA became interested in the magazine after it ran the article,

“What the Hell Is a University Doing Buying Guns, Anyway?” in its April 1966 issue. The article revealed how Michigan State University worked with the CIA to arm and train South Vietnam’s police force and Bureau of Investigation. The

CIA, though prohibited by law from engaging in domestic operations, placed

Ramparts reporters under close surveillance and researched the magazine’s finances with the aim of shutting it down. Throughout 1966 and 1967, the CIA worked to sabotage Ramparts’ circulation, advertising, and financing, and had the

IRS investigate employees’ tax records, while, in turn, the IRS provided copies of

Ramparts’ tax returns to the CIA. A CIA operative later said that agents had identified and investigated 127 Ramparts writers and researchers, along with 200

15 Sidney E. Zion, “Four Ramparts Editors Facing Draft Card Burning Prosecution,” New York Times, July 18, 1968. Zion later became co-editor of Scanlan’s. The four editors were Hinckle, editor-in-chief Robert Scheer, art director Dugald Stermer, and senior editor Sol Stern. Stern later wrote for Scanlan’s. 16 Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 427-428.

U.S. civilians with links to the magazine. The CIA’s massive Operation CHAOS program against domestic publications grew out of its investigation of Ramparts.17

Ex-Ramparts editor and future neo-conservative Peter Collier captured the style of the Ramparts-era Hinckle, if not his substance, in his book Destructive

Generation:

Hinckle liked to think of himself as an old-fashioned newspaperman, a heavy drinking, muckraking troublemaker in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce and Citizen Kane. . . . [H]e was almost comically anxious to acquire panache and cultivated a dandy’s style that emphasized patent-leather dancing pumps and three- piece suits. . . . His trademark was a patch covering a missing or mutilated eye, whose fate remained a mystery. My son Andrew, then three years old . . . referred to Warren as “that pirate guy.” This was closer to the truth than he could have known, as the investors Hinckle convinced to put a king’s ransom into Ramparts over the next few years could have ruefully affirmed.18

Indeed, Hinckle’s ability to raise money for Ramparts, often from bizarre sources, was as legendary as his ability to spend it. He enticed college professors, a retired inventor, and a jailed mobster to invest in the magazine.19 Nor was he known for his frugality. He always stayed in lavish hotels, but then again, he rarely paid his hotel bills. One oft-repeated story suggested that Hinckle, when stranded in Chicago and unable to fly to New York because of a domestic air

17 Operation CHAOS was originally designed by the CIA to investigate the foreign ties of domestic dissidents. It was expanded to investigate and disrupt publications that were viewed as disruptive to the Vietnam War effort. Journalist Angus Mackenzie has estimated the program may have affected more than 150 underground publications. See Angus Mackenzie, “Sabotaging the Dissident Press: The Untold Story of the Secret Offensive by the U.S. Government Against Antiwar Publications,” Columbia Journalism Review, March-April 1981, 57-59; Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1-24; and William W. Turner, Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails (Granite Bay, Calif.: Penmarin, 2001), 53-77. 18 Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (New York: Summit Books, 1989), 259-260. Hinckle injured his left eye in a childhood accident. 19 The Ramparts staff refused to accept financing from the convicted mobster, to Hinckle’s dismay. See Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 361.

strike, flew to London and once there boarded a flight to New York.20 The truth was not dissimilar; he actually flew from San Francisco to Paris to get to New

York. “If I had been in Chicago, I would have just taken a cab,” Hinckle later wrote.21

Hinckle’s personal spending habits surely ate away at the Ramparts coffers, but it was his editorial decision-making that helped to empty them. In

1968 he decided to turn the magazine into a biweekly, and started a Sunday newspaper called Sunday Ramparts when San Francisco’s newspapers were hit by a newspaper strike.22 Nor did he hesitate to take a Ramparts contingent to Chicago in August 1968 to cover the Democratic national convention. There, he and his staff printed a “daily broadsheet” that cost the magazine $50,000, of which

$10,000 was for the staff’s hotel suite alone.23

While the Chicago excursion may have contributed to Ramparts’ slide toward bankruptcy, it helped plant the seed for Scanlan’s. Also in Chicago that week was Sidney Zion, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the state of New

Jersey who set aside his legal career to become a legal correspondent for the New

York Post and the New York Times. In the late 1960s he covered Ramparts for the

20 James Ridgeway, “The Ramparts Story: . . . Um, Very Interesting,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 20, 1969, 36. 21 Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 183. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who launched a new version of the magazine City of San Francisco in 1975 with Hinckle as editor, once reportedly said, “I gave [Hinckle] an unlimited budget and he still exceeded it.” The story was told by a staff member of Asia Week who knew Hinckle, during a December 21, 2004, phone conversation. The staffer asked not to be named. 22 Future Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner was a member of the Sunday Ramparts editorial staff. He convinced art director Dugald Stermer to let him use the Sunday Ramparts design concept and even its paste-up flats for the debut issues of Rolling Stone. See Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 80-82. 23 Ridgeway, “The Ramparts Story: . . . Um, Very Interesting,” 36.

Times and wrote for Ramparts as a freelancer.24 Hinckle liked Zion’s reporting and personality and asked him to come to Chicago to report for Ramparts. Zion wrote about his immediate rapport with Hinckle in Read All About It!:

We hit it off great; we clicked just like that. It was more a matter of style than substance, as it turned out, but the style was so similar that for years it seemed to cover our real differences. . . . Mainly, it was the bar scene we had in common. Hinckle and I love a great bar. It’s our court.25

Zion and Hinckle also spoke similarly, so much so that strangers sometimes mistook them for brothers.26

Amidst the riots, protests, police brutality, and general chaos that characterized the Chicago convention, Hinckle and Zion engaged in some booze- fueled hijinks and discussed ideas for a new magazine. Zion had learned from a source that President Lyndon Baines Johnson was prepared to take the 1968

Democratic presidential nomination away from Vice President Hubert

Humphrey if Humphrey agreed on a peace platform for Vietnam. The source said he could get the plan in writing, but only if Hinckle and Zion “could get him laid.”27 Hinckle and Zion decided to find the source a prostitute, and with the help of the hotel’s administrative staff, procured one for $100. When Zion got back in touch with the source, he claimed that the plan was in Washington, D.C., and it would take a day or two for him to get it to Zion. Unsure of whether the

24 Sidney Zion did not respond to inquiries requesting an interview for this thesis. 25 Zion, Read All About It!, 37. In 1993, Jerry Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Hinckle and was surprised when Hinckle told him he had not had a drink for six months. “As deeply held articles of faith go,” Carroll wrote, “it’s like the pope saying atheists might be on to something.” See Carroll, “Hinckle’s Literary Latest: Gadfly Editor Starts Up a Quarterly.” 26 Zion, Read All About It!, 37. 27 Ibid., 38.

12 source was telling the truth, Zion urged Hinckle to take a gamble and dispatch the prostitute to the source:

“But what have we got to lose?” [Zion] said. “We’re putting the hundred on the bill, which you’ll never pay anyway, and if he doesn’t deliver, we can lunch on this one for twenty years.”

“Done,” said Hinckle.

A couple of hours later, our lover boy walked into the Ramparts suite looking the glum one if there ever was one. “Hey, baby, how was it?” Hinckle shouted out over the din of peaceniks boozing, smoking, munching. And the guy said, “I had better on the Albany-Schenectady line.”28

Such escapades cemented Hinckle’s and Zion’s friendship. But before Hinckle could begin a new magazine with his new pal, he had to divorce himself from

Ramparts. His departure would be controversial, but he was no stranger to controversy.

By January 1969, Ramparts was on the brink of bankruptcy.29 In New York,

Hinckle told a group of magazine editors not to “pay much attention to those stories about Ramparts’ troubles,” yet only a few days later in Ramparts’ San

Francisco offices, he told reporters that the magazine was bankrupt.30 He resigned as editor and president on January 29, and shortly thereafter the Ramparts board of directors declared bankruptcy.

But Hinckle did more than just announce his resignation from Ramparts on

January 29; he also told reporters that he had been offered and had accepted

28 Ibid., 39. 29 Time reported the magazine required $300,000 to clear its debts, while the New York Times reported the debt was $1.5 million. See “Manning the Ramparts—Or Is It the Barricades?” 42; and Henry Raymont, “Head of Ramparts Resigns in Crisis Over Its Finances,” New York Times, January 30, 1969. 30 “Manning the Ramparts—Or Is It the Barricades?” 42.

financial support for a new magazine to be called Barricades.31 He added that the first issue of Barricades would appear February 25. This bit of information led the

New York Times to conclude that “plans for the new publication had been under way for some time.”32 His abandonment of the Ramparts ship did not thrill publisher Frederick C. Mitchell, who probably spoke for other bitter Ramparts staffers when he sarcastically told the Times, “[W]e know [Hinckle] must be weary from having tried so hard to raise money.”33 As for the new magazine’s content, Hinckle told the New Republic that Barricades would be different from

Ramparts in that it would feature more muckraking journalism and do away with left-wing ideology. An unidentified source “close to the magazine” said, “It will no longer be a sacrilege to slap Castro once in awhile.”34

Zion and Hinckle began forming a Barricades staff and enlisted New York

Times writer and former Commonweal staffer John Leo as a founding editor and secretary-treasurer, as well as former Ramparts marketing guru and advertising genius Howard Gossage, the man who coined the phrase, “If you have a lemon, make lemonade.”35 No matter how many staffers Hinckle and Zion enlisted, however, they were unable to publish Barricades’ first issue by February 25, 1969,

31 Zion recalled in Read All About It! that the name Barricades sprouted from the Ramparts title, “as in off the ramparts and to the barricades.” See Zion, Read All About It!, 40. 32 Raymont, “Head of Ramparts Resigns in Crisis Over Its Finances.” 33 Ibid. The editors of Ramparts took a relatively mild parting shot at Hinckle when the magazine resumed publication in April 1969 following its emergence from bankruptcy: “It’s true, as Time reported, that one of our more vociferous editors cut out . . . but the rest of the staff hung tough, working without pay during the difficult interim.” See “About this Issue,” Ramparts, April, 1969, 4. Ramparts continued to publish until 1975. 34 “Two for One,” New Republic, February 15, 1969, 9. The article also reported that Barricades would be “pro-Israel,” unlike Ramparts. 35 Gossage died of leukemia in the summer of 1969. He was honored on the Scanlan’s masthead in each of its issues as “Chairman of the Board: The Late Howard Gossage.”

14 as Hinckle had promised. In fact, it would be another twelve months before the new magazine would appear on newsstands.

Though the New Republic reported that Hinckle was able to raise $165,000 within three days after he began fundraising for Barricades, he and Zion struggled to find investors for the magazine during the winter and spring of

1969.36 Then, the duo decided to take the magazine public. The idea was hatched by a lawyer and fight promoter, Bob Arum, who represented investment banker

Charles Plohn. In a February 23, 1970, New York magazine story riddled with misspelled names, Zion told Linda Francke that Arum believed investors would be scared off by the pro-Arab articles Hinckle had run in Ramparts, but when

Zion reminded Arum that he had equal say as co-editor, he said, “Then let’s go public.”37

A less-than-enthusiastic prospectus was written by the law office of Paul

O’Dwyer, later a member of Scanlan’s’ board of directors, and underwritten by

Charles Plohn & Co.38 On November 13, 1969, 250,000 shares of Scanlan’s Literary

House were offered, and the stock price soared from $3 to $4.50. On the next day, his birthday, Zion resigned from the New York Times. Zion later wrote that he was amazed that his editors at the Times were unaware that he was already at

36 See “Two for One,” 10. 37 Francke, “The Rascals Go to Press,” 49. 38 The New York article reported that the prospectus was eventually framed and hung in the back room of Elaine’s, a New York bar frequented by Hinckle and Zion. Elaine herself was a director, along with singer and pianist Bobby Short, satirist Stan Freberg, advertising guru Carl Ally, and a clerk at Aqueduct raceway. See Ibid., 50.

15 work for a new magazine, considering that his Barricades secretary visited him every day at the Times office to take dictation and make telephone calls.39

Later in November, Charles Plohn & Co. presented Hinckle and Zion with a check for $675,000.40 Hinckle, thirty-one, and Zion, thirty-six, now had the money they needed to start their magazine, which had a new title: Scanlan’s

Monthly.

39 Zion, Read All About It!, 40. 40 In Read All About It!, Zion claimed he was handed the check on November 25, 1969. See Zion, Read All About It!, 44. In Lemonade, Hinckle wrote that he received the check from Charles Plohn: “[T]he day I got the check from Charlie Plohn I didn’t have enough scratch in my pocket to pay for a celebratory drink in the bar in the Pan Am Building and almost had to resort to the game of asking the bartender if he could make change for the $675,000 check in my hand.” See Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 362.

Chapter Two

Pay the Buck and Turn the Page

Hinckle and Zion chose the title Scanlan’s Monthly not because it honored a legendary muckraking journalist or a prominent financial backer. Instead, the title had arcane Irish origins. It “honored” John Scanlan, a pig farmer described by a group of “old IRA guys” that Zion and Hinckle came across while touring

Ireland in 1968 as “the worst man who ever lived in Ireland”—the father of seven illegitimate children that he neither raised nor supported.1

The new name likely did little to assuage skeptics puzzled by the success of the Scanlan’s stock floatation. Hinckle’s reputation as a financial profligate preceded him, but investors may have been comforted by the stabilizing presence of founding editor John Leo. His former colleague at Commonweal, Peter

Steinfels, was told by a lawyer that Leo’s involvement “as editor and secretary- treasurer . . . was the only reason a lot investors were willing to risk their money with Hinckle III.”2 Victor Navasky, the editor of the political and social criticism journal Monocle, called Leo “the only honest man in an unholy trio.”3

Sometime between November 1969 and February 1970, Hinckle, Zion, and

Leo established editorial offices in midtown Manhattan at 143 West 44th Street,

“sandwiched between a dilapidated Irish pub and a skin-flick cinema,” as Time

1 Sidney Zion, Read All About It!: The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter (New York: Summit Books, 1982), 62-65. 2 Peter Steinfels, “Scanlan’s Monthly and Other Diversions,” Commonweal, March 13, 1970, 6. 3 Linda Francke, “The Rascals Go to Press,” New York, February 23, 1970, 48.

19 described it.4 Meanwhile, Hinckle opened a Scanlan’s San Francisco office at 451

Pacific Avenue, in a converted firehouse where Howard Gossage had plied his advertising trade. Hinckle shared the building with a conservation group,

Friends of the Earth, which would contribute an ecology installment to the first three issues of Scanlan’s.

In its February 23 issue, New York magazine published Linda Francke’s article on Scanlan’s, “The Rascals Go to Press.” It featured a large photo of Zion and Hinckle enjoying drinks at one of the many New York City bars they frequented, with the caption: “Sidney Zion and Warren Hinckle toasting

Scanlan—the magazine and the pig farmer” (see figure 2.1).5 Francke had caught up with Zion at Sardi’s bar, where he was sick with a cold and without sleep for twenty-four hours because he was writing and editing galleys for the debut issue. He made no secret of his affinity for the taverns of New York. “If you want me,” he told Francke, “try the office first. Then Gallagher’s, Frankie and

Johnny’s, Sardi’s, Broadway Joe’s and Elaine’s.”6

Zion spoke enthusiastically about the upcoming debut issue. “We’re not going to run a bunch of essays,” he said. “That’s homework and I hate magazines that are homework. We’re going to run pieces we like.”7 Oddly, it was Leo, not

Hinckle, who spoke about the magazine’s philosophy and prospects. “Scanlan’s

4 “A Scanlan Is Born,” Time, March 9, 1970, 42. 5 Francke, “The Rascals Go to Press,” 49. 6 Ibid., 50. When the telephone line at Sardi’s went dead, Zion ran a small advertisement on the bottom of the New York Times front page that read, “Telephone Company! Please fix the phones at Sardi’s bar. Signed, Scanlan’s Monthly.” Zion claimed later that “half a dozen” telephone repairman descended on Sardi’s on the next day to fix the telephone line. See Zion, Read All About It!, 43. 7 Francke, “The Rascals Go to Press,” 48.

20 is going to be personal journalism,” Leo said. “We’re going to write and publish what appeals to us. We’re not going to be the house organ for any particular group, and we’re not going to dance for the kids.”8 Scanlan’s would preserve its editorial independence by following “Howard Gossage’s first rule”: the magazine would not spend a dime to solicit advertising or build up circulation through mailings. The magazine’s no-advertising doctrine would be re-stated boldly in (or more accurately, on) the debut issue, but the editors probably knew that soliciting advertising would be a futile exercise because of its firebrand content. As Hinckle recalled thirty years later, “[A]s far as commercial advertisers, [Scanlan’s] was just too goddamn controversial.”9

Although Scanlan’s was eschewing the primary source of revenue for most magazines, Leo told Francke that it could break even financially within a year if it could build and maintain a circulation of 110,000 at $1 a copy. “But we don’t know if that is true,” he conceded.10 Leo’s caution was shared by observers.

Francke reported that an unidentified literary agent was instructing writers not to write for Scanlan’s unless they received payment in advance.11

***

8 Ibid. It was peculiar that Francke did not interview Hinckle, especially since he was pictured with Zion in the photograph accompanying the article. Perhaps he was away from New York when Francke spoke to Zion and Leo, but it was unlikely that he could not have been contacted by telephone. 9 BarTel d’Arcy, “The Hinckle File,” Suck.com, March 31, 2000. Accessed on line at www.suck.com/daily/2000/03/31/3.html on July 23, 2004. Hinckle discussed Gossage’s “first rule” at length in his memoir, and in the March 21, 2005, Thompson obituary he wrote for The Nation. See Warren Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 126-128; and Warren Hinckle, “Hunter S. Thompson,” The Nation, March 21, 2005, 26. 10 Francke, “The Rascals Go to Press,” 48. 11 Ibid., 49.

On February 24, 121,000 copies of the debut issue of Scanlan’s Monthly, dated March 1970, hit the streets.12 It featured the $675,000 check from Charles

Plohn & Co. on its front cover, along with an editorial manifesto spanning the front and back covers (see figure 2.2):

Since the halcyon days of the great muckraking journals of half a century past, there has not been one publication in this country whose editors were absolutely free—and had the cash—to do what journalists must do.

That vision of a free, crusading, investigative, hell-raising, totally candid press has largely been consigned to the apologias of the smug publishers who won the working journalists and to the barroom daydreams of newsmen. . . .

Scanlan’s eschews the reliance on any outside economic force—including that almost irresistible mistress advertising—and will charge the reader enough to make it on circulation alone. . . .

In the meantime we have enough money to sustain ourselves and to print exactly what we want. . . .

We will make no high-blown promises about how great this magazine is going to be. Pay the buck and turn the page.13

Once they did that, readers quickly got a taste of Scanlan’s’ muckraking, hell-raising content. Several contributors were Ramparts alumni, and their articles were very much in that tradition. Vietnam veteran turned Ramparts writer

Donald Duncan wrote about atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, told to him by a medic who served twelve months there.14 The medic told Duncan

12 “New Magazine Called Scanlan’s Monthly Arrives on Thursday,” Wall Street Journal, February 20, 1970. 13 Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 1, 132. 14 Duncan was an ex-Green Beret who famously appeared on the cover of Ramparts’ February 1966 issue under the words “I quit!” The issue brought Ramparts national exposure. See James D. Henry (as told to Donald Duncan), “The Men of ‘B’ Company,” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 26-31.

22 he knew of at least fifty civilians executed by troops in his company, including one incident in which the company slaughtered nineteen women and children with machine-gun fire. Another former Ramparts perennial, Sol Stern, supplied one of the issue’s highlights. He chronicled the disastrous concert by the Rolling

Stones and other rock groups at Altamont Raceway outside San Francisco in

December 1969, where a concertgoer was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels.

Stern’s copy was augmented with striking black-and-white and color photographs that captured the fear in the faces of the concertgoers and the day’s chaos.15 Another former Ramparts editor, Maxwell Geismar (who was listed as a

Scanlan’s founding editor in the short biography that followed his article), wrote

“Mark Twain and the Robber Barons,” “a brief history of the disgrace of Twain criticism.”16

The debut included “The Lost Tribe of Alabama” by Richard Severo, who told the sad story of Alabama’s Cajun population, which suffered from chronic health problems and were ostracized because of their mixed-race ancestry. “The

Cajuns are a people without a race and they have a great misfortune to live in a state where you must have a race so you’ll know where to go,” he wrote.17 Zion

15 Sol Stern, “Altamont: The Woodstock Nation’s Pearl Harbor,” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 37-54. 16 Maxwell Geismar, “Mark Twain and the Robber Barons,” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 33. Geismar wrote the introduction to Soul on Ice, the autobiography of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver also wrote for Ramparts. 17 Richard Severo, “The Lost Tribe of Alabama,” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 81.

23 proudly told New York’s Francke that “The Lost Tribe of Alabama” was “so tough that no [other magazine] would buy it.”18

Another Zion favorite was a twenty-three-page excerpt from an incomplete biography of Jewish gangster Mickey Cohen written by Zion’s hero,

Ben Hecht, a newspaperman and screenwriter who died in 1964. Zion introduced

“The Incomplete Life of Mickey Cohen” with a fawning biography of Hecht, who called early attention to the plight of European Jews under the yoke of Nazism in a column he wrote for the New York daily PM during World War II. Hecht’s legacy was clearly an inspiration for Zion, who told the New York Times on

February 24, “We’re going to start Hecht’s literary renaissance.”19

Elsewhere in the magazine, Gene Grove revealed that the CBS network spent at least $170,000 to back an invasion of Haiti by refugees of that country.

Three decades before it became fashionable, CBS had hoped to produce its own reality show—a documentary film of the invasion. Unfortunately for CBS, the invasion fizzled before a shot was fired. Auberon Waugh, the son of English novelist Evelyn Waugh, wrote about the failure of Western governments to

18 Francke, “The Rascals Go to Press,” 48. Severo is now an obituary writer and book critic for the New York Times, and author of the 1989 book The Wages of War: When America’s Soldiers Came Home: From Valley Forge to Vietnam. 19 See Ben Hecht, “The Incomplete Life of Mickey Cohen,” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 55-80; and Henry Raymont, “Scanlan’s, a Monthly Magazine, Promises to ‘Vilify’ Institutions,” New York Times, February 25, 1970. Hinckle later wrote that Zion wanted Scanlan’s to “recreate the secular toughness of his hero, Ben Hecht.” See Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 363. It is probably no coincidence that like Scanlan’s, PM had eschewed advertising and relied on newsstand sales and subscription revenue. In its debut June 18, 1940, issue, PM wrote a manifesto not unlike the one printed on the front and back cover of Scanlan’s’ debut issue: “PM accepts no advertising. . . . PM’s sole source of income is its readers—to whom it alone is responsible. . . . PM is one newspaper that can and dares to tell the truth.” PM folded in 1948. See Philip Nel, “About the Newspaper PM” (accessed on line at www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/purple/miscellaneous/ pm.html on July 22, 2005); and Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940-1948 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 22-23.

24 properly respond to the Nigerian civil war in Biafra. The article was accompanied by a small illustration by noted British illustrator Ralph Steadman.

Murray Kempton, a former New Republic editor, contributed a critical review of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s autobiography. But not every contributor to the debut issue had a famous name; two high school students wrote about Students for a Democratic Society organizing in high schools and the film “Easy Rider,” respectively. Scanlan’s even threw in something for comics lovers, a four-page, color translation of the popular French comic strip, “The

Adventures of Tintin.”20

Two sections of the March issue became monthly installments. Hinckle’s co-tenants, the Friends of the Earth, supplied a photographic essay titled “What

If We Don’t Do It?,” analyzing the pros and cons of building an Alaskan oil pipeline. New York Post writer Joseph Kahn wrote the first of seven investigative reports on the health standards of New York restaurants, complete with cleanliness ratings for each restaurant, represented by stars and garbage cans.

Soon, restaurant proprietors began to refuse Kahn entry into their eateries.21

Of course, Scanlan’s would not have been complete without an editorial section. Titled “What Obtains?,” it began at the front of the magazine on pages 7 through 14 and was continued on pages 119 through 126. Unlike the rest of the magazine, which was printed in color on quality stock, “What Obtains?” was

20 See Gene Grove, “The CIA, FBI & CBS Bomb in Mission: Impossible,” 2-4, 15-21; Auberon Waugh, “The Short Outrageous Political History of Biafra,” 101-108; Murray Kempton, “Acheson,” 109-111; Rob Cohen, “The High Schools and S.D.S.,” 113-117; Frederic Silber, “Down on Easy Rider,” 117-118. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970. 21 See “What If We Don’t Do It? No. 1: The Alaska Pipeline,” 127-129; and Joseph Kahn, “Dirty Kitchens of New York,” 22-25. Both articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970.

25 printed on cheap butcher paper, suggesting that the section may have been sent to the printer late and inserted hastily.

Under the subheading “Who Are We to Make a Magazine?” short biographies of Zion, Hinckle, art director Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, and managing editor Donald Goddard were supplied (readers learned that Scanlan’s was Solomon’s first magazine and Goddard was “a goddam Englishman”).22 “On a Theory of the First Amendment” featured the editors’ defense of the right of reporters to protect their sources. “[T]here can be no more chilling effect on freedom of the press than a jurisprudence which insists that journalists either become informers or go to jail,” they wrote.23 Israel “Izzy” Schwartzberg, a lawyer and former convict who the editors called “the underworld’s foremost authority on the underworld,” caustically reviewed two books on the Mafia.24 Other editorials included staff editor Rick Beban’s account of a daily newspaper strike in Marin County, California, and a review of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s

Woman and Colin MacInnes’ Westward to Laughter by Ramparts staffer Peter

Collier.25

Graphically, Scanlan’s had little in common with the “radical slick”

Ramparts, which had featured sophisticated layouts and abundant color photography. Excepting the stunning color photographs of the Altamont concert,

22 “Who Are We to Make a Magazine?” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 7. 23 “On a Theory of the First Amendment,” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 8. 24 Schwartzberg died of heart failure in December while representing Scanlan’s against Canadian authorities who had seized most of the press run of Scanlan’s’ eighth issue. See Chapter 5. 25 See Rick Beban, “The Anatomy of a Small Town Strike,” 119-121; and Peter Collier, “Antique Forms of the English Novel, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Divisions,” 121-123. Both articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970.

26 the debut issue featured mostly black-and-white photography. Art director

Solomon often placed a “splash” page or two-page spread before each article with an illustration that was often bold, arresting, and in color. However, the

(often lengthy) articles that followed continued for as many ten pages, unaccompanied by even a small photograph or illustration. As a result, the issue had a text-heavy, “all-art or no-art” feel. To be fair, Scanlan’s was Solomon’s first magazine, and her layouts improved in future issues. Still, while Scanlan’s’ covers were often memorable, the magazine rarely equaled the visual standard set by Ramparts.

***

The name most commonly associated with Scanlan’s today is neither Zion nor even Hinckle, but Hunter S. Thompson. In 1970, he was a thirty-two-year-old freelance writer best known for his 1966 book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible

Saga. He first met Hinckle in San Francisco in 1966; they were both adept drinkers, and they became fast friends.26

In late 1969, Hinckle agreed to publish an article about celebrated French skier Jean-Claude Killy that Thompson had originally written for Playboy. It had been indignantly rejected by Playboy; one editor was so angered by it that he composed an internal memo that declared, “Thompson’s ugly, stupid arrogance

26 One day when Thompson and Hinckle were out to (likely a liquid) meal in San Francisco, Hinckle’s pet monkey, Henry Luce, broke loose from his cage in the Ramparts office and found bottles of pills from Thompson’s rucksack and gobbled them. When Thompson and Hinckle returned, the monkey was running around the office at top speed, and had “turned into a ferocious, snarling monster and no one could stop him,” Hinckle remembered in 2005. See Hinckle, “Hunter S. Thompson,” 26; and Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (New York: Summit Books, 1989), 260-261.

27 is an insult to everything we stand for.”27 But Scanlan’s was not Playboy, and

Hinckle was thrilled with the article, a long (nine pages of text) and rambling story about an Olympic gold medallist who now spent his time promoting

Chevrolet automobiles and ski equipment. Thompson was overjoyed by

Hinckle’s purchase of the article, calling it “[t]he only decent thing that’s happened to me on the writing front in two years” in a January 12, 1970, letter to his friend, author William J. Kennedy.28 Thompson received $1,500 for the article, a rate “better than Esquire,” he wrote in the same letter.29

“The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy” opens as Thompson arrives in

Boston for a conference of ski equipment dealers, where Killy is making a promotional appearance:

Two weeks of guerilla warfare with Jean-Claude Killy’s publicity juggernaut had driven me to the brink of hysteria. What had begun in Chicago as a simple sketch of a French athlete turned American culture-hero had developed, by the time I got to Boston, into a series of maddening skirmishes with an interlocking directorate of public relations people.

I was past the point of needing any more private time with Jean-Claude. We had already done our thing—a four-hour head-on clash that ended with him yelling: “You and me, we are completely different. We are not the same kind of people! . . . I don’t care what I say, what I think, but I have to keep doing it. And two weeks from now I can go back home to rest, and spend all my money.”

There was a hint of decency—perhaps even humor—about him, but the high-powered realities of the world he lives in now

27 Hunter S. Thompson, “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy,” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 89. Thompson struck back by calling Playboy “a conspiracy of anemic masturbators” in the introduction that preceded the Killy article. 28 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 256. 29 Ibid., 257.

make it hard to deal with him on any terms except those of pure commerce.30

Thompson dispensed with the traditional rules of objective reporting by emphasizing his own role in the story as much as he did Killy’s. As Thompson biographer William McKeen put it, “[g]etting the story is the story.”31

Douglas Brinkley, the editor of two collections of Thompson’s letters, wrote that Hinckle took a tremendous risk by publishing “Killy,” and in doing so played a major role “in the development of Thompson’s infamous Gonzo style.”32

Robert Draper, who profiled Thompson extensively in his 1990 history of Rolling

Stone magazine, wrote that Hinckle was “about the only editor willing to give

Thompson’s predatory writing sufficient room to prowl.”33 Thompson himself had kind words for Hinckle in a January 13, 1970, letter to Random House editor

Jim Silberman: “As an editor, Hinckle is one of the few crazed originals to emerge from the jangled chaos of what we now have to sift through and define or explain somehow as ‘the 1960s.’”34

Indeed, Hinckle’s enthusiasm for Thompson’s unusual brand of journalism provided the latter the opportunity to have articles published that few other magazines would dare print. Thompson, who once defined Gonzo as

“a style of reporting based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far

30 Thompson, “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy,” 92. 31 William McKeen, Hunter S. Thompson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 35. 32 Douglas Brinkley, “Editor’s Note,” in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, xvi. 33 Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 207. 34 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 260. Seven days later, Thompson wrote Hinckle to complain that he (Thompson) had not received any promotional materials about Scanlan’s. “You’re the last person in the world I’d expect to launch a magazine by word of mouth,” he wrote. See Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 269.

29 more true than any kind of journalism,”35 would take the style to new heights a few months later, again in the pages of Scanlan’s.

His spirits boosted by Hinckle’s purchase of “The Temptations of Jean-

Claude Killy,” Thompson expected great things from Scanlan’s’ first issue. In the

January 12 letter to Kennedy, he wrote: “The first issue is due in March, and I assume it will be something like the old, fire-sucking Ramparts. If their taste for my Killy article is any indication, I’d say it will be a boomer. . . . Hinckle has weird and violent tastes.”36

Less than two months later, his enthusiasm was tempered after reading the debut issue. He wrote in a March 2 letter to Hinckle, “Editorially, the first issue looked good and up to par . . . but [g]raphically, it was a fucking horror show. It looks like it was put together by a compositor’s apprentice with a head full of Seconal.”37 Thompson was particularly embittered by the two-page spread featuring illustrations by Jim Nutt that accompanied the Killy article (see figure

2.3). He requested that Nutt’s artwork “not be allowed within 15 pages on either side of my byline.”38 He also wrote that Nutt’s art separated the article’s introduction—an excerpt of a December 6, 1969, letter from Thompson to

Hinckle—and the actual article, which rendered the introduction “useless.”

Indeed, the introduction appeared to be tacked on to the end of Severo’s “The

35 Brinkley, “Editor’s Note,” in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, xvi. 36 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 257. 37 Ibid., 283. 38 Ibid.

Lost Tribe of Alabama.” Thompson told Hinckle to recruit Ramparts designer

Dugald Stermer to overhaul Scanlan’s’ look.39

***

Thompson was not the only critic of Scanlan’s’ debut. Volume One,

Number One’s robust mix of muckraking journalism, literary criticism, film reviews, and photographic essays was reviewed in mainstream newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Time, and Commonweal. The latter two publications slammed the front- and back-page manifesto as a “tub-thumping, back-patting” editorial that reads “like an ultimatum.”40

Scanlan’s also was criticized for what both magazines believed were alarmingly lax editing and design standards. Steinfels wrote in Commonweal:

Perhaps it is in the tradition of barroom journalism to paste your publication together late in the night in some ill-lit speakeasy, thus overlooking those finer points of makeup that indicate where one section of the magazine ends and another begins, what is text and what is caption, and so on. . . . If that is the case, then Scanlan’s is certainly true to the tradition. . . . After practicing on a few more issues, Hinckle III and Zion will probably learn how to make up a magazine, or find someone else to do it for them. (The old Ramparts was excellently designed.)41

Steinfels also felt the issue featured what he considered “standard subjects” by

1970—ecology, Biafra, rock festivals, and even Vietnam atrocities—that were treated with “an average blend of New Journalism and underground-press styles.”42 Nor was he impressed by Thompson’s contribution. While “The

Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy” is now widely praised, he slammed the piece,

39 Ibid. 40 See Steinfels, “Scanlan’s Monthly and Other Diversions,” 6; and “A Scanlan Is Born,” 42. 41 Steinfels, “Scanlan’s Monthly and Other Diversions,” 6. 42 Ibid.

31 writing that the article “is so bad that Playboy looks good” for rejecting it.43 He had few good things to say about the debut, but he praised Geismar’s re- examination of Mark Twain criticism and Severo’s Cajuns article. He also remarked that Hecht’s piece on Cohen is “a suitable symbol of the hair-on-your- chest, tough newspaperman nostalgia that Scanlan’s basks in.”44

The March 9 issue of Time seemed to confirm Steinfels’ suspicion that

Scanlan’s was put together in boozy, haphazard circumstances. Time discovered chaos in the New York office: cluttered desks and typewriters, freelance writers demanding payment, and private investigators in deep conversation with editors.45 Hinckle and Zion were pictured together with drinks in hand, just as they had appeared in New York magazine.

Hinckle proudly told Time, “We did everything we weren’t supposed to.

No marketing studies. No direct-mail campaigns. No promotion. No ads. We didn’t even do a dry-run issue.”46 Like Commonweal, Time felt that one of the things Scanlan’s was not supposed to do was edit in such a sloppy fashion, singling out Grove’s CBS/Haiti article as an egregious violator of proper editing standards. Zion did little to rebut the assertion that the debut issue should have been better edited. He told Time that the issue’s original page count was eighty, but was increased to 136 “because we just didn’t want to kill the stuff.”47 Time did

43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 “A Scanlan Is Born,” 42. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid.

32 praise Duncan’s Vietnam atrocity story and Stern’s “strong” piece on the

Altamont concert.48

Unlike Time’s and Commonweal’s reviews, Henry Raymont’s February 25

New York Times article was neutral in tone, listing the contents of the first issue and detailing Scanlan’s’ advertising-free strategy. Raymont, along with Time, also reported that Zion and Hinckle were working on several side projects under the

Scanlan’s Literary House imprint. They planned a literary review called Scanlan’s

Literary Supplement, a compendium of book reviews,49 and a book middleman service. “To the author, we’re the publisher,” Hinckle explained to Time. “To the publisher, we’re the author.”50 In addition, Zion told Raymont that he was planning to issue a collection of articles and reprints of out-of-print books written by Hecht in conjunction with his widow. Finally, Zion announced that Scanlan’s

Literary House would issue High School Revolutionaries by Marc Liberale and

Tom Seligson, which was printed and distributed by Random House that year.51

Of these ventures, it appears only High School Revolutionaries came to pass.

Commonweal, Time, and the New York Times reported on Scanlan’s’ financial health, no doubt aware that readers would want to know how much cash

Hinckle was spending. Commonweal’s Steinfels eagerly reported that Hinckle

48 Ibid. 49 Time reported that Scanlan’s Literary Supplement would be bi-weekly, while Raymont wrote that it would be bi-monthly. See “A Scanlan Is Born,” 42, and Raymont, “Scanlan’s, a Monthly Magazine, Promises to ‘Vilify’ Institutions.” 50 “A Scanlan Is Born,” 42. 51 Raymont, “Scanlan’s, a Monthly Magazine, Promises to ‘Vilify’ Institutions.” In yet another side project, Zion had announced earlier in February that Scanlan’s would run an essay contest for law students on “the constitutional implications of the Federal Government’s policy of subpoenaing reporters and their notes.” See “Rights of Newsmen To Be Essay Subject,” New York Times, February 13, 1970.

33 spent $300,000 of the original $675,000 before the first issue had even appeared on newsstands. He then added uncharitably, “I wonder what his next idea for a magazine will be,” referring to Hinckle’s controversial departure from Ramparts.52

In Time, Zion painted a cautiously (and humorously) optimistic future for

Scanlan’s: “We’ve got six months, maybe a year to find 120,000 readers willing to pay a buck a copy. It’s all up to us. If we fail, I’ll blame Hinckle and Hinckle will blame me, but who’s gonna come to that press conference?”53

Hinckle and Zion may have spent a little less than half of their seed money by Scanlan’s’ debut issue, but they were expecting to issue a second public floatation of stock in order to raise more money. This plan did not pan out due to the crash of the new issues market, which eventually led to the demise of Charles

Plohn & Co. Despite the absence of a second influx of cash, Zion later wrote that from the beginning both he and Hinckle were dedicated to putting out a high- quality magazine, willing to pay writers far more than the going rate, and ready to buy a first-class ticket anywhere in the world for a reporter covering a story.

“Nobody could keep a national magazine afloat on $675,000, unless it were run on butcher paper and a close-to-the-vest budget,” he wrote in 1982. “Well . . . we wanted a big, exciting book with plenty of four-color photojournalism and artwork. So butcher paper was out, and of course so was budgeteering.”54

While the critics may have been unenthusiastic about the first issue and

Scanlan’s’ long-term prospects, Hinckle and Zion must have been pleased that

52 Steinfels, “Scanlan’s Monthly and Other Diversions,” 6. 53 “A Scanlan Is Born,” 42. 54 Zion, Read All About It!, 44.

34 the debut received as much publicity as it did. On the other hand, one person who was decidedly unpleased was former founding editor Leo, who was hospitalized briefly while the magazine was going to press. For reasons unknown, Hinckle and Zion stripped Leo’s name from the masthead, and he never returned to the Scanlan’s fold.55

55 Commonweal’s Steinfels reported that Leo planned to sue, while in Raymont’s New York Times article, Zion only said that Leo’s departure would delay the literary supplement. See Steinfels, “Scanlan’s Monthly and Other Diversions,” 6; and Raymont, “Scanlan’s, a Monthly Magazine, Promises to ‘Vilify’ Institutions.” In an August 1994 interview for C-SPAN’s “Booknotes” program, Leo said little about his Scanlan’s experience: “I joined Sid Zion and Warren Hinckle in an effort to start a radical magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly, which didn’t turn out too well.” Leo suggested in the same interview that he and Zion had buried the hatchet. He said that Zion had attended a party for his book, Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police, a collection of essays about political correctness. See “Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police,” (C- SPAN “Booknotes” Interview with John Leo). Accessed on line at www.booknotes.org/ Transcript/?ProgramID=1214 on May 27, 2005.

Chapter Three

“You Trust Your Mother But You Cut the Cards”

Scanlan’s’ sophomore effort, the April 1970 issue, was designed to give its readers more bang for their one buck. The cover announced, “You’ve Read Too

Much About Atrocities. Now Listen to One on Page 3,” and also promised “Pan

Am—Hog Butcher To The World,” “The Women of The Chicago 7,” “In Praise of

Robert Mitchum,” and “In Astrocolor: Nixon’s Horoscope.” Page three included a bound-in record, “The Interrogation of Capt. Howard Turner,” which contained testimony from the court-martial trial of an Army lieutenant charged with deliberately killing a South Vietnamese soldier.

Like the March issue, April’s table of contents was divided under the headings “Politics and Reportage” and “Essays and Criticism.” In the former category, Herbert Gold wrote about the small Caribbean island of Anguilla, whose struggle for independence had been publicized by none other than the late Howard Gossage. Esteemed journalist Studs Terkel contributed “The

Conspiracy Women,” in which he interviewed wives, girlfriends, daughters, and sisters of the Chicago Seven, the group of radicals on trial for conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Elsewhere, historian and novelist Thomas Fleming explored the long history of political machine bosses and corruption in Jersey City, New Jersey. Finally, Asian scholars Alfred McCoy and Angus McDonald supplied an article reminiscent of Ramparts’ exposes on

Michigan State University’s enterprises in South Vietnam. The authors revealed

38 that Pan American Airways made $99.8 million in 1968 by flying troops from the

U.S. to Vietnam, shuttling troops from Vietnam to rest and recuperation areas, and flying dead bodies back to the U.S. The airline used nineteen jets flying full- time between the U.S. and the war zone to do the job.1

Under “Essays and Criticism,” Richard Thompson trumpeted the underappreciated “anti-art” genius of actor Mitchum; Joseph Kahn wrote the second installment of the “Dirty Kitchens” series; and Gavin Arthur, the great grandson of the 21st president, Chester Arthur, furnished an astrological

“portrait” of President Nixon. And under “The Environment,” the Friends of the

Earth analyzed the drawbacks of a proposed California water system of reservoirs, dams, canals, and aqueducts.2

The editorial section, still titled “What Obtains?”, was now placed in the back of the magazine beginning on page 70. In the lead editorial, “The Jewish

Establishment and Pompidou,” Scanlan’s took a strong Zionist stance by praising those New York and Chicago Jews who threw raspberries at visiting French

Premier Georges Pompidou because of his pro-Arab views. The editors wrote:

“The Arabs, who have never given up the dream of Jewish genocide, have now taken to dynamiting civilian aircraft, a policy as brave as their 1940’s tactic of

1 See Herbert Gold, “The Log of the Anguilla Free Trade & Charter Company,” 20-35; Studs Terkel, “The Conspiracy Women,” 42-47; Thomas Fleming, “A Political History of Jersey City,” 62-69; and Alfred McCoy and Angus McDonald, “Pan Am Makes the Fighting Great,” 48- 58. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, April 1970. 2 See Richard Thompson, “Robert Mitchum Is Better than Dean Martin,” 12-15; Joseph Kahn, “Dirty Kitchens of New York,” 16-19; Gavin Arthur, “An Astrological Portrait of President Nixon,” 36-41; and “What If We Don’t Do It? No. 2: The California Water Plan,” 59-61. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, April 1970.

39 slicing Jewish children’s throats.”3 The editorial also castigated Jewish-American groups for fomenting anti-Israel bias among young American Jews. The opinions likely surprised those accustomed to Ramparts’ pro-Palestinian pieces. “What

Obtains?” also included an examination of reviews of the film Zabriskie Point by the novelist, screenwriter, and former Ramparts writer Stephen Schneck.4 The editors also outlined their letters policy: letter writers were charged 25 cents per word or $1 per word for letters “which we find particularly dumb, boring or offensive.”5

The most attention-grabbing editorial was “Hello, Informer,” which chronicled the editors’ recent run-in with Elia Kazan, the film producer and director. He was reviled by many for testifying before the House Un-American

Activities Committee during the red scare of the 1950s. In that testimony he supplied names of fellow Communist Party members he knew when he had been a member in the 1930s. Hinckle and Zion stumbled upon Kazan at the Manhattan bar Toots Shor’s, where he was sharing a drink with novelist Norman Mailer and journalist Pete Hamill. The editors wrote:

Perhaps we are naïve, but this surprised us. We were taught to think that Hamill and Mailer—both of whom keep adding to their list of “war criminals”—would never consider drinking with

3 “The Jewish Establishment and Pompidou,” Scanlan’s Monthly, April 1970, 70. 4 See “The Jewish Establishment and Pompidou,” 70-71; and Stephen Schneck, “At Last I’ve Found Someone Who Actually Likes Zabriskie Point: Me,” Scanlan’s Monthly, April 1970, 75- 77. 5 “Letters to the Editor,” Scanlan’s Monthly, April 1970, 74. Zion told the Wall Street Journal in August that he had returned $38 and $100 checks accompanying letters because they were “too dumb.” See “If You Write Scanlan’s, Kindly Enclose a Check,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 1970.

an informer. We asked them about this at Toots’ bar. Mailer accused us of “moralism.”6

Below their account of the incident, the editors reprinted Kazan’s infamous April

12, 1952, advertisement in the New York Times, in which he urged liberals to turn in Communists. Scanlan’s was running the reprint, the editors wrote, “[s]o the old can be reminded, and the young learn something about the character of this famous producer-director.”7

Twenty-nine years later, Zion commented further about the encounter with Kazan in an opinion piece written shortly after the Academy Awards board awarded the filmmaker a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. He claimed that when

Mailer introduced Hinckle and himself to Kazan, Hinckle said, “I don’t shake the hand of a fink,” and Zion said, “Ditto.” He also wrote that he sent Kazan a $150 check for re-printing the advertisement (per Scanlan’s’ policy of paying for advertisements) and the check was not returned.8

The Kazan editorial did not create nearly as much controversy as an advertisement—or what appeared to be an advertisement—for Lufthansa

Airlines on the back cover (see figure 3.1). The doctored advertisement was created and sold by a freelance writer to Scanlan’s for $50. It was identical to the original Lufthansa advertisement, which featured four photographs and the tag line “This year, think twice about Germany,” with two notable exceptions. One

“replacement” photograph showed a nude woman with her hands bound behind

6 “Hello, Informer,” Scanlan’s Monthly, April 1970, 72. 7 Ibid. 8 Sidney Zion, “Once a Rat, Always a Rat,” Montreal Gazette, February 3, 1999. In the same article, Zion defended his decision in 1971 to name Daniel Ellsberg as the source of the Pentagon Papers before Ellsberg had stepped forward. Observers at the time, including Hinckle, criticized Zion for doing so.

41 her back being whipped by a soldier, while a third person filmed the scene; another showed three German Luftwaffe soldiers giving “Heil Hitler” salutes.

***

The cover of Scanlan’s’ May issue was as eye-catching as the modified

Lufthansa advertisement. A muscular woman with ape-like features and enormous breasts, sporting a sword and a snake wrapped around her left wrist, greeted readers and newsstand passersby. The illustration advertised “Russia’s

Underground Political Pornography,” a story co-written by Hinckle and Joel

Solkoff about an intellectual movement in the Soviet Union that printed comic books featuring pornographic images and stories. The cover also advertised an

“exclusive” story, “New Hot Water for Teddy Kennedy.” The un-bylined article reported that federal agents were investigating Kennedy, a Massachusetts senator, for allegedly intervening in a grand jury investigation of a family friend.9

Kennedy was still reeling from the July 1969 Chappaquiddick Island incident in which he had walked away from a car accident that had killed a female companion.

Elsewhere in “Politics and Reportage,” Zion took a swipe at his old bosses at the New York Times, reprinting in its entirety an unfavorable June 1969 story he wrote about federal judge Henry J. Friendly that the newspaper chose not to print.10 Another Ramparts alumnus, William Turner, critiqued FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover’s handling of the case involving accused kidnapper Kathryn Kelly

9 See Warren Hinckle and Joel E. Solkoff, “Russia’s Underground Political Pornography,” 1-4; and “New Hot Water for Teddy Kennedy,” 17-19. Both articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970. 10 See Sidney E. Zion, “Who’s Afraid of Judge Henry Friendly? (Besides the New York Times Et Al),” Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970, 11-16.

42 in 1938. Turner concluded that Hoover was more interested in preserving the

FBI’s image than administration of justice. Hinckle christened the meandering article with the title, “Mrs. Machine Gun Kelly: J. Edgar Hoover Gets His First

Woman.”11 “Politics and Reportage” also included a profile of Ghana premier

Kwame Nkrumah by French political historian Jean Lacouture, and Gene Grove wrote on the Los Angeles Police Department’s follies and misdeeds in the

Charles Manson murders investigation and its dealings with the Black Panthers.12

The issue also offered a photographic essay by photographer Robert

Altman (not the filmmaker) of a hippie commune in California, a reprint of four

Kansas City Star articles from April 1918 by an eighteen-year-old Ernest

Hemingway, and reflections from writer Graham Greene on the writing of his

1947 novel Brighton Rock.13 It also included a shocking four-page newsletter published by the Information Service of the Republic of South Africa, which unapologetically defended a massacre of sixty-nine black South Africans and blamed the republic’s poor image on Communists and other “troublemakers.”

The editors may have reasoned that South Africa’s racist policies were best reported by the republic itself.14

11 Hoover was widely believed to be a closeted homosexual. See Stephen Schneck and William Turner, “Mrs. Machine Gun Kelly: J. Edgar Hoover Gets His First Woman,” Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970, 53-58. 12 See Jean Lacouture, “The Demi-god: African Power and Kwame Nkrumah,” 59-70; and Gene Grove, “Sorry About That, Jack Webb,” 27-34. Both articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970. 13 See Robert Altman, “The Wheeler Ranch,” 35-42; Ernest Hemingway, “Hemingway: Cub Reporter,” 50-52; and Graham Greene, “God Blessed Brighton Rock,”6-8. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970. 14 See “News From South Africa,” Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970, 49.

In “What Obtains?” the editors attacked the prohibition of cigarette advertising on radio and television, signed into law by President Nixon a month previously. They claimed the law “infringes outrageously upon the reasonable

God-given right to pick his own poison.”15 The editors took an absolutist stand on

First Amendment rights, writing that “no amount of lung cancer can change the inviolability of that principle.”16

“What Obtains?” also responded to the controversy over the Lufthansa

“advertisement” in the previous issue. The airline, the original advertisement’s agency creators, and the travel agent listed in the advertisement were all outraged, the editorial reported with some glee. The editors’ response came in the form of yet another reprint—an Advertising Age article in which Zion said the advertisement was a “natural” for Scanlan’s because “it seemed awfully odd for

Lufthansa to be using a line like, ‘think twice about Germany.’ When they invite second thoughts, this is what can happen.”17

University of California graduate student Jon Unger followed “That

Lufthansa Ad” by slamming the U.S. press for failing to report a massacre of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians by U.S troops near the village of Song My in

March 1968. The incident, now commonly known as My Lai, had first been reported by the Viet Cong’s clandestine radio service in the spring of 1968, but the U.S. press did not pick up the story until late 1969.18 “What Obtains?” was

15 “The Wesleyans Are Alive and Well in Washington, D.C.,” Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970, 71. 16 Ibid., 72. 17 “That Lufthansa Ad,” Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970, 72-73. 18 See Jon Unger, “The NLF Radio Scooped the American Press By a Year and a Half on Song My. That Makes It News,” Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970, 73-75.

44 rounded out by Yale University law professor Fred Rodell’s unflattering review of his Yale colleague Alexander Bickel’s book on the Supreme Court. In the short author biography that followed the article, the editors wrote that Rodell “is despised by Harvard Law School, which is not the sole reason for his inclusion as a director and contributing editor of Scanlan’s.”19

***

When it was not busy printing doctored versions of legitimate advertisements in its pages, Scanlan’s was doing its own advertising in order to boost circulation. On May 10, an eye-catching, full-page advertisement bearing the headline, “YOU TRUST YOUR MOTHER BUT YOU CUT THE CARDS,” appeared in the New York Times, and the advertisement was run again four days later. It featured amusing graphics alongside tongue-in-cheek, irreverent copy describing who ran Scanlan’s; the magazine’s mission; and past, present, and future articles (see figure 3.2). “You could think of SCANLAN’S as a cross between RAMPARTS and THE NEW YORK TIMES,” it read. “You’d be dead wrong, but you could think of it that way if you wanted to.”20 It also referred to the $675,000 seed money: “This is a lot of money, even for boozehounds like

Warren Hinckle and Sidney Zion, so we’re in fairly solid shape.”21 Running full- page advertisements in the New York Times was certainly not cheap, but Zion

19 Fred Rodell, “Alexander Bickel and the Harvard-Frankfurter School of Judicial Inertia,” Scanlan’s Monthly, May 1970, 77. 20 Advertisement, New York Times, May 10, 1970. The identical advertisement ran in the May 14 Times, and a new version with updated copy appeared in the Times on various dates in June and July. The copy was written by Dan Greenburg, who has written dozens of fiction and non-fiction books for adults and children. 21 Ibid.

45 wrote later that they drew 30,000 new subscriptions in three months.22 In the May

25 issue of Newsweek, Zion told Lee Smith that Scanlan’s was selling 75,000 to

80,000 copies of each issue but needed to sell more than 110,000 to break even.23

Just as Time and Commonweal had done in March, Newsweek’s Smith lamented Scanlan’s’ untidy editing, especially Turner’s article on Hoover and

Machine Gun Kelly. He opined that “nobody seems to have exercised much control over the three issues that have appeared so far.”24 Smith did praise Zion’s story on Judge Friendly and Murray Kempton’s “stinging” review of Dean

Acheson’s autobiography from the March issue. But his conclusion was fairly damning: “[U]nlike Ramparts, which attracted attention to itself with explosive exposes, Scanlan’s has not created a public scandal, an unhappy condition for a muckraking magazine.”25

If it was controversy and scandal Smith was looking for, Scanlan’s’ June issue may have satisfied him. Its attention-grabbing cover featured an illustration of President Nixon’s face with a fist firmly planted in it, under the headline

“Impeach Nixon.” Alongside the table of contents, the editors wrote, “The

Editors of Scanlan’s Monthly assert that impeachment proceedings against

President Richard Nixon are mandatory if the constitutional system of government in the United States is to retain any validity.”26

22 Sidney Zion, Read All About It!: The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter (New York: Summit Books, 1982), 45. 23 Lee Smith, “Scanlan’s Reviewed,” Newsweek, May 25, 1970, 66. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 “The Cover,” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, table of contents page.

A passionate “What Obtains?” editorial accused Nixon of high crimes, misdemeanors, and “outright fraud,” including the undeclared invasion of neutral Cambodia, as well as the “rape of the stock market, mayhem on the economy, and felonious assault on the Supreme Court.”27 The editors saved most of their venom for Nixon’s continuation of presidents Kennedy’s and Johnson’s undeclared war in Vietnam and expanding it into an undeclared and unconstitutional war throughout Southeast Asia. Finally, they dismissed the argument that impeaching Nixon would only push into office a direr prospect—

Vice President Spiro Agnew. They wrote:

The fear that Agnew would be worse has stymied most serious thought of impeaching Nixon. This is silly and self- deluding, yet quite predictable given the historical urge of liberals to follow “responsibility” to the nearest cop-out. If the Senate found the backbone to impeach Nixon, the system could be considered to be back in at least temporary working order and Agnew would have to stand in line if he in turn violated the Constitution.

If in fact the House has not the courage to impeach him, nor the Senate to convict him, President Nixon will at least have the scarlet letter brand on his forehead. That is the least he deserves for what he has done.28

The June issue was Scanlan’s’ most interesting, catholic, and controversial to date. It included John Kifner’s investigation into the murder of Black Panther

Fred Hampton by Chicago police and a savage insider’s expose of Newsweek magazine by a former female staff member.29 In its brand-new “Service Feature” department, Elihu Blotnick talked to counterfeiters to learn how they forged

27 “Where Did the Robbery Take Place,” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, 73. 28 Ibid., 74. 29 See John Kifner, “Socking It to the Panthers,” 29-43; and Kate Coleman, “Turning On Newsweek,” 44-53. Both articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970.

47 credit cards and driver’s licenses. “How to Counterfeit Credit Cards and Get

Away with It” even included step-by-step photographs showing a Gulf credit card and a California license being doctored by an anonymous counterfeiter.30

The title of staff writer Rick Beban’s article, “Remember Kent State. And,

Remember Isla Vista,” recalled the May 4 incident at Kent State University in

Ohio, when National Guard troops fired on protesting students, killing four and wounding nine. Beban wrote about a University of California at Santa Barbara student who was shot by police during a riot in which students burned down a local branch of Bank of America. He revealed how police tried to cover up the shooting by claiming the victim was a sniper, when in fact the student was trying to put out the fire started by other protestors.31

Jerry Mander, president of the late Gossage’s advertising firm and director of the Friends of the Earth, Hinckle’s fellow tenants at 451 Pacific Avenue, provided a thoughtful look at how the advertising industry had successfully appropriated environmentalist imagery. The article included examples of what

Mander called “eco-pornography” in advertisements for Chevron and Bethlehem

Steel. He flatly contradicted Hinckle’s and Zion’s absolutist First Amendment stance in the April issue’s “What Obtains?” He wrote, “government interference

30 See Elihu Blotnick, “How to Counterfeit Credit Cards and Get Away with It: The Confessions of a Plastic Man,” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, 21-28. It was surely this article that caused the Bank of America to “upbraid” Scanlan’s. See Warren Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 363. In 1980, Blotnick, a writer and photographer, published California Street 1, a collection of non-fiction stories that included “How to Counterfeit Credit Cards and Get Away with It.” The collection was reissued in 2005 in audio book form in a four-CD set. See Elihu Blotnick, California Street 1: San Francisco Adventures and Some That Only Began Here (Carson, Calif.: Firefallmedia, 2005). 31 See Rick Beban, “Remember Kent State. And, Remember Isla Vista,” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, 13-20. Beban is now a poet who runs fiction and poetry workshops in Playa del Rey, California. He did not respond to inquiries requesting an interview for this thesis.

48 strikes me as the only way to mitigate effects of the millions of ad dollars which are being spent to tell just one side of the story.”32

The June issue was also perhaps Scanlan’s’ strongest from a design standpoint. Blotnick’s counterfeit credit card story and Mander’s “eco- pornography” piece outclassed the debut issue’s clunky layouts by some stretch.

Robert Altman contributed another photographic essay; this time the subject was celebrated merry prankster Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s

Nest.33 And the back cover was as eye-catching as the front: centered within a mass of white space was a tiny 5-cent Canada stamp containing the now-famous image of a grieving woman kneeling over the bleeding body of a wounded Kent

State student.

Despite these highlights, Scanlan’s’ June issue was considered a landmark because of “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Thompson’s

“coverage” of the annual Kentucky Derby horse race in Louisville. Only a few days before the race, he called Hinckle at his San Francisco home at 4 a.m.—“a normal social hour” for Thompson, according to Hinckle—to say he wanted to cover the Derby.34 Thompson, a Louisville native, originally asked Hinckle to hire

Denver Post editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant, a Pulitzer Prize winner, to accompany him to provide illustrations. He proved unavailable, so Hinckle suggested thirty-four-year-old Ralph Steadman, a Welsh illustrator acclaimed in

32 Jerry Mander, “Six Months and Nearly a Billion Dollars Later, Advertising Owns Ecology,” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, 61. In 1971, Mander founded the first non-profit advertising agency in the United States. He also wrote the 1977 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. 33 See Robert Altman, “Ken Kesey’s ‘Atlantis Rising,’” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, 62-69. 34 Warren Hinckle, “Hunter S. Thompson,” The Nation, March 21, 2005, 26.

49 the United Kingdom for gruesome caricatures of British politicians. Steadman recalled in 2005:

I got a call from J.C. Suares, art editor of Scanlan’s Magazine [sic] in New York. He said: “How’d ya like to go to the Kentucky Derby with an ex-Hell’s Angel who just shaved his head, and cover the race? His name is Hunter S. Thompson and he wants an artist to nail the decadent, depraved faces of the local establishment who meet there. He doesn’t want a photographer. He wants something weird and we’ve seen your work.35

Steadman, who had arrived in the United States only a few days earlier and was staying in Long Island, flew to Louisville, where he had little luck locating

Thompson or press credentials. “I was under the impression that this was an official trip and I was an accredited press man,” he remembered. “Why shouldn’t

I think that? I assumed that Scanlan’s was an established magazine.”36

The pair eventually found each other on the racetrack grounds.

Thompson, equipped with a pencil, notebook, and a can of mace, and Steadman, using borrowed lipstick and an eyebrow pencil for his drawings, chronicled their alcohol- and drug-fueled (and mace-infested) escapades while debunking a celebrated American tradition:

“[Thompson:] Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. . . . The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up.”

35 Ralph Steadman, “Hunter S. Thompson RIP: ‘I Would Feel Real Trapped in This Life if I Didn’t Know I Could Commit Suicide at Any Time,’” The Independent (online edition), February 22, 2005. Suares later became art director of the New York Times op-ed page. 36 Ibid.

[Steadman] looked so nervous that I laughed. . . . “Don’t worry. At the first hint of trouble I’ll start pumping this ‘Chemical Billy’ into the crowd.”37

In Steadman, Thompson found not only a perfect foil for his escapades, but also an artist whose style perfectly matched his own. As Douglas Brinkley,

Thompson’s curator of letters, put it, the article brought together Thompson’s

“viciously funny, first-person, Gonzo perspective” with Steadman’s “perversely exact illustrations . . . drawn in lipstick to shock the unprepared reader.”38

Following the weekend’s mayhem, Thompson was flown to New York to write the piece, where he was “locked in [a] stinking hotel room with a head full of pills & no sleep for 6 days, working at top speed & messengers grabbing each page out of the typewriter just as soon as I finished it,” he wrote his agent days later.39 In 1974, he spoke further about the genesis of the article in an interview with Playboy, the same magazine that rejected “The Temptations of Jean-Claude

Killy”:

I was desperate. Ralph Steadman had done the illustrations, the cover was printed and there was this horrible hole in the interviews. I was convinced I was finished, I’d blown my mind, I couldn’t work. So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was going to write for anybody. Then when it came out, there were massive numbers of letters, phone calls, congratulations, people calling it a “great breakthrough in journalism.” And I thought, “Holy shit, if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I write like The

37 Hunter S. Thompson, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, 8. 38 Douglas Brinkley, “Editor’s Note,” in Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), xvi. 39 Ibid., 300.

New York Times?” It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.40

Though they did not realize it at the time, the “combustible pairing” of

Thompson and Steadman “changed the face of modern journalism,” wrote

Brinkley.41 Following Thompson’s suicide in February 2005, obituary writers cited

“Kentucky Derby” as a the first article that showcased Thompson’s trademark

Gonzo style. Mikal Gilmore wrote in Rolling Stone: “[The article] feels freewheeling when you read it, [but] it doesn’t feel accidental. The writing is right there, on the page—startling, unprecedented and brilliantly crafted.”42 In a

Thompson obituary he wrote for The Nation, Hinckle wrote, “Gonzo journalism—the unedifying concept of the reporter as the active party of the story”—grew out of the Kentucky Derby assignment.43

At the time, Thompson’s genius was noted by celebrated “New

Journalist” Tom Wolfe. In November 1970, he sent a copy of his new book Radical

Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers to Thompson with a hand-written note that read, “Dear Hunter, I present this book in homage after reading the two funniest stories of all time—J.C. Killy and The Derby—(Scanlan’s).”44 Wolfe also told

Writer’s Digest in 1974, “[Thompson] has developed into the greatest humorist in

America. He wrote some things for Scanlan’s—I laugh just thinking about them,

40 “The Playboy Interview: Hunter Thompson,” Playboy, November 1974. Accessed on line at www.playboy.com/features/features/hunterthompson/ on May 24, 2005. 41 Brinkley, “Editor’s Note,” in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, xvii. 42 Mikal Gilmore, “The Last Outlaw,” Rolling Stone, March 24, 2005, 46. 43 Hinckle, “Hunter S. Thompson,” 26. 44 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 337. In a February 25, 1971, letter to Thompson, Wolfe praised Thompson’s “superb” Scanlan’s articles, calling them “too uproarious for words.” See Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 371.

52 one on the Kentucky Derby, and one on Jean-Claude Killy selling Chevrolets.

Just marvelous.”45

Thompson’s Scanlan’s articles also were admired by Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner, who eventually convinced him to become a regular contributor to that magazine. Soon, his Gonzo journalism would appear regularly in Rolling Stone and in best-selling books (he memorably collaborated with Steadman again on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), and by the mid-1970s he was an American celebrity. His adventures were eventually immortalized in two

Hollywood films. Yet Thompson did not forget Hinckle’s crucial role in the development of his career, calling him “the best conceptual editor I ever worked with.”46

***

“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” may have been a roaring success, but Thompson’s optimism about the future of Scanlan’s had faded by May. In a May 15 letter to Hinckle, he wrote:

As for Scanlan’s general action . . . well, what little I saw of the NY scene leaves me slightly worried. Something is badly lacking in the focus, the main thrust—and $10,000 ads in the NY Times only emphasize what’s missing. . . . [T]he vibes I got in NY

45 Dorothy M. Scura, ed., Conversations with Tom Wolfe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 65-66. 46 This quote is cited in several sources, but the author has not been able to determine its origin. See Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 207; and Jack Boulware, “Hinckle, Hinckle, Little Star (Part I),” San Francisco Weekly, February 14, 1996 (accessed on line at http://sfweekly.com/issues/1996-02-14/ feature.html on February 21, 2004).

were somewhat mixed—and the only cure I can see is impossibly drastic.

The fucker should work. It’s one of the best ideas in the history of journalism. But thus far the focus is missing—or maybe it just seems that way to me; perhaps something missing in my own focus.47

Thompson also saw little improvement in Scanlan’s’ layout and design. In a June

2 letter to Steadman, he wrote, “The drawings were fine, although I think they fucked up the layout—as usual—quite badly.”48

In his May 25 Newsweek article, Smith had suggested that Scanlan’s was suffering from internal strife. He told of managing editor Goddard’s imminent departure as well as the problems posed by Hinckle being in New York only ten days a month. Smith quoted an anonymous staffer: “Warren creates a

Gotterdammerung [catastrophically violent and disorderly] atmosphere in which he will go down as the misunderstood genius.”49 Like Smith, Thompson sensed something was amiss. In a May 27 letter to departing managing editor Goddard, he wrote:

God only knows how Scanlan’s NY office will hold together now. I was quite depressed by the deranged & unfocused chaos of the place—& I told Warren that I saw your departure as a very ugly & ominous event. I hope he can pull that goddamn monster together very soon, but in truth I don’t see much hope.50

47 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 296. 48 Ibid., 309. 49 Smith, “Scanlan’s Reviewed,” 66. 50 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 304. In the May 15 letter to Hinckle, Thompson praised Goddard for his assistance during the writing of “Kentucky Derby” and after he lost his wallet in a Manhattan bar. “Goddard’s patience was all that kept me functioning. He’s a first- class head to have on your side and I’m sorry to hear he’s leaving. God only knows what will happen to the NY end of your action without his calming influence.” See Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 296. In August, Scanlan’s ran a classified advertisement in the New York Times seeking an editorial assistant. “Long crazy hours in small crazy office,” it read. See Classified Advertisement, New York Times, August 16, 1970.

In Lemonade, Hinckle conceded that his decision to spend most of his time in San Francisco created friction between himself and Zion. “The chemistry that made my friendship with Zion did not serve to make a magazine,” he wrote.

“Scanlan’s became an East Coast-West Coast tug of war.”51 In San Francisco, he enjoyed dealing with counter-culture figures such as Thompson, cartoonist

Robert Crumb, “and a painted wagon full of counterculture freaks and left-wing bombers who drove Zion berserk.”52 When not in his office, he could often be found in Cookie’s bar on Kearny Street in San Francisco, one of his favorite haunts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Visitors to Cookie’s commonly found him seated at the bar, manuscript pages spread in front of him. “[M]any a manuscript arrived at the typesetter’s marked with wet circles,” William Turner remembered.53

Three-thousand miles away in New York, Zion was interacting with a different crowd: police lawyers, informants, Mafia experts, and “revisionist

Israeli historians,” Hinckle recalled. Maintaining offices in New York and San

Francisco that housed editors not known as penny-pinchers naturally took a toll on the magazine’s budget, Zion wrote in 1982. “We had a full-scale operation out there, and what with Hinckle flying to New York and me to California, not to mention the phone bills and transmission machines—well, budget, shmudget,”

51 Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 362. 52 Ibid, 363. 53 Michael Goldberg, “Hinckle Tells All,” Boulevards, 1980 (exact date unknown), 13. The author requested this article from an inter-library loan service, knowing only the name of the publication and the year it was printed. He received a photocopy of the article, but the exact date of issue was not listed. Hinckle wrote a tribute to Cookie Picetti and his bar in 2004 for the San Francisco Examiner. See Warren Hinckle, “The Old Town Comes Back—for a Night,” San Francisco Examiner, June 8, 2004.

55 he wrote.54 Hinckle summarized the situation in Lemonade: “It was a crosscountry clash of generations between two journalists and friends of roughly the same age and the same generally liberal politics.”55

54 Sidney Zion, Read All About It!, 45. 55 Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 362-363.

Chapter Four

The Magazine the President Hated So Much

The July 1970 issue, Scanlan’s’ fifth, sported another provocative cover that featured the bald-headed, long-lashed face of an actress named Pandora. The issue’s contents—“San Francisco’s Film Bastards,” “Cookbook Frauds,” “The

CIA’s Cancer Cure,” “Maoists in Limerick,” and “Revolutionary Latin American

Poetry”—were advertised on Pandora’s forehead.

“What Obtains?” attacked Life magazine, deeming it “America’s Pravda.”

The editors argued that since the IRS and the FBI spoon-fed information on the

Mafia and rogue government officials to Life, “what the old picture book has been passing off as bloodhound reportage is little more than the government handout.”1 The remainder of “What Obtains?” was reserved for New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes’s lengthy treatise on the current theater scene.2

Arnold Passman, a staffer in the San Francisco office, wrote the cover story on San Francisco’s underground film culture; Susan Griffin interviewed women who had recently had illegal abortions; a young, anonymous Colombian contributed revolutionary poetry; a cooking expert harshly critiqued popular cookbooks; and Lee Lockwood supplied photographs from the May Day celebration at Yale University. 3

1 “America’s Pravda Consider the Alternative,” Scanlan’s Monthly, July 1970, 73. 2 See Clive Barnes, “Stranger than Fact, Stronger than Fiction,” Scanlan’s Monthly, July 1970, 74-77. 3 Passman, who worked as a part-time radio disc jockey while employed at Scanlan’s, was author of the 1971 book The Deejays. See Arnold Passman, “The Bastard Children of Cecil B. DeMille Are Making Films in San Francisco,” 2-13; Susan Griffin, “Post-Abortion Interviews,” 47-

Hinckle wrote the issue’s most compelling article, “Maoists in Limerick and Other Pogroms of Modern Ireland.” He reported on the authoritarian mayor of Limerick, Ireland, who declared that any pub owner who served a drink to a

Maoist would be presumed to be a sympathizer and used his influence to have local Maoists fired from their jobs. “Ireland has not been in such a condition of fantastic chaos since the Civil War of 1922,” Hinckle wrote in characteristic overstatement.4 Also compelling was Peter Geismar’s “The Strange Dying Days of Frantz Fanon,” a profile of the psychoanalyst and philosopher, who wrote extensively about black consciousness and identity and colonialism.5

Although Hinckle’s and Geismar’s articles were standouts, Scanlan’s’ July issue as a whole paled in comparison to the June “Impeach Nixon” edition.

Perhaps the “East Coast-West Coast tug of war,” Goddard’s departure, and the chaos in the New York office cited by Thompson and Newsweek’s Smith contributed to its relative weakness. Perhaps sensing the need to create a sensation for their fledgling magazine, Hinckle and Zion packed considerable controversy into the August installment of Scanlan’s. August’s cover lived up to the high standards set by its predecessors, as famed underground comics artist

Robert Crumb allowed Scanlan’s to adapt one of his most acclaimed comic book covers (see figure 4.1). A typically Crumb-esque large-limbed, large-breasted woman rips up an issue of Scanlan’s while her son weeps, and proclaims:

55; “Latin American Revolutionary Poetry: ‘Colombia Ripped Off,’” 36-46; Hyman Goldberg, alias Prudence Penny, “The Rotten Truth About Cookbooks,” 56-61; and Lee Lockwood, “May Day at Yale,” 69-72. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, July 1970. 4 Warren Hinckle, “Maoists in Limerick and Other Pogroms of Modern Ireland,” Scanlan’s Monthly, July 1970, 17. 5 See Peter Geismar, “The CIA’s Cancer Cure: An Account of the Strange Dying Days of Frantz Fanon,” Scanlan’s Monthly, July 1970, 62-66. Fanon died in 1961.

THIS DIRTY MAGAZINE IS ONLY ABOUT POT AND DOPE SMUGGLING AND POONTANG MOVIES AND LEFT WING INDIANS AND PENTAGON FRAUDS AND CHARLIE MANSON!! SO DON’T HAND ME ANY OF THAT CRAP ABOUT WINNIE THE POOH (P. 28).6

Simply put, the cover was brilliant. The colors were vibrant, Crumb’s artwork lent Scanlan’s underground culture cachet, and the issue’s contents were summarized seamlessly into the illustration. Another arresting feature of the issue was a stark, one-page color photograph of a grave of a U.S. soldier who died June 7, 1969, in Vietnam. The tombstone read, “VIETNAM—DIED FOR

WHAT—?”7

As the cover promised, the issue featured articles about marijuana smuggling, X-rated films, Native American revolutionaries, the Pentagon’s role in Lockheed Aircraft’s mismanagement, an astrological portrait of Charles

Manson, and yes, Winnie the Pooh. The first of two marijuana articles, the remarkable “How Life Magazine Paid $5000 for Marijuana Fields in Mexico and

Other Tales,” was penned by Roger Tichborne, who spent six months in the marijuana harvesting ranches of Mexico. He and a companion spent $5,000 of expense money supplied by Life magazine to purchase, cultivate, harvest, cure, and pack a ton of marijuana and smuggle it back to the United States. Life refused the story and the pictures, while Look magazine purchased the story but decided against printing it. Of course, Scanlan’s jumped at the chance to publish a fascinating article that happened to embarrass Life, and printed the story along

6 Front cover, Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970. 7 Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970, 5.

61 with six pages of black-and-white photos. It even included a one-page list of do’s and don’ts titled “A Smuggler’s Guide to Importing Pot from Mexico.” The second “pot article” focused on the vibrant marijuana growing and smoking scene in Lawrence, Kansas, where marijuana growers had formed a trade union.8

Elsewhere, Hinckle wrote about the cast of characters in Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland; Robert Sherrill, an editor for The Nation, wrote about how the Pentagon bailed out Lockheed Aircraft, the government’s number-one defense contractor; and San Francisco State College professor Robert Chrisman wrote “Ecology is a Racist Shuck,” in which he claimed the environmentalist movement was racist in nature.9 Richard Parker offered an “annual anti-report” on the Bank of America in the form of a traditional corporate report that revealed the dark side of the biggest bank of America. His report concluded, “Most annual reports have predictions, and here is ours: if you tried to do with your money what the Bank of America gets away with doing with your money, you would be put in jail for a variety of indictable crimes.”10

In “What Obtains?” the editors supported Italian-Americans who protested against the FBI in New York City, calling for due process for Mafia kingpins. Federal and state prosecutors were convicting Mafia members, in order to further their careers, on “evidence that would make the Greek junta blush,”

8 See Roger Tichborne, “How Life Magazine Paid $5000 for Marijuana Fields in Mexico and Other Tales,”6-20; and George Kimball, “The Great Grass Harvest in River City,” 21-26. Both articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970. 9 See Warren Hinckle, “O.K. About Christopher Robin, But What Happened to Alice?”, 28-36; Robert Sherrill, “The Conveniences of Being Lockheed,” 39-45; Robert Chrisman, “Ecology Is a Racist Schuck,” 46-49. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970. 10 Richard Parker, “An Annual Anti-Report on the Bank of America,” Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970, 62.

62 they wrote.11 The editors also attacked members of the left for castigating revolutionary Native Americans for being insufficiently revolutionary, an attitude that demonstrated “just how really stupid the left can be at times.”12

Under the “Sex” section of “What Obtains?”, critic William Pechter took in a few

X-rated films.13

Scanlan’s called attention to its unusual advertising policy by listing the issue’s advertisements in its table of contents. They comprised an updated version of “You Trust Your Mother But You Cut the Cards,” advertisements for

South Carolina National Bank and Family Cribari Wine, and a clever advertisement similar in style to “You Cut the Cards” for The Realist, journalist

Paul Krassner’s underground magazine.14

***

Just as the April issue’s one-page doctored Lufthansa advertisement created a storm of controversy, it was one page of the August issue that garnered headlines and notoriety. Six days before it hit newsstands, the New York Times reported the issue was to feature a copy of a single page of a confidential memorandum on Vice President Agnew’s stationery that the magazine claimed was authentic. Dated March 11 and labeled “page 2 of 4 pages,” it suggested

Agnew was linked to a report allegedly written by the Rand Corporation

11 “Will Leonard Bernstein Give a Party for Joe Colombo?” Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970, 64. 12 “Left-Wing Indians,” Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970, 65. 13 See William Pechter, “A Critic Turns On to Poontang Movies,” Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970, 68-69. 14 Krassner inscribed a copy of his 1971 book, How a Satirical Editor Became a Yippie Conspirator in Ten Easy Years, to Hinckle: “To Warren, a reporter who generously shares misinformation and friendship alike . . . Yours, Paul.”

63 analyzing the possibility of canceling the 1972 presidential election and repealing the Bill of Rights (see figure 4.2).15 The document also included details for a plan titled “Operation U.S.A. All The Way,” which would use CIA funds to inspire

“spontaneous demonstrations” supporting Nixon’s Indochina policy by construction workers in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, and Seattle.

Hinckle and Zion proudly printed the memorandum on page one, under the caption, “This document recently came into the hands of the editors.”16 Years later, Zion remembered the memorandum controversy in Read All About It!: “We trusted our source, who had been reliable in the past, but there was no way to totally prove the authenticity of the memo without going to Agnew, who would obviously deny it. So we figured, let’s drop it and see what happens.”17

Agnew, whom the Times allowed to preview Scanlan’s’ August issue so he could comment, said it was “ridiculous” that the magazine believed the memorandum was authentic. The letterhead in the Scanlan’s memorandum, he explained, was not the same as that used by his office. “My denial is unequivocal,” he said.18 In the same article, Zion told the Times, “The document came directly from Mr. Agnew’s office, and he knows it.”19 Meanwhile, Attorney

15 Both the White House and the Rand Corporation denied that such a study existed; its existence was first rumored in a Newhouse News Service weekly gossip column several months earlier. See James M. Naughton, “Agnew Attacks Memo as Fraud,” New York Times, July 22, 1970; and “This Document Recently Came Into the Hands of the Editors,” Scanlan’s Monthly, August 1970, 1. 16 “This Document Recently Came Into the Hands of the Editors,” 1. 17 Sidney Zion, Read All About It!: The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter (New York: Summit Books, 1982), 48. 18 Naughton, “Agnew Attacks Memo as Fraud.” 19 Ibid.

General John Mitchell said that the memorandum was “a complete fabrication” and “an example of Hitler’s big lie technique.”20

Scanlan’s further answered Agnew’s denials on July 30 and again on

August 2 with full-page advertisements in the New York Times titled “THE

FAMOUS AGNEW MEMO” (see figure 4.3). “Mr. Agnew had thrown down the gauntlet,” the copy declared. “We accept the challenge. We are pleased to submit our credibility against his.”21 The advertisement summarized past and present articles and neatly summarized the magazine’s editorial philosophy: “If we like something, if we think it’s exciting, we’ll run it in SCANLAN’S even if it seems out of place. We think magazine editors who say, ‘this article is great, but it’s not for us,’ are full of it.”22 Zion later wrote that the Times advertisements stimulated a record amount of new subscriptions, while newsstand sales “soared.”23

In its Fall 1970 issue, Columbia Journalism Review criticized Scanlan’s for making “little effort to establish any authenticity for the document; in a news story the editors merely remarked that the item was a source that had never misled them.”24 It then repeated Scanlan’s’ statement submitting its credibility against Agnew’s, but it concluded, “It’s not a choice a reader wants to make on faith alone.”25

The Agnew memorandum did more than prompt Columbia Journalism

Review to reprimand Scanlan’s—by July, it also had attracted the attention of the

20 Warren Weaver Jr., “Mitchell Decries Rumor on ’72 Vote,” New York Times, July 29, 1970. 21 Advertisement, New York Times, July 30, 1970. 22 Ibid. 23 Zion, Read All About It!, 49. 24 “The Incredibles,” Columbia Journalism Review, Fall 1970, 6. 25 Ibid.

White House. John Dean, former White House counsel to Nixon, revealed as much in his 1976 memoir Blind Ambition. On July 24, 1970, his first day of work at the White House, thirty-one-year-old Dean was handed a confidential memorandum with specific instructions: “It was noted that [Scanlan’s’ printing of the memo] was a vicious attack and possibly a suit should be filed or a federal investigation ordered to follow up on it.”26

After consulting with members of the White House staff, Dean learned that the person who used the phrase “vicious attack” was none other than

President Nixon, who had demanded a lawsuit, an FBI investigation, and an apology.27 Dean was “astounded” that Nixon was “so angrily concerned about a funny article in a fledgling magazine.”28 He then sent the president a memorandum on August 4 that warned against a lawsuit or FBI investigation.

After reading it, Nixon wrote instructions to his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob”

Haldeman, directly on Dean’s memorandum: “H—Have I.R.S. conduct a field investigation [on Scanlan’s] on the tax front.”29

Soon after receiving instructions to proceed with an IRS investigation of

Scanlan’s, Dean met with White House aide Murray Chotiner and complained,

“I’m still trying to find the water fountains in this place . . . [and] [t]he President

26 John W. Dean III, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 33. Dean did not respond to inquiries requesting an interview for this thesis. 27 Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: Volume Two: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 374. 28 Dean, Blind Ambition, 33. 29 Ambrose, Nixon: Volume Two, 374. Ambrose accessed the original memorandum by visiting the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, which was then based in Alexandria, Virginia.

66 wants me to turn the IRS loose on a shit-ass magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly.”30

Chotiner told Dean:

‘If the President wants you to turn the IRS loose, then you turn the IRS loose. It’s that simple, John.’

[Dean replied:] ‘I really don’t think it’s necessary, Murray. The President’s already got [Attorney General] Mitchell investigating it. The FBI, I guess.’

[Chotiner said:] ‘I’ll tell you this, if Richard Nixon thinks it’s necessary you’d better think it’s necessary. If you don’t, he’ll find someone who does.’31

Dean then turned to White House staffer John J. Caulfield, who discovered that a tax inquiry on Scanlan’s was fruitless because the magazine was only six months old and had yet to file a tax return. However, Caulfield asked the IRS to look into the tax records of Scanlan’s’ owners. Dean wrote in Blind

Ambition that he had no idea how Caulfield was able to get the IRS to agree to act so easily nor did he discover what became of the IRS inquiry.32

Dean soon learned that the IRS commonly undertook investigations for political reasons upon the request of the White House. In 1973, he submitted to the Senate Watergate Committee an “IRS Talking Paper,” a White House document that suggested that incoming IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters

“must be made to know that discreet political actions and investigations on behalf of the administration are a firm requirement and responsibility on his

30 Dean, Blind Ambition, 34. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 34-35. The author filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the IRS seeking copies of Scanlan’s’ tax returns, but the request was denied on the grounds that it required written authorization of the taxpayer.

67 part.”33 In his testimony before the committee in June 1973, Dean said that after

Newsday, a New York, newspaper, printed an article critical of Nixon’s close friend, C.G. “Bebe” Rebozo, he received “instructions that one of the authors of the article should have some problems” with the IRS.34 Dean then had the IRS subject the article’s author to an income tax audit.35

Later, investigations by the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study

Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (commonly known as the “Church Committee” in reference to committee chairman Frank

Church, an Idaho senator) in 1974 and 1975 determined that the IRS investigated individuals, organizations, and publications at the request of the White House, the CIA, and the FBI. The Church Committee discovered that the IRS investigated magazines such as Ramparts, Playboy, Commonweal, The New York

Review of Books, Washington Monthly, Rolling Stone, and The National Observer.36

Between 1969 and 1973, the IRS, at the behest of the White House and the FBI, monitored tax records and political activities of 3,000 groups and 8,000 individuals.37 Journalists subjected to tax audits during Nixon’s presidency

33 Ibid., 159. 34 James M. Naughton, “A New Challenge: Ex-Counsel Is Firm—Differs on Series of Explanations,” New York Times, June 27, 1973. 35 Ibid. 36 Hearings Before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session, Volume Three: Internal Revenue Service (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 1-30. During these proceedings it was revealed that the CIA requested that the IRS audit Ramparts in 1967 in response to the magazine’s expose on the CIA’s association with the U.S. National Students Association. 37 Ibid., 29.

68 included Robert Greene, William Attwood, Jack Anderson, Jules Witcover, James

Wechsler, Joseph Alsop, and Jimmy Breslin.38

Hearings by the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Senate

Judiciary Committee in 1974 also revealed that the IRS maintained an illegal political investigation and surveillance unit called the Special Service Staff from

1969 through 1973, which was responsible for the collection of “all available information on organizations and individuals promoting extremists’ views or philosophies.”39 The staff investigated general interest magazines, literary magazines, sex publications, and underground newspapers. Each member of the staff was responsible for reviewing magazines and newspapers for relevant articles. The staff used a variety of sources to help it monitor radical publications, including Tupart Monthly Reports on the Underground Press, a left-wing-media- watch publication.40 In the February 16-March 15 1971 issue of Tupart, three of its eight pages were devoted to Scanlan’s’ January 1971 issue, which chronicled incidents of guerilla terrorism and sabotage in the United States. Scanlan’s was

38 See Joseph C. Spear, The Presidents and the Press: The Nixon Legacy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), 160; and Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 95. Former FBI agent and Ramparts and Scanlan’s writer William W. Turner was subjected to an IRS audit over a $35 dispute in the late 1960s. See William W. Turner, Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA, and Other Tails (Granite Bay, Calif.: Penmarin, 2001), 66. 39 Political Intelligence in the Internal Revenue Service: The Special Service Staff: A Documentary Analysis Prepared by the Staff of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-Third Congress, Second Session (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), 1. 40 See Ibid., 1-51 and “Miscellaneous Sources” section; and Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II, 94-96.

69 also referenced in the following issue of Tupart.41 There is little doubt that the IRS

Special Service Staff was aware of Scanlan’s. Had Dean known that the IRS maintained a staff dedicated to politically motivated investigations, he likely would not have been surprised by the IRS’s willingness to look into Scanlan’s on the basis of a telephone call from the White House.

A few days after Caulfield asked the IRS to dig up the tax records of

Scanlan’s’ owners, he gave Dean a Scanlan’s article about U.S.-Mexico drug traffic that he thought would help Nixon prepare for his upcoming meeting with

Mexican President Diaz Ordaz. Dean attached a copy of the article to a memorandum to Nixon. The article never reached the president; a White House staffer removed it, fearing Nixon’s reaction to an article from a magazine he despised. “No one in Haldeman’s office wanted to be responsible for passing along anything from a magazine the President hated so much,” Dean wrote.42

***

Its circulation boosted by the “Famous Agnew Memo” controversy and the New York Times advertisements, Scanlan’s was planning for a long future in the summer and fall of 1970. The magazine was holding its own, and Zion recalled in Read All About It! that it looked as if Scanlan’s was going to make it

“despite our spending habits.”43 That summer, Hinckle had Thompson working on multiple projects, including a review of The Police Chief magazine, a monthly

41 See “Basic Strategy Discernible,” 1-2; and “Digests of Major Topics,” 8. Both articles were in Tupart Monthly Reports on the Underground Press, February 16-March 15 1971. Also see “Observable Trends,” Tupart Monthly Reports on the Underground Press, March 16-April 15 1971, 3. 42 Dean, Blind Ambition, 35. The article was almost certainly “How Life Magazine Paid $5000 for Marijuana Fields in Mexico and Other Tales” from the August issue. 43 Zion, Read All About It!, 45.

70 magazine for police officers, which ran in the September issue. Thompson proposed “a regular monthly weapons feature” written under his Raoul Duke pseudonym, in which he would test different weapons used by law enforcement in each issue. Hinckle also considered sending Thompson and Steadman to

Australia to report on the government-sanctioned kangaroo slaughter.44

In July, Hinckle had also commissioned Thompson to write a series of monthly articles titled “The Thompson-Steadman Report” (Thompson also had suggested the title “Rape-Series on Amerikan Institutions”). Each month, they would visit a traditional American event such as Mardi Gras, New Year’s Eve in

Times Square, Detroit’s Labor Day picnic, the Super Bowl, and the Masters golf tournament.45 Thompson enthusiastically wrote Steadman on July 18, “We could go almost everywhere & turn out a series of articles so weird & frightful as to stagger every mind in journalism. . . . Pure madness . . . on a scale hitherto unknown.”46 Thompson, Steadman, and Hinckle agreed on the subject of the first installment: September’s America’s Cup races in Newport, Rhode Island.

By late July, Thompson had already laid plans to rent a fifty-foot press boat that would be rented out to “selected members of the Freak Press.”47 He hoped to “sail right out in the midst of the Newport fleet, flying the red & black flags of anarchy & revolution, launching mace canisters off the bowsprit & hire

44 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 314. 45 Thompson eventually covered the Super Bowl for Rolling Stone and produced an article titled “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl” for its February 15, 1973, issue. See Ibid., 319-321. 46 Ibid., 320. 47 Ibid., 326.

71 the Grateful Dead to perform on the foredeck.”48 The Grateful Dead did not pan out, but in September, Thompson and Steadman (making his first trip to the

United States since the Kentucky Derby) descended on Newport. Once there,

Thompson fed the seasick Steadman a dose of psilocybin, providing the

Welshman his first-ever hallucinogenic experience. The pilled-up pair hatched a plan to paint “Fuck the Pope” on the side of the Australian boat competing in the race, the Gretel. In the darkness of the night, they rowed a dinghy to the side of the boat. The Gretel’s crew heard the sound of spray paint cans being shaken, and began shouting at the would-be vandals. They managed to row away and get back to their boat, whereupon Thompson told Steadman, “We failed, Ralph. We failed. It’s hopeless. The story’s over. We’re finished.”49 Thompson then fired three emergency flares into the sky, which fell on other boats, starting fires.50

Thompson and Steadman managed to hitch a ride to shore on a passing motor launch. Once they hit shore they immediately grabbed a cab to the local airport, where they chartered a flight to Boston. There, Thompson put the barefooted, gibbering Steadman on a flight to New York before flying home to

Colorado. Unfortunately for Steadman, no one met him in New York, and

48 Ibid. 49 “Fear and Loathing at the America’s Cup: An Interview with Ralph Steadman,” Gadfly Online, June 1998. Accessed on line at www.gadflyonline.com/archive/June98/ archive-steadman.html on May 24, 2005. 50 Steadman has recounted the America’s Cup adventure in at least three publications, and Thompson supplied his own version in the introduction to Steadman’s 1974 collection of drawings, America. See Hunter S. Thompson, “A Conversation on Ralph Steadman and His Book, ‘America,’ with Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” Introduction to Ralph Steadman, America (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974), pages unnumbered; “Fear and Loathing at the America’s Cup: An Interview with Ralph Steadman;” Ralph Steadman, “Hunter S. Thompson RIP: ‘I Would Feel Real Trapped in This Life if I Didn’t Know I Could Commit Suicide at Any Time,’” The Independent (online edition), February 22, 2005 (accessed on line at enjoyment.independent.co.uk/ low_res/story.jsp?story=613513&host=5&dir=497 on April 7, 2005); and “Tales from a Weird & Righteous Life,” Rolling Stone, March 24, 2005, 52-53.

72 lacking shoes and money, he wandered around the city for days until he located an acquaintance, who nursed him back to health until he was capable of flying back to England.51 The Newport saga surely would have been a compelling sequel to the “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” but Thompson never wrote it. It is unclear if Scanlan’s folded before he had the chance to do so, or if it was not written for another reason. The adventure was not a waste, however; Steadman later said the drawings he did for Thompson’s best-selling

1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas were formed from the America’s Cup experience.52

Following the America’s Cup, Thompson began investigating the alleged murder of Los Angeles Times journalist and community activist Ruben Salazar, who was killed by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy on August 29, 1970.

Thompson completed a version of the article that was edited and laid out for

51 In the June 1998 Gadfly Online article, Steadman said Scanlan’s “was going bust” at the time. “It had gone through three quarters of a million dollars of borrowed money in nine months, which doesn’t seem like much now maybe, but it was a hell of a lot then,” he said. The author believes that Steadman’s recollection is incorrect. It is true that Scanlan’s had probably spent most if not all of the $675,000 seed money by September, but based on Zion’s recollections, it had built up enough circulation to survive on an issue-by-issue basis. While Steadman and Thompson were at the America’s Cup, Scanlan’s had not yet sent its eighth issue to press. There is no reason to believe it did not have the money to print and distribute that issue. As it turned out, that issue, which was scheduled to be on newsstands on October 15, was delayed more than three months because U.S.-based printers refused to work on it, Canadian authorities seized most of the press run after it was printed in Quebec, and U.S. Customs officials seized copies in San Francisco. The issue eventually appeared in January 1971. See “Fear and Loathing at the America’s Cup: An Interview with Ralph Steadman.” Like Steadman, Thompson’s recollection of the America’s Cup fiasco was hazy. In the introduction to Steadman’s America, he wrote that when they arrived in Boston, he “called down there [to New York] and found out that Scanlan’s had folded yesterday.” This is impossible, because in September 1970 Scanlan’s was still open for business. He also wrote that when Steadman was in New York, the Scanlan’s office was closed and no one answered the phone, which if true suggests that Steadman tried the office on a weekend. See Thompson, “A Conversation on Ralph Steadman and His Book, ‘America,’ with Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” in Steadman, America, pages unnumbered. 52 See “Tales from a Weird & Righteous Life,” 53.

73 what would have been Scanlan’s’ ninth issue, but that issue was never printed.53

Somehow, Thompson also found the time that fall to run for sheriff of Aspen,

Colorado, under the “Freak Power” ticket; he lost by a narrow margin in the

November election. By then, “The Battle of Aspen: Freak Power in the

Rockies,”—a chronicle of the previous year’s mayoral campaign of Aspen “Freak

Power” candidate Joe Edwards, who also lost by a handful of votes—had been published in the October 1 issue of Rolling Stone, even though Thompson had previously promised the article to Scanlan’s.54 Robert Draper, author of Rolling

Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History, wrote, “Hinckle was enraged that his star journalist would take his story down the street to the office of that wise-ass little twit [Rolling Stone editor and former Sunday Ramparts staffer, Jann Wenner]

Hinckle once employed.”55 “The Battle of Aspen,” “Strange Rumblings in

Aztlan” (a 19,000-word version of the investigation into the alleged murder of

Salazar), and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”—articles that all employed the journalist-as-participant style that Thompson first attempted in Scanlan’s— appeared in Rolling Stone in 1970 and 1971.56 As Rolling Stone editor Paul Scanlon put it, “He was too much of a nonconformist and a misfit for any magazine besides us and Scanlan’s, and they were out of business.”57 If Scanlan’s had

53 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 359, 362. 54 See Paul Perry, Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), 135. 55 Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 211. 56 See “The Battle of Aspen: Freak Power in the Rockies,” October 1, 1970, 30-37; “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” April 29, 1971, 30-37; and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” November 11, 1971, 36-48 and November 25, 1971, 38-50. All of the articles were written by Hunter S. Thompson and published in Rolling Stone. 57 Perry, Fear and Loathing, 169.

74 continued publishing in 1970 and 1971, “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” and perhaps “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” would have been published in

Scanlan’s, not Rolling Stone.

Chapter Five

Guerilla Warfare in the U.S.A. (and Canada)

In September, Scanlan’s created even more work for John Dean when that month’s issue led off with an editorial, “Nixon and the Bums” (see figure 5.1). It featured a photograph of President Nixon in a May 1970 “hardhat luncheon” with four New York construction union leaders and accused the bosses of various crimes and indiscretions, including extortion, racketeering, and running a nearly all-white union. The editorial summarized the character of the meeting’s attendees: “In sum, the most extraordinary bunch of bums, gougers and defrauders of the poor ever to gather under one roof.”1 Scanlan’s then ran a full- page advertisement in the September 15 and 20 editions of the New York Times titled “The Great White House Tea Party,” which re-printed the photograph of

Nixon and the union leaders and summarized the editorial (see figure 5.2). It also invited readers to purchase the September issue to learn more and, like “The

Famous Agnew Memo” advertisements, included a summary of contents from previous issues. Finally, it repeated the “You Trust Your Mother” motto, underneath which the copy declared, “In seven months we’ve cut the cards on a lot of mothers.”2

The “Nixon and the Bums” editorial had a definite impact. Dean was asked to have the FBI check into Scanlan’s’ charges, and the FBI confirmed that the labor leaders with whom Nixon had met in May were indeed “shady

1 “Nixon and the Bums. An Editorial,” Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970, 3. 2 Advertisement, New York Times, September 15, 1970.

77 characters.”3 On September 8, eighty-five labor leaders and their wives dined with the president at the White House, but only one of the union bosses from the

May meeting was invited. “Part of the reason for trimming the New York list,”

New York Times reporter Christopher Lydon wrote, “may have been the revelation in Scanlan’s magazine that a handful of the President’s springtime guests had criminal records and/or close criminal associations.”4

Hinckle and Zion decided not to run “Nixon and the Bums” on the

September issue’s cover and instead featured four cover stories, each represented with a concise headline above a small photograph (see figure 5.3). As a result, the cover fell far short of matching the visual impact of August’s Robert Crumb- illustrated effort, despite the fact that one of the photographs showed a naked female, a member of a New Mexico commune. That story, Jon Stewart’s

“Splitting Apart and Holding Together in New Mexico,” examined the commune’s problems, which included harassment from police and beatings from local Chicanos. The article was accompanied with beautiful color and black-and- white photographs of the commune’s members. Hinckle supplied one of the other cover stories, “The Law Firm That Runs California,” that reported on the power yielded by a Los Angeles firm, O’Melveny and Myers, which represented

President Nixon, California Governor Ronald Reagan, and two current and one former U.S. senators. The remaining cover stories comprised Jerry Kamstra’s exciting first-person account of being aboard a fishing boat chasing down a

3 John W. Dean III, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 36. 4 Christopher Lydon, “Administration Is Stressing Political Loyalty for Jobs,” New York Times, September 9, 1970.

Russian boat illegally fishing off the California coast, complete with dramatic photographs; and excerpts from former Polish Communist Party member K.S.

Karol’s book on Cuba, Guerillas in Power.5

Elihu Blotnick contributed “Check One: Syracuse University Does ( )

Does Not ( ) Give a B.S. in Guinea Pigs,” which was the story of a former

Syracuse student who worked as a guinea pig for Bristol Labs and other drug companies as an undergraduate. The student told of horrific effects of the tests, including the loss of twenty-six pounds in two days. Since his student days he had developed horrible health problems, and his son was born allergic to proteins. The article was accompanied by gruesome but effective illustrations of emaciated and hairless bodies, as well as gigantic syringes.6

In an article surely of great interest to the Ireland-obsessed Hinckle,

Russell Stetler wrote about the use of CS gas—a highly potent tear gas—by

British troops against Catholics in Derry, Northern Ireland. His investigation found that more than 4,000 canisters of the gas were fired into the Catholic

Bogside neighborhood over a forty-hour period. “The British have historically never been loath to try things out on the Irish,” he wrote.7 The problems in Derry received international attention a year and a half later when thirteen unarmed

5 See Jon Stewart, “Splitting Apart and Holding Together in New Mexico,” 23-33; Warren Hinckle, “The Law Firm That Runs California,” 48-52; Jerry Kamstra, “Captain Garbage and The Fishing Ship Havana Chase the Russians at Sea,” 34-43; and K.S. Karol, “The Two Honeymoons of Fidel Castro,” 4-17. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970. 6 Elihu Blotnick, “Check One: Syracuse University Does ( ) Does Not ( ) Give a B.S. in Guinea Pigs,” Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970, 18-22. 7 Russell Stetler, “Gassing the Irish: The Many Uses of CS-Gas in Derry,” Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970, 58.

Derry Catholics were killed by British troops on January 30, 1972, in what became known as Bloody Sunday.

“Politics and Reportage” was rounded out by Bill Surface’s look at cock fighting in the U.S., while “What Obtains?” included Joseph Kahn’s final installment of the “Dirty Kitchens” series. He complained of a “conspiracy” of

New York City restaurant owners, who had begun refusing him entry into their kitchens. Kahn’s editorial was followed by a review of a collection of essays by

Irving Howe, the noted literary critic and founding editor of Dissent magazine, and Kamstra’s review of an anthology of poems by Allen Ginsberg.8

Thompson contributed under his soon-to-be-famous pseudonym Raoul

Duke. A self-described “master of weaponry” and a “respected law enforcement official for 20 years,” he reviewed an issue of Police Chief, a magazine for law enforcement professionals.9 The author’s true identity was revealed in the author’s biography following the article, which read, “Raoul Duke is a well- known weapons advisor and consultant to Hunter S. Thompson, candidate for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado.”10 The article included advertisements from Police

Chief, and the issue’s back cover was devoted to a Police Chief advertisement for a gas gun and kit that promised to be “your best riot insurance” (see figure 5.4).11

***

8 Bill Surface, “Cock Fights in America,” 44-47; Joseph Kahn, “The Dirty Kitchen Conspiracy,” 67-69; Jonah Raskin, “The Irving Howe Times Book Review Axis Welcomes John Leonard,” 70-72; and Jerry Kamstra, “One Long Tactile Embrace of Mother India,” 72-73. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970. 9 Raoul Duke, “The Police Chief—The Indispensable Magazine of Law Enforcement,” Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970, 64, 66. 10 Ibid., 66. 11 Advertisement, Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970, back cover.

If September’s “What Obtains?” section seemed skimpy to readers, it may have been because Hinckle and Zion were already hard at work on its next issue, which was devoted entirely to “Guerilla Warfare in the U.S.A.”12 According to

Zion, the issue “was Hinckle’s baby, and the core idea was to document acts of sabotage and terrorism in the country going back to 1965.”13 It included a twenty- eight-page section of charts and maps that documented approximately 1,500 incidents of bombings, sabotage, and terrorism in the United States during the previous five years. The issue also featured an “Aspen Wall Poster” supplied by

Thompson, which was a doctored Time magazine cover with an illustration of

Nixon, blood pouring out of his mouth. Most controversial was the “What

Guerillas Read” section, which comprised American “guerilla propaganda” from extreme right-wing and left-wing groups and included instructions for the construction of a bomb from a Colorado-based right-wing periodical.14 In 1980,

Hinckle recalled the philosophy behind the special issue:

This was at the time when Nixon was publicly taking the position that there was no bombings. And this was when the whole

12 It is unclear if the “Guerilla Warfare in the U.S.A.” special issue was intended as the October 1970 or November 1970 issue. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 5 that it was the November issue, and it was scheduled for October 15 sales under the original agreement with Barnes Press. The New York Times also reported that the issue was originally dated November, while Publisher’s Weekly reported that it was to be the October issue. Since the issue was a special issue and required extensive preparation, Scanlan’s may have opted to skip the October issue and release the Guerilla Warfare issue on October 15 as its November 1970 issue. When Hinckle edited Ramparts, the magazine often delayed printing an issue to include a last-minute article and even skipped regularly scheduled issues to deliver special issues. See William R. Galeota, “Censors in the Shop: Some Printers Refuse Controversial Copy,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 1970; “Police in Montreal Seize a Monthly,” New York Times, December 12, 1970,” and “ACLU Joins Scanlan’s In Dispute With Printer,” Publisher’s Weekly, November 2, 1970, 29. 13 Sidney Zion, Read All About It!: The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter (New York: Summit Books, 1982), 46. 14 See “Guerilla Acts of Sabotage and Terrorism in the U.S., 1965-1970,” 24-47; “Guerilla Attacks in the United States, 1965-1970,” 48-51; Hunter S. Thompson, “The Aspen Wallposter,” 96-97; and “What Guerillas Read,” 62-69. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, January 1971.

country was being bombed around 1969 and 1970. So we set out to show that, for whatever reason, the government was lying about this, and, in fact, there was very close to a wave of revolutionary activity going on in the U.S.15

The staff spent six months preparing the issue, but it was another three months before that hard work appeared as a newsstand magazine.16 In the interim, Scanlan’s was forced to flee to Canada after U.S.-based printing unions boycotted the issue. As the editors soon learned, Canadian authorities were no more tolerant of the issue than were the printing unions, nor were U.S. Customs agents who seized copies of the issues when they arrived from Canada.

Eventually Scanlan’s managed to distribute a very limited press run of the issue, but it came at a high cost: the death of one of its editors, the dissolution of

Hinckle’s and Zion’s friendship, and bankruptcy.

Scanlan’s had reached an agreement in September with Barnes Press, a

New York City company that it was contracting with for the first time, to print

150,000 copies of the issue for $31,000.17 On October 1 or 2,18 members of the

Amalgamated Lithographers of America, which handled lithographing duties at

Barnes, refused to process the magazine on the grounds it was “un-American” and “extremely radical.”19 In particular, the lithographers objected to the “What

Guerillas Read” section. Zion quickly organized a press conference in the

15 Michael Goldberg, “Hinckle Tells All,” Boulevards, 1980 (issue unknown), 17. 16 See Paul L. Montgomery, “A Scanlan’s Issue Delayed By Union,” New York Times, October 3, 1970; and Zion, Read All About It!, 46. 17 See Montgomery, “A Scanlan’s Issue Delayed By Union;” and “Scanlan’s Sues Union and Barnes Press Inc. in Printing Dispute,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 1970. Montgomery reported that Scanlan’s parted ways with its previous California-based printing company over deadline disputes. 18 The Wall Street Journal reported the date was October 1, and the New York Times said it was October 2. See “Scanlan’s Sues Union and Barnes Press Inc. in Printing Dispute;” and Montgomery, “A Scanlan’s Issue Delayed By Union.” 19 Montgomery, “A Scanlan’s Issue Delayed By Union.”

82 magazine’s New York office on October 2 and told reporters that the lithographers’ actions were “paranoid” and were violating the First Amendment.

“The assertion they make is so brazen—that they have the right to say what’s printed in this country,” he said.20 On the same day, Barnes offered to print the issue after it said it had reached an agreement with the president of the printing union. However, Scanlan’s declined the offer because, according to Zion, the financial terms were not the same as those agreed upon before the dispute. A

Barnes executive said that Zion had refused to make a down payment of $10,000 toward the printing bill.21

Scanlan’s then filed suit in federal court against Barnes and the union on

October 5, demanding that it print the issue under the original terms of the contract and seeking $1,250,000 in damages.22 It also searched for another printer and found a San Francisco-based press that agreed to handle the issue. Yet when

Scanlan’s sent a $10,000 check to the company as a binder, it was returned without explanation. Later that month, Scanlan’s reached an agreement with

Medallion Printers and Lithographers of Los Angeles to print the guerilla warfare issue and future issues. However, president Larry Narry of Medallion telephoned Tom Humber, managing editor of Scanlan’s in New York, to inform him that he could not print the issue because union workers at the plant had

20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 “Scanlan’s Sues Union and Barnes Press Inc. in Printing Dispute.”

83 called the issue’s content “un-American” and threatened to sabotage it if forced to work on it.23

At yet another New York press conference, Zion told reporters on October

22 that the American Civil Liberties Union would join Scanlan’s in a suit against

Medallion. He also revealed that San Francisco police had told a Scanlan’s contributing editor, Earl Shorris, that the magazine would never again receive press credentials if the guerilla warfare issue was printed with illustrations of how to make bombs.24 Meanwhile, lithographers employed by three printing companies in Colorado and one in Missouri refused to work on the issue, while

Hinckle had no luck convincing a Texas printer to produce the issue.25 According to Publisher’s Weekly, “dozens” of printing companies refused to work on the issue, either because they objected to its contents or feared its employees would sabotage it if forced to work on it.26 In November, Scanlan’s finally found a printer, albeit one in another country: Payette-Simms Co. Ltd. of St. Johns,

Quebec, about thirty miles south of Montreal.

In Read All About It!, Zion wrote that word had spread that the magazine was broke, so printers, binders, and distributors were demanding cash up front.

“[I]n order to quell the rumors,” he wrote, “we were compelled to keep our staff

23 “ACLU Joins Scanlan’s In Dispute With Printer,” 29. 24 Ibid. 25 See Zion, Read All About It!, 46-47; and “ACLU Joins Scanlan’s In Dispute With Printer,” 29. 26 “Controversial ‘Scanlan’s’ Issue May Yet Appear,” Publisher’s Weekly, December 28, 1970, 35. Zion told the Wall Street Journal in December that “50 to 60” printing companies turned down the magazine. See Galeota, “Censors in the Shop: Some Printers Refuse Controversial Copy.”

84 on payroll. Catch-22.”27 Time and Newsweek reported in January 1971 that several printers claimed they had refused to print the issue because of uncertainty about

Scanlan’s’ financial status, not because of its contents.28 However, Time also said that a business information service, Dun & Bradstreet, said the magazine’s net worth was $497,976.29 In late October, Humber had told Publisher’s Weekly that by the end of October the delays had cost the magazine $100,000 at a minimum, while unnamed “colleagues” at Scanlan’s (probably Zion and/or Hinckle) estimated the delay had cost as much as $500,000.30

Humber and the rest of the Scanlan’s staff were not the only persons beset by financial worries. The IRS had demanded that Thompson produce $2,200 in back taxes by November 28, and he was anxious to collect the $5,290 Scanlan’s owed him for past assignments and expenses. On November 22, he telephoned

Hinckle and demanded at least a portion of the money, and was told that

Scanlan’s would be able to pay up once “the current issue comes across the border from Quebec in a fleet of black trucks.”31 “In other words,” Thompson wrote Random House editor Jim Silberman on the next day, “my ability to pay the IRS depends on Hinckle’s ability to smuggle 100,000 sabotage-bomb manuals past U.S. Customs in huge trucks. . . . I’ve seen that issue . . . and I know Nixon won’t want it let loose in the U.S.”32 Two days later, he wrote Tom Wolfe about

27 Zion, Read All About It!, 47. 28 See “Censorship, North and South,” Time, January 4, 1971, 43; and Anthony Wolff, “Scanlan’s Bomb,” Newsweek, January 25, 1971, 61. 29 “Censorship, North and South,”43. 30 “ACLU Joins Scanlan’s In Dispute With Printer,” 29. 31 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 332. 32 Ibid.

Scanlan’s problems and once again predicted the issues would be seized: “[I]f the whole shipment is seized at customs—which it certainly will be—then Scanlan’s is doomed and croaked. And I think that’s a foregone conclusion.”33

Thompson’s premonitions came true. On December 10, U.S. Customs agents knocked on Hinckle’s door at 2 p.m., demanding all copies of the issue in his possession. Since the agents lacked a court order, he told them to leave. On the same day, 6,000 copies of what was now the January 1971 issue were seized by customs agents in distributors’ warehouses in San Francisco and Oakland, although it had been cleared by customs when it had arrived by airplane from

Quebec four days earlier.34 A few hours after agents visited Hinckle, the

Department of Justice “suggested” that customs officials return the magazines, and the issues were duly returned to the warehouses.35

As the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, the government appeared to have a

“somewhat schizophrenic attitude” toward the controversial issue.36 “The

Government,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Sloan said, “sort of stepped in and stepped out.”37 He said that after the magazines were approved by customs on

December 7, “somebody” in Washington, D.C., read the issue and asked customs agents to seize it. That “somebody,” Edwin F. Rains, assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Customs, said, “did not have sufficient position and authority.”38 In

33 Ibid., 338. 34 See George Draper, “A Curious Episode at Scanlan’s,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 1970; and “U.S. Seizes and Then Releases 6,000 Copies of a Magazine With Article on How to Make Bombs,” New York Times, December 11, 1970. 35 Draper, “A Curious Episode at Scanlan’s.” 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.

86 the following week, he called the incident “an unfortunate episode” and a

“mistake.”39 William Lim, acting district director of U.S. Customs, told the

Chronicle a somewhat different story. He said that the original clearance on

December 7 was done mistakenly, and the seizure on December 10 was undertaken to correct that error. He confirmed that the seized copies would be returned. “It’s true,” he said. “But don’t ask me why.”40

A bemused Hinckle called the episode “pretty goddamn outrageous” and said, “The Customs people are becoming Keystone Kops.”41 He would soon have reason to be similarly dismayed by the actions of Canadian authorities. On the same day he had been visited by customs agents, the Montreal police department’s “morality squad” began seizing copies of Scanlan’s. In a series of four raids on December 10 and 11, police took between 75,000 and 80,000 copies of the issue at a bindery warehouse while another 22,000 copies were seized from a truck en route to the United States. The copies seized represented the entire press run of the issue, except for the 6,000 that had arrived in California.42

Like the “schizophrenic” U.S. authorities, Canadian officials originally gave the issue their approval and then changed their minds. On December 1,

Montreal police, Quebec provincial police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted

Police inspected the issue at a Montreal bindery hired by Scanlan’s to finish the issues printed by Payette-Simms. Under the War Measures Act, a controversial

39 Tony Burman, “Scanlan’s Charges Studied,” Montreal Star, December 15, 1970. 40 Draper, “A Curious Episode at Scanlan’s.” 41 Ibid. 42 See “Montreal Police Seize Scanlan’s ‘Guerilla’ Issue,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 12, 1970; “Police in Montreal Seize a Monthly;” and Tony Burman, “Police Seize U.S. Magazine,” Montreal Star, December 12, 1970. The Chronicle and Times reported that 80,000 issues were seized from the warehouse; the Star reported the number was 75,000.

87 law designed to combat Quebec separatist terrorist activity, police had the power to seize a publication believed to be subversive. Following the inspection, a

Mounties spokesperson said the issue did not violate the War Measures Act, and no action was planned. Less than a day later, the bindery decided it would not work on the issue after all, and Scanlan’s was forced to hire yet another bindery in St. Leonard, Quebec.43

Montreal police said the December 10 and 11 seizures were made on the orders of the Montreal Anti-Terrorist Squad, which comprised representatives from the same three law enforcement bodies that had visited the Montreal bindery on December 1. This group, the Chronicle reported, “was acting on information from undisclosed U.S. sources, believed to be the FBI.”44 Canadian officials refused to explain why the seizures had been made or why 6,000 copies had been allowed to leave the country. The Chronicle called the Canadian officials

“close-mouthed” and declared “the much-feared” issue had become “even more of an orphan in the storm.”45 Jacques Payette, president of Payette-Simms, said the police told him that it was being seized because it lacked a permit. “But I think this was just an excuse,” he said.46

A furious Zion told the New York Times and the Montreal Star that the seizures were made in “collusion” between the Montreal police and the United

43 See Burman, “Police Seize U.S. Magazine;” “Montreal Police Seize Scanlan’s ‘Guerilla’ Issue;” and Tony Burman, “’Unexpected Welcome’ Given Scanlan’s Since Quebec Move,” Montreal Star, December 18, 1970. 44 “Montreal Police Seize Scanlan’s ‘Guerilla’ Issue.” 45 Ibid. 46 Burman, “Police Seize U.S. Magazine.”

States government.”47 “It’s an attempt to kill the magazine completely,” he

“angrily” told the Star.48 Inspector Guy Toupin, head of the Montreal police’s west division morality force, suggested that there was indeed collusion with U.S. authorities in an interview with the Canadian Broadcast Service on December 11.

He said there had been a “great deal of co-operation” between Montreal police and U.S. authorities, although he later described it as “communication.”49 U.S.

Customs officials, however, denied any communication with Montreal police.50

Toupin told the Star that the magazine might be considered seditious, “but we’re not sure yet.”51

On December 17, while Montreal police continued to hold the issues,

Quebec’s deputy-minister of justice, Antonio Dubé, instructed Benjamin News

Reg’d, Scanlan’s’ Montreal distributors, not to place the magazine on newsstands in the province. The distributor’s president told the Star that he had asked the justice department for advice and decided he would no longer handle the magazine.52 On the same day, Andre Ledoux, a legal adviser to Montreal police, said the issue was not seditious, and the magazine would only be charged with failure to officially register in Quebec. The fine for this transgression was $20, but

47 See “Police in Montreal Seize a Monthly;” and Burman, “Police Seize U.S. Magazine.” 48 Burman, “Police Seize U.S. Magazine.” 49 Burman, “‘Unexpected Welcome’ Given Scanlan’s Since Quebec Move.” In Read All About It!, Zion wrote, “[Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] radio asked the chief of police of Montreal why. He said, ‘The United States Government asked us to stop it.’” The author has not been able to verify the quote. See Zion, Read All About It!, 47. 50 Burman, “‘Unexpected Welcome’ Given Scanlan’s Since Quebec Move.” 51 Burman, “Police Seize U.S. Magazine.” 52 Tony Burman, “Quebec Slaps Ban on Scanlan’s,” Montreal Star, December 18, 1970.

Ledoux said the issues would not be released until Scanlan’s registered the magazine and its representatives appeared in court.53

One week after the seizures, Inspector Toupin had changed his tune and now maintained that the seizures were “done on our own, at no one’s urging except for our legal department.”54 Tony Burman, who covered the Scanlan’s story extensively in the Star, analyzed the explanations of Canadian officials and the

“collusion” accusations made by Zion in a “news analysis story” in the newspaper’s December 18 edition. He wrote that the timing of the incident—the seizures occurred on the same day as the U.S. Customs seizures in San

Francisco—“tend[s] to bear out” Zion’s charge that that there had been collusion between U.S. and Canadian officials.55 What was also odd, Burman wrote, was that Montreal police had exceeded their jurisdiction: St. Leonard, where the

80,000 issues had been seized, was outside the Montreal city limits, as was the truck that was stopped short of the U.S. border. In fact, only 2,000 issues were seized within Montreal’s city limits.56

On the same day Burman wrote his analysis, the Star’s editorial department printed an editorial, “Scanlan’s: An Act of Suppression.” It insisted that the guerilla warfare issue performed a “useful public service” and added that if the magazine was charged with simply lacking a proper permit, “it was a minor offence, entailing a $20 fine and hardly requiring the mysterious air with

53 Ibid. 54 Burman, “‘Unexpected Welcome’ Given Scanlan’s Since Quebec Move.” 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

90 which local authorities have surrounded it.”57 The editorial backed Zion, who was quoted: “Your people are doing the dirty work for our people.”58 Zion, the Star wrote, “makes a strong case in saying that Canadian authorities are helping

American authorities suppress an embarrassing article they would have difficulty suppressing any other way.”59

The Star’s competition, the Montreal Gazette, had barely covered the

Scanlan’s saga, but in its December 18 edition Quebec Justice Minister Jerome

Choquette frankly admitted that he had personally ordered the province’s justice department to investigate the magazine after complaints from the United States.

“That magazine is full of urban guerilla warfare,” he said, before sitting down to a bowl of pea soup in the parliamentary restaurant.60

The bizarre situation grew even stranger within days. On December 20,

Deputy-Minister of Justice Dubé died of heart failure in his Quebec City home.

Two days later, Israel “Izzy” Schwartzberg, a former convict, a Scanlan’s’ contributing editor, and now the magazine’s lawyer, was found dead in his hotel room in Montreal, also a victim of heart failure. He had arrived in Montreal on

December 18 to fight for the release of the issues. Zion eulogized him in the Star by calling him “New York’s legendary jailhouse lawyer” and a “legal genius who had gone straight.”61

Finally, on December 26, Justice Paul-Emile Champagne ordered the issues released after Montreal police representatives confirmed that Scanlan’s had

57 “Scanlan’s: An Act of Suppression,” Montreal Star, December 18, 1970. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 “Magazine Seized on Choquette’s Order,” Montreal Gazette, December 18, 1970. 61 Tony Burman, “Scanlan’s Copies May Be Out Today,” Montreal Star, December 23, 1970.

91 met registration requirements.62 Montreal police had held the issues for sixteen days, all because Scanlan’s lacked proper registration. The trucks containing the issues soon arrived safely in New York, but not all the issues made it intact.

“When we opened them,” Hinckle recalled in 1980, “it was like a swimming pool inside. Somebody had flooded the trucks so all the magazines were ruined.”63

Getting the undamaged issues onto U.S. newsstands was no easy task. The magazine’s national distributor had dropped the magazine, and news dealers in about thirty cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, refused to stock it.64 Zion later claimed that he spoke with anonymous news dealers who said “government officials” had visited them and said that selling

Scanlan’s was not good for the country or for the news dealer.65

Scanlan’s managed to organize a makeshift distribution scheme of undamaged copies of the magazine but only in some parts of the country. The

6,000 copies that had been returned by customs agents in San Francisco and

Oakland had been scheduled to be distributed by Golden Gate Magazine Co., which reportedly demanded that Hinckle produce a bond as a down payment.

He decided instead to contract with Lew Swift, an underground publications

62 “Scanlan’s Issue Given Clearance,” Montreal Gazette, December 26, 1970. 63 Michael Goldberg, “Hinckle Tells All,” Boulevards, 1980 (issue unknown), 17. Hinckle also told Goldberg that 20,000 copies were printed at a “sympathetic” San Francisco press. Zion did not mention this or the flooded trucks story in Read All About It! 64 Zion, Read All About It!, 47. Zion also wrote that the distributor refused to release $35,000 it owed Scanlan’s. 65 Ibid., 47-48. Also see Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Dean’s Book Says Nixon Proposed Tax Inquiry of Scanlan’s Magazine,” New York Times, October 20, 1976.

92 distributor, to get the issue on newsstands in San Francisco, Oakland, and

Berkeley.66

The January 1971 issue of Scanlan’s, printed on cheap butcher paper because of the delays, finally hit newsstands on January 14. The cover declared in stark, bold print: “SUPPRESSED ISSUE: GUERILLA WAR IN THE U.S.A.” (see figure 5.5). On page one, under a headline reading “WE’VE MOVED TO

CANADA,” Scanlan’s explained why it had “fled” the United States (see figure

5.6):

[Canada’s] atmosphere is eminently more conducive to the publication of Scanlan’s than the hardhat state of America. Here, printing plants in states from coast to coast knuckled under to sabotage and other blackmail rather than print Scanlan’s. . . .

This issue tells the raw truth of what is going on in this country. Some ruffian printers decided they didn’t want the truth printed. They bullied the plant’s owners into breaking their contract with Scanlan’s. The threats were hardly veiled: sabotage was the alternative. . . .

Subsequently, Scanlan’s has been turned down by other large printers in Colorado and Missouri. Their reason: the lithographer’s union had “put the word out on Scanlan’s.” Any printer who had tried to print the magazine in America clearly would have had trouble.67

The editorial also asked readers to tell friends, newspapers, radio stations, and congressmen about the situation, and it pleaded for new subscriptions.68 A cut-

66 “Montreal Police Seize Scanlan’s ‘Guerilla’ Issue.” The issue was also printed in book form by Pocket Books, whose printer declined to print the book until Pocket edited out the material on homemade bombs. A Pocket Books spokesperson denied that the printer was acting as a censor, and claimed Pocket Books would have edited out the section on homemade bombs regardless. “We would not print a Boy Scouts handbook on how to blow things up,” the spokesperson said. See “U.S. Seizes and Then Releases 6,000 Copies of a Magazine With Article on How to Make Bombs.” 67 “We’ve Moved to Canada,” Scanlan’s Monthly, January 1971, 1. 68 Ibid.

93 out coupon for new subscribers read: “Gentlemen, I understand that the political intransigence of American printers has forced you to print in exile. I will become a subscriber in exile . . . [and] [i]f any of the copies are unduly held up in transit by U.S. Customs, I will raise proper hell with the American government.”69

Scanlan’s’ new address was listed as 470 Boulevard Du Seminaire, St. Jean,

Quebec.70

Scanlan’s’ special issue was prefaced with a twelve-page editorial written by Hinckle explaining why the issue was delayed and why it was published:

It is quite the job of the press to tell people what is going on—especially when the government won’t or can’t. If the necessarily relentless documentation of the machinery of terror loose in this country scares the hell out of some people, we don’t apologize. . . .

To understand guerilla war is not to endorse it; not to understand it is to make it inevitable.71

He went on to provide a short history of various guerilla movements and explain the methodology of the research. The preface was followed by an interview with an anonymous member of the radical left-wing organization, the Weather

Underground; a first-person “tactical description” of the July 28, 1970, bombing of Armed Forces Headquarters in San Francisco; and an interview with a student who took part in the burning down of a branch of the Bank of America in Isla

Vista, California, on February 25, 1970.72 These first-person accounts were

69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Warren Hinckle, “An Editorial Preface,” Scanlan’s Monthly, January 1971, 4. 72 See Ibid.; “December 1969: Weatherman Goes Underground,” 13-15; “A Bomber’s Tactical Description of the Attack on a Military Installation,” 16-19; and “The Student Who Burned Down the Bank of America,” 20-23. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, January 1971.

94 followed by the twenty-nine page “Guerilla Attacks of Sabotage and Terrorism in the U.S., 1965-1970,” a chronological listing of guerilla activities that used agate type, maps, and symbols to represent the guerillas’ targets and the weapons used.73

The issue also included the now-infamous “What Guerillas Read” section, which had diagrams from guerilla publications showing how to make a Molotov cocktail, a pocket incendiary bomb, and a “Bangalore torpedo.”74 The second half of the issue also included a look at guerillas serving in the military; interviews with a member of the underground White Panther organization, a Catholic priest who used napalm to destroy draft records at a Maryland Selective Service Office, and Georgia Jackson, the widow of slain prison activist George Jackson; excerpts from a speech by Black Panther Huey Newton; and more interviews with various guerillas about bombings and street fighting.75

The issue concluded with “The Future for Guerillas,” in which Zion and

Hinckle wrote opposing editorials on the subject. Although he agreed that U.S. society needed reform, Zion flatly rejected guerilla actions. “Since I see no need for the bomb, nor any possibility of it succeeding, nor any hope in its purchasing a better world even if it did succeed, it follows that I must oppose it and surely

Rick Beban wrote about the destruction of the Isla Vista Bank of America branch in the June issue of Scanlan’s. See Chapter 3. 73 See “Guerilla Acts of Sabotage and Terrorism in the U.S., 1965-1970,” 24-47; and “Guerilla Attacks in the United States, 1965-1970,” 48-51. 74 “What Guerillas Read,” 62-69. 75 See “Guerillas in the Military,” 54-61; “Captured: A White Panther,” and “Captured: An Underground Priest,” 70-73; “Georgia Jackson Interviewed,” 79-81; and “Interviews with Guerillas,” 87-93. All articles were in Scanlan’s Monthly, January 1971.

95 cannot endorse it. . . . Let ‘em eat dynamite.”76 Hinckle, on the other hand, believed that violence was a natural consequence of a such a corrupt system.

“The only way to bombproof this society is to reform the system,” he wrote. “The alternatives are repression or revolution, and probably both, and not necessarily in that order. As for guerillas? Personally, I think the ones I’ve met are all right, and I refuse to beat them up.”77 Finally, the issue was rounded out by

Thompson’s “bleeding Nixon” wallposter and perversely, an advertisement for a sheet-music book titled “Great Songs of the Sixties” on the back cover.78

***

While Scanlan’s’ disastrous Canadian experience was not front-page news in U.S. newspapers, Columbia Journalism Review, the New York Times, and

Publisher’s Weekly wrote editorials supporting Scanlan’s’ anti-censorship position.

A January 4, 1971, Publisher’s Weekly editorial read: “[W]hat is involved in the

Scanlan’s case is censorship not on moral but on political grounds. . . . If a publisher can be systematically denied access to the means of communication, freedom of the press is destroyed.”79 The New York Times said on February 24,

1971:

It is particularly disconcerting that the publication of controversial articles has in recent months been increasingly challenged, delayed or blocked by printers who considered such materials offensive to their own political or moral views and values. The publishers of Scanlan’s Monthly, an iconoclastic magazine, have complained of a succession of such skirmishes. . . .

76 Sidney Zion, “The Future for Guerillas,” Scanlan’s Monthly, January 1971, 94. 77 Warren Hinckle, “The Future for Guerillas,” Scanlan’s Monthly, January 1971, 95. 78 Two Scandinavian artists reproduced an edition of the guerilla warfare issue in the early 2000s. See Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, “Between the Lines,” Apexart, March 15-April 12, 2003. Accessed on line at www.apexart.org/exhibitions/nesbitt.htm on May 27, 2005. 79 “The Printer as Censor,” Publisher’s Weekly, January 4, 1971, 37.

The implications of censorship by printers are particularly serious. The ultimate danger is that freedom of the press, and of the printed word in general, might be controlled and shut off at the very source.80

While many publications discussed Scanlan’s’ victimization, only one mainstream publication actually reviewed Volume One Number Eight. Anthony

Wolff wrote on January 25, 1971, in Newsweek that readers “whetted by the publicized delay may be disappointed.”81 He criticized the “Guerilla Attacks in the United States” section, which he deemed a “dry tabulation of events from bombings of Selective Service centers to more ambiguous acts of vandalism that

Scanlan’s sometimes generously interprets as in the guerilla spirit.”82 He also slammed Hinckle’s “Future for Guerillas” editorial, writing that he “finds intellectual safety in a nice distinction between good bombings and bad bombings.”83

For all of the press coverage and support Scanlan’s received as it was battling to get its eighth issue printed, when the issue finally appeared the press apparently lost interest. The issue’s limited distribution also may have contributed to the lack of buzz. As the Montreal Star wrote in December, “The longer the delay, it is obvious, the staler the story becomes.”84 Unfortunately for

Scanlan’s, it did not have any money left to tell a fresher story. The guerilla warfare issue was its last.

80 “Censors at the Source,” New York Times, February 24, 1971. Also see “Censoring ‘Scanlan’s,’” Columbia Journalism Review, Winter 1970-71, 5. 81 Wolff, “Scanlan’s Bomb.” 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 “Scanlan’s: An Act of Suppression.”

100

Chapter Six

Farewell to Scanlan’s

The “Guerilla Warfare in the U.S.A.” debacle left Scanlan’s in a perilous state. The delays cost more than three months of newsstand sales and new subscriptions, too much to bear for a magazine that relied solely on income from those sources. The financial success of future issues was doubtful because

Scanlan’s had been dropped by its national distributor, and it was uncertain if a

U.S.-based printer would handle the magazine. “Once we were wiped off the newsstands,” Zion later wrote, “it was obvious we were finished.”1

Hinckle, however, had other ideas. He wanted to continue operating and move the magazine’s offices to San Francisco. “Warren . . . kept spending money out on the coast and talked and acted as if we were merely in a temporarily embarrassed financial condition,” Zion remembered. “‘I’ve been in bigger trouble before,’ he’d say. ‘We can keep going, no trouble.’”2 In the early days of

1971, Hinckle and his lawyer, John G. Clancy, would meet in Cookie’s bar,

“where among policemen and politicians, we formulated battle plans” to keep the magazine running, Clancy recalled in a 1981 Harper’s article.3

He accompanied Hinckle to New York for a “decisive” board meeting, and when they arrived at Scanlan’s’ offices on West 44th Street, they found it was already in progress. The Scanlan’s board, which was in favor of declaring

1 Sidney Zion, Read All About It!: The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter (New York: Summit Books, 1982), 48. 2 Ibid. 3 John G. Clancy, “Room Service,” Harper’s, April 1981, 107.

101 bankruptcy, had hired a lawyer who had represented Julius and Ethel

Rosenberg, the husband and wife who were executed in 1953 for spying for the

Soviet Union. Hinckle and Clancy learned that while they were en route from the airport, the board had convicted Hinckle of “fiscal irresponsibility” and stripped him “of all his offices at Scanlan’s, including that of co-editor.”4 Hinckle was then ordered to turn in his credit cards, including the air travel card that made the trip to New York possible. In the silence that followed that announcement, wrote

Clancy,

Hinckle threw up his hands to the ceiling and roared, “This is like burning down the barn after the horse is dead.” Advancing on the lawyer [representing the board], he wagged a finger in his face and shouted, “If you think that this corporation is going to be put to death like your clients the Rosenbergs, you are wrong.”5

The meeting descended into a shouting match between the two sides.

Hinckle and Clancy retired to Elaine’s, a Manhattan bar frequented often by

Hinckle and Zion in better times. After they stumbled their way to their hotel at dawn, they were awoken a few hours later by a Plaza Hotel employee armed with a list of unpaid bills from four different New York hotels, the amounts ranging from $1,400 to $3,400. Hinckle convinced the employee that the bills were “corporate debts” for which Ramparts, not himself, was responsible. He then provided the employee with the address and telephone number of the

Scanlan’s New York office, and assured him the magazine would pay for the room. Ten minutes later, three hotel employees barged into the room and told

Hinckle that Scanlan’s had informed them that he was no longer employed at the

4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

102 magazine. Somehow, he persuaded the employees to allow him and Clancy to stay, on the condition that they would leave all their clothes and possessions in the room as security. Over the next two days, Hinckle and Clancy spirited their clothes out of the room one piece at a time, stowed them at a friend’s apartment, and never paid the bill.6

“[I]n the end,” Zion wrote in Read All About It!, “the directors voted overwhelmingly for bankruptcy and that was that.”7 On March 18, the New York

Times reported that the magazine had filed for reorganization under the Federal

Bankruptcy Act in an article that quoted Zion but did not mention Hinckle. He said the final issue’s delay had “cost us upward of $250,000,” and he blamed a

“combination of hard-hat printing unions and members of the Nixon administration” for the losses.8

Hinckle summarized the final days of Scanlan’s in his 1974 memoir, If You

Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade:

The seizure [of the final issue] was financial as well as political, and corporate guerilla warfare ensued within the Scanlan’s organization, Sidney and I ambushing one another in horrendous board-room showdowns, he wanting to sell the valuable carcass of the magazine to some other company . . . [and] I plotting to keep the magazine going at any cost. . . . In the end, we both lost.9

Zion wrote in Read All About It! that the trauma destroyed his friendship with

Hinckle, and the editorial difference of opinion expressed in the concluding editorials of the final issue was symptomatic of a deeper break. “In the old days,”

6 Ibid., 107-109. 7 Zion, Read All About It!, 48. 8 “Scanlan’s Magazine in Bankruptcy Move,” New York Times, March 18, 1971. 9 Warren Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 363.

103

Zion wrote, “we’d have promoted the two editorials, made lemonade, but now we were barely talking.”10

If Zion wanted to repair the relationship, he did himself no favors later in

1971 when he divulged that Daniel Ellsberg was the man who leaked the

Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.11 Hinckle and former managing editor

Tom Humber responded by issuing a joint statement that read, “Sidney Zion’s reprehensible act is that of a publicity-seeking scavenger.”12 Other journalists, including New York journalism icon Pete Hamill, also criticized him. In a June

22, 1971, New York Post column, Hamill called Zion a hypocrite for naming

Ellsberg, considering that Zion had called filmmaker Elia Kazan a “rat” in

Scanlan’s’ April issue for revealing the names of former members of the

Communist Party to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s.13

In Read All About It!, Zion claimed Hamill was getting even because Zion and

Hinckle had turned down Hamill’s offer to be a “roving columnist” for Scanlan’s during the magazine’s planning stage.14

Hamill, Hinckle, and Humber were not the only persons whose relationship with Zion soured following Scanlan’s demise. In a December 8, 1970,

10 Zion, Read All About It!, 48. 11 Ellsberg was a former Pentagon employee who gave a secret Pentagon report on the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, to the Times in 1971. 12 “F.B.I. Continues Investigation of How Times Got Documents,” New York Times, June 18, 1971. 13 See Chapter 3. Zion defended his actions on New York City television and radio stations. In 2002, Ellsberg wrote that Zion’s announcement was helpful, because it allowed him to avoid arrest by the FBI and go underground. See Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002), 393-394; and Zion, Read All About It!, 62-66. 14 Zion, Read All About It!, 62-63. In his April 20, 1969, New York Times Sunday Magazine piece on Ramparts, James Ridgeway reported that Scanlan’s planned to appoint Hamill as its Dublin “editor in residence.” See James Ridgeway, “The Ramparts Story: . . . Um, Very Interesting,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 20, 1969, 34.

104 letter, Thompson had asked Zion to pay at least a portion of the money that the magazine owed to him, even though he sympathized with the magazine’s problems. “I realize, of course, that your normal procedures have been even further addled, of late, by fascist insanity relating to printers, unions, customs,

Mounties and that sort of thing,” he wrote.15

Two months later, Thompson was no longer patient or sympathetic. He wrote Zion a scathing letter on February 5, 1971, which he copied to Hinckle, his agent Lynn Nesbit, and the IRS. He called Zion a “worthless, lying bastard” for refusing to pay the $3,400 Hinckle had agreed Scanlan’s owed Thompson in fees and expenses.16 He then called into question Zion’s value to Scanlan’s:

What the fuck would you know about Scanlan’s dealing with writers, financial or otherwise? The only interest you ever showed in the magazine, as I recall, was that useless, atavistic series on ‘dirty kitchens’ that was a constant embarrassment to the magazine. . . . As far as I or the other writers were concerned, Hinckle was the editor & you were some kind of two-legged nightmare to be avoided at all costs. Which was easy, because not many of the writers spent time in Sardi’s or Gallagher’s. . . .

As [staff editor] Harvey Cohen said to you one night at Elaine’s: “You’re a pig, Sidney. You are the enemy!” . . .

In ten years of dealing with all kinds of editors I can safely say I’ve never met a scumsucker like you. You’re a disgrace to the goddamn business and the only good thing likely to come of this rotten disaster is that the name Sidney Zion is going to stink for a long, long time.17

Thompson carried out his threat to make Zion’s name “stink” in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was published later that year. “And no more of

15 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 340-341. 16 Ibid., 357. 17 Ibid., 357-358. Italics were in the original.

105 those devilish credit-card reimbursement deals,” he wrote. “Not after dealing with Sidney Zion. They seized my American Express card after that one.”18

Thompson was far kinder to Hinckle in a February 28 letter to Rolling

Stone editor Jann Wenner, in which he proposed writing a critical article titled

“Farewell to Scanlan’s.” “Hinckle was the only editor in America,” he wrote,

“you could call at 3:00 a.m. with a sorry idea & feel generally confident that by the time you hung up you’d have a $1500 story in your craw, plus massive expenses & whatever else you needed to get the thing done.”19 However, he insinuated that Scanlan’s’ editors and stockholders were making a profit from declaring bankruptcy. He admitted that he had not investigated the financial situation carefully enough to be sure, but he had no reservations about once again castigating Zion [ellipses in original]:

Indeed . . . there was Sidney Zion, the Money Man, who spent his days in Sardi’s & his nights in Gallaghers & Elaine’s, Holding Forth . . . then reeling back to the office to fuck over the editorial people . . . the writers (like me) and the artists (like Ralph Steadman) & even the staff editors like Harvey Cohen & that poor straight British bastard Don Goddard . . . and god knows how many others.20

Thompson never wrote “Farewell to Scanlan’s.” Perhaps Wenner was not interested, or Thompson wanted to repay Hinckle’s faith in him. “[A]s far as I’m concerned it’s not only right but necessary to fuck Zion,” he wrote. “But I wonder about Hinckle.”21

***

18 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the American Dream (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 69. 19 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 371-372. 20 Ibid., 372. 21 Ibid.

106

In Michael Learmonth’s 450-word profile of Scanlan’s for Folio magazine, he wrote, “Scanlan’s was a study in how a little magazine could cause a lot of trouble.”22 Indeed, Scanlan’s created quite a commotion in its eight-issue lifespan.

The magazine’s words and actions angered Pete Hamill, Elia Kazan, Lufthansa

Airlines, the Bank of America, the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, the

San Francisco Police, Attorney General John Mitchell, U.S. Customs agents, the

Montreal Anti-Terrorist Squad, and Vice President Spiro Agnew, to name a few.

Of course, Scanlan’s’ most famous enemy was President Richard Nixon, who wanted the magazine to apologize for printing “The Famous Agnew Memo.” He also wanted a lawsuit, an FBI investigation, and eventually an IRS inquiry. John

Dean may have been perplexed by Nixon’s interest in what Dean described as a

“shit-ass” magazine, but the president’s staff was well aware that Scanlan’s was

“a magazine [that] the President hated so much.”23

Although few publications likely inflamed the president like Scanlan’s did, the magazine appears to be one more example of the Nixon administration’s willingness to use illegal means to harass both the mainstream and underground press. Former Nixon speechwriter William Safire remembered that Nixon said the phrase “The press is the enemy” at least a dozen times.24 As Chapter 4 noted, the investigations of the Church Committee and other Senate committees in the mid-1970s established that the White House frequently requested that the IRS

22 Michael Learmonth, “Scanlan’s Monthly (1970-1971),” Folio, May 1, 2003. Accessed on line at www.foliomag.com on January 16, 2004. 23 John W. Dean III, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 34-35. 24 William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 342.

107 investigate newspapers and magazines. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the IRS maintained a Special Service Staff devoted to politically motivated investigations,25 and on many occasions Nixon ordered IRS audits and FBI wiretaps and snooping operations against journalists.26 It also has been well established that the FBI and CIA used surveillance, false information, and various tactics to disrupt the dissident press.27 Historian Joseph C. Spear wrote in his 1984 book, The Presidents and the Press: The Nixon Legacy: “After Richard

Nixon had resigned, it was easily seen that there had existed a plot— unprecedented in its magnitude and organization and in the energy in which was perpetuated—to intimidate and manipulate the press.”28

Although it cannot be proven, Scanlan’s’ struggle to print its guerilla warfare issue strongly suggests that the U.S. government wanted the magazine silenced or, at the very least, to have its guerilla warfare issue delayed. As

Hinckle’s one-time lawyer, John Clancy, wrote, “There is reason to suspect that there were large, if not sinister, forces arrayed against the publication—forces such as the CIA and the White House.”29 Soon after John Dean’s memoir Blind

Ambition appeared in 1976, Zion told the New York Times that Dean’s recollections

25 See Chapter 4. 26 See Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), 342-343, 374-377; and J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1976), 22-25, 54. Nixon admitted in his 1978 memoir that he ordered the IRS to do checks on “our political opponents,” but he wrote that his Democratic predecessors, presidents Kennedy and Johnson, did the same. See Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 893. 27 See Angus Mackenzie, “Sabotaging the Dissident Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, March-April 1981, 57-63; Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1-24; and William W. Turner, Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails (Granite Bay, Calif.: Penmarin, 2001), 53-77. 28 Joseph C. Spear, The Presidents and the Press: The Nixon Legacy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), 160. 29 Clancy, “Room Service,” 106.

108 about Scanlan’s “supported his own long standing conviction” that “a concerted

Government effort” had forced the magazine into bankruptcy.30 Zion also believed that “The Famous Agnew Memo” editorial and advertisement inspired the “revolt” of the printing unions in the fall of 1970. He wrote in Read All About

It!:

This [Agnew] editorial, backed by the ad, really sparked the lithographer’s revolt . . . not the crap about Molotov cocktails and guerilla war. I can’t prove it, but I was always willing to bet the house. . . .

We were plenty aware of the trouble the Nixon crowd was causing us, only we couldn’t convince anybody in the news media; they thought we were broke, paranoiac, or both. Again, this was long before Watergate; who would believe that the President of the United States would bother to go after what John Dean called a ‘shit-ass magazine’? . . .

Enough for me that Dean said Nixon was after us—at least now nobody could tell me that I was some kind of nut. The Nixon Gang had put us away, a precursor to Watergate, and who can gainsay it?31

Hinckle, too, blamed the magazine’s demise on the White House. He said in

2000:

We got shut down and we had to print in Canada because we did a story about guerilla warfare in the United States. . . . Anyway, we got into a huge printing squabble and had to print in Canada. . . . We later got word that this was the result of a call from the White House to the Canadian government saying, “Get these fuckers.”32

30 Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Dean’s Book Says Nixon Proposed Tax Inquiry of Scanlan’s Magazine,” New York Times, October 20, 1976. 31 Zion, Read All About It!, 50-51. 32 BarTel D’Arcy, “The Hinckle File: A One-Eyed Man in the Kingdom of Way-Old Journalism,” Suck.com, March 31, 2000. Accessed on line at www.suck.com/daily/2000/03/31/ 3.html on July 23, 2004.

109

It is unclear whether the printing union boycott of Scanlan’s’ guerilla warfare issue was in fact government-inspired. Regardless, the refusal of union members to work on the issue was symbolic of a working-class backlash against anti-war demonstrators and left-wing revolutionaries, who, as the guerilla warfare issue itself made clear, grew increasingly violent in the late 1960s. The boycott also took place just five months after the killings of college students by

National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio and by state police at

Jackson State College in Mississippi. In the days after the shootings, student strikes took place on more than 300 campuses, 30 ROTC buildings were either burned or bombed, and more than seventy-five colleges or universities were forced to close for the remainder of the academic term.33

Many Americans, especially working-class citizens who never had the opportunity to go to college, were decidedly unsympathetic to the protests, strikes, and violence of student protestors. In May, 58 percent of respondents to a

Newsweek poll said they blamed the students for the Kent State shootings.34

Among those fed up with antiwar protestors were construction workers in New

York City, who descended upon a memorial gathering for the Kent State victims near City Hall in May. The workers, swinging their hard hats like batons, beat up mourners before marching on City Hall. Chanting “All the way with the U.S.A.,”

33 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 754-755. 34 Ibid., 755.

110 the mob brushed past police and raised the U.S. flag, which had been set at half- staff in memorial, to full staff.35

As Scanlan’s reported in its September issue, Nixon met with four construction union leaders in the White House days after the events in New

York. One union leader presented Nixon with a commemorative hard hat. As historian Richard T. Patterson wrote, Nixon “actively fomented backlash against demonstrators.”36 The president was keen, then, to ally himself with union members who were the vanguard of such a backlash. Much like the construction workers in New York, the union workers who called Scanlan’s’ guerilla warfare issue “un-American” and refused to work on it surely believed they were doing their patriotic duty, in this case to keep the issue off the streets and out of the hands of violent revolutionaries.

***

Scanlan’s’ “You Trust Your Mother But Cut the Cards” advertisements were playful and humorous, but Dan Greenburg’s copy encapsulated all that was splendid and crazy about the magazine. One line summarized the magazine’s mission well: “Scanlan’s has no axe to grind politically or otherwise, but we’re more than willing to take a whack at anyone of whatever persuasion if we think he deserves one, including members of our most hallowed institutions.”37

35 Ibid., 755-756. 36 Ibid., 753, 756. Interestingly, the “Famous Agnew Memo” Scanlan’s printed in its August issue discussed a plan to use CIA funds to encourage construction workers in cities across the country to demonstrate in favor of Nixon’s policies in Southeast Asia. The memo was almost certainly bogus, however. See Chapter 4. 37 Advertisement, New York Times, May 14, 1970.

111

The magazine’s willingness to take a whack at leaders in government, the military, and the corporate world was representative of a growing segment of the population that was increasingly distrustful of such leaders and the institutions they represented. As David Frum argued in his book How We Got Here: The 70’s:

The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (for Better or Worse), beginning in 1967

“the United States sank into a miasma of self-doubt from which it has never fully emerged” and suffered an “abrupt collapse of trust in institutions.”38 Americans’ faith in their leaders would erode even further with the Watergate crisis of 1972-

1974. Patterson wrote in Grand Expectations:

Watergate, they believed, proved—yet again—the deviousness and arrogance of government officials who claimed to serve the public interest. First, Lyndon Johnson and exaggerated claims about a Great Society. Then lies about Vietnam. Now, Watergate and many more lies.39

Frum points to 1967 as the year that America began doubting itself, and it is difficult to imagine Scanlan’s existing before that year. The magazine’s graphic representations of Nixon alone—as a Ralph Steadman-drawn grotesque, a cover illustration with a fist planted in his face, and especially, the doctored Time magazine cover that showed a demonic president with blood pouring down out of his mouth—would have been unthinkable in, let’s say, 1965. That is not to argue that most Americans in 1970 would have approved of Scanlan’s’ characterizations of the president, or would have cared for the magazine in general, for that matter. Most, if not all, of the 47 million Americans (60.7 percent

38 David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (for Better or Worse) (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 4. 39 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 782.

112 of the popular vote) that would re-elect Nixon in 1972 surely would have despised Scanlan’s, if they ever came across it. But there is little doubt that the magazine served a growing population of cynics. Zion certainly believed that the magazine’s no-holds-barred attack on the president and his cronies had an audience. “We had the hang on [Nixon] long ere Watergate rang on him, and we were virtually alone in the field,” he wrote in Read All About It! “The public was starving for criticism of the Nixon administration, and almost nobody was coming through with it, certainly not the establishment press.”40

Days after the suicide of Thompson, always one of Nixon’s most outspoken critics, famed New York journalist Jimmy Breslin told Zion, “You guys made him. Gonzo, whatever the hell that means.”41 In a February 24, 2005, column in the New York Daily News, Zion conceded that “The Kentucky Derby Is

Decadent and Depraved” was “terrific.” Yet, perhaps still stinging from his feud with Thompson thirty-five years earlier, he cautioned those who he felt overstated his achievements. “Thompson was a commotion, to be sure,” he wrote. “But if he changed the course of journalism, how come we never had

Gonzo Two? The kids read him as we read J.D. Salinger in the ‘50s. Only we read it without cocaine. I knew Hunter Thompson. He wasn’t Ernest Hemingway.”42

Unsurprisingly, Hinckle had kinder words for Thompson and his influence on the current generation of writers and journalists. In an obituary that ran in The Nation on March 21, 2005, he wrote:

40 Zion, Read All About It!, 49. 41 Sidney Zion, “Searching in Vain for the Gonzo Legacy,” New York Daily News, February 24, 2005. 42 Ibid.

113

Hunter’s personal style of journalism blew a hole in the tin can of the profession and let in some welcome air. He has inspired a new generation of journalists-to-be who have been less than called to a profession assuming the dull armor of accounting. His the-personal-is-political and the-political-is-personal world-view was the seed path to blogging, which makes little pretense to harrumphing “objectivity” but insists on telling the truth as the blogger sees scoundrels and professional humbug.43

His acrimonious relations with Thompson aside, Zion wrote in Read All

About It! that he was “proud” of Scanlan’s’ achievements, particularly the “Dirty

Kitchens of New York” series, which forced one restaurant to close and led to tougher New York Health Department standards.44 Although he regretted that his friendship with Hinckle soured, he looked back with fondness on his Scanlan’s experience. “I had the chance to do something big, and even in retrospect, even though it went down, I can’t imagine not taking the chance,” he wrote. “Indeed, I did it with the full awareness that it might not work, that the odds were higher than a cat’s back that it wouldn’t work.”45

Oddly, Hinckle, the lone soul who wanted to keep the magazine running

“at any cost” following the guerilla warfare issue saga, suggested in his memoir that his heart was never quite in Scanlan’s.46 “Like a toy soldier running down,” he wrote, “I went through the motions of launching a new venture for the seventies, but the spirit wasn’t there, even if the money was.”47 For him, Scanlan’s, like Ramparts and later ventures such as City of San Francisco, War News, and

Argonaut, was one chapter in a career dedicated to muckraking. “There’s only

43 Warren Hinckle, “Hunter S. Thompson,” The Nation, March 21, 2005, 26. 44 Zion, Read All About It!, 52. 45 Ibid., 35. 46 Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 363. 47 Ibid., 362.

114 one magazine—the names change, but the rest stays the same,” he told the

Washington Post in 1981.48

***

Neither Zion nor Hinckle abandoned journalism after Scanlan’s folded, although the former claimed that after he named Ellsberg he was blacklisted in the journalism world for six years.49 In 1977 he became a columnist for the New

York Post, and since then he has written for the New York Times, the New York

Daily News, and New York magazine. He returned to the Post in 2000 as a biweekly columnist. He has written several books, including his memoir, Read All

About It!; 1988’s The Autobiography of Roy Cohn; and a 1993 collection of columns, the title of which recalled the old Scanlan’s motto: Trust Your Mother But Cut the

Cards. In addition, he has written novels and non-fiction books about the Mafia, politics, and Judaism. Appropriately, he also wrote the introduction to a mixed- drink instruction book.

After Scanlan’s folded, Hinckle wrote a book, based on the guerilla warfare issue, that was published in Germany.50 In 1975, filmmaker Francis Ford

Coppola handed him the editor-in-chief reins of City of San Francisco magazine, which Coppola had purchased earlier in the year. The August 3, 1975, cover story, “Why Women Can’t Get Laid in S.F.,” created quite a stir in the Bay Area, but only three months later Coppola folded the magazine. Oddly enough, under

Hinckle’s stewardship the magazine reduced its weekly losses from $100,000 to

48 Curt Suplee, “Two Partisan of the Post: Into the ‘80s; Warren Hinckle: Voice of the Old New Left,” Washington Post, October 8, 1981. 49 Sidney Zion, “Capital Games,” New York Daily News, January 5, 2004. 50 Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 363.

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$25,000.51 Even so, the joke in San Francisco at the time was that Hinckle was the only man who could spend money faster than Coppola could make it.52

Hinckle has written columns for the San Francisco Examiner, the San

Francisco Chronicle, Frisco, and the San Francisco Independent. He has authored more than a dozen books, including his 1960s memoir, If You Have a Lemon, Make

Lemonade (1974), which made the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” list; 10-Second

Jailbreak: The Helicopter Escape of Joel David Kaplan (1973), co-written with William

Turner and Eliot Asinof, which was later made into the Charles Bronson movie

Breakout; 53 The Richest Place on Earth (1978), with Frederic Hobbs; The Fish Is Red:

The Story of the Secret War Against Castro (1981), with Turner; Gayslayer!: The Story of How Dan White Killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone and Got Away with

Murder (1985); and The Agnos Years, a 1991 collection of columns about San

Francisco mayor Art Agnos. When he was not writing, he kept busy by running for mayor in 1987 and married Susan Cheever, the daughter of novelist John

Cheever, in the late 1980s.54

In the 1990s, Hinckle and a volunteer staff produced Argonaut, a quarterly journal devoted to muckraking, politics, and popular culture. Its contributors included Scanlan’s alumni such as Zion, Thompson, and Studs Terkel. One issue of Argonaut even included photographs of Elaine’s, the same bar frequented by

51 Michael Goldberg, “Hinckle Tells All,” Boulevards, 1980 (issue unknown), 18. 52 “City Slickers,” Newsweek, September 1, 1975, 42. Also see Goldberg, “Hinckle Tells All,” 19. A similar joke was told by a staffer at Asian Week during a 2004 interview with the author. See Chapter 1. 53 In the mid-1970s the Irish Republican Army airlifted one of its members out of a British penitentiary in a style similar to that used by Kaplan and his associates. The IRA sent a note to Hinckle that read, “Thanks for the idea.” See Turner, Rearview Mirror, 284. 54 Jerry Carroll, “Hinckle’s Literary Latest,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1993.

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Hinckle and Zion during their Scanlan’s days.55 “Quarterlies, the last frontier,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I’ve done everything else.”56

Three decades after Scanlan’s’ demise, Hinckle continued to attract controversy—and censorship. In 1991 the Examiner refused to print an anti-

Persian Gulf War column he wrote that compared President George Bush to

Japanese Word War II Emperor Tojo.57 He was then asked to take an unpaid three-month leave, so he published his own anti-war newspaper, War News. He was still stirring up trouble at the Examiner in 2004, writing about gay marriage and divorce, city hall politics, and the firing of a veteran reporter by the liberal

Bay Guardian.58 He was dismissed from the newspaper in October 2004 after conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz purchased the newspaper.59

Although they parted on bad terms in 1971, Zion and Hinckle may have renewed their friendship in the mid-1990s during Zion’s lawsuit against New

York Hospital for the wrongful death in 1984 of his eighteen-year-old daughter

Libby. Zion v. New York Hospital was a landmark case that led to New York State regulations limiting the hours worked by medical residents. In 1995, a jury exonerated the hospital, although the Zions eventually received a $375,000 award

55 Deirdre Carmody, “A Journal Is Sprouting from Seeds of the 60’s,” New York Times, August 8, 1994. 56 Carroll, “Hinckle’s Literary Latest.” 57 See Jim Balderston, “Muzzling Warren Hinckle,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, January 30, 1991. 58 See Warren Hinckle, “S.F.: Gay Divorce Capital,” San Francisco Examiner, March 2, 2004; Warren Hinckle, “Power Grab at City Hall,” San Francisco Examiner, February 17, 2004; and Warren Hinckle, “Bay Guardian ‘Family Values,’” San Francisco Examiner, January 29, 2004. 59 Leah Garchik, “Daily Notebook,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 1, 2004.

117 for Libby’s pain and suffering.60 In the same year, Hinckle wrote a book published by Argonaut Press, Do No Harm: The Libby Zion Case, which no doubt required extensive interviews with Zion.

“What journalism is all about is to attack everybody,” Hinckle said in

1981. “First you decide what’s wrong, then you go out to find the facts to support that view, and then you generate enough controversy to attract attention.”61

Under Hinckle’s and Zion’s stead, Scanlan’s personified “attack” and

“controversy.” It fearlessly took on corporate, union, and government power; created a stir with doctored advertisements and full-page New York Times advertisements submitting its credibility against that of the vice president of the

United States; tackled a wide array of interesting and provocative subjects such as dope smuggling, credit card counterfeiting, and Irish Maoists; called for

Nixon’s impeachment with a cover that showed the president being punched in the face; and took risks such as printing Thompson’s singular reportage.

What is most remarkable about the Scanlan’s story is that it almost succeeded. On the cover of its first issue, the magazine vowed to “make it on circulation alone.”62 Six issues later, it was selling more than 100,000 issues a month, just short of breaking even. If Scanlan’s had managed to get its guerilla warfare issue on newsstands across the country, it likely would have topped that number. Of course, we will never know for sure if Scanlan’s would have lived a long and happy life if it had printed and distributed that issue without incident.

60 “Discussion Guide: Landmark Consumer Rights Trials: A Hospital on Trial: Zion v. New York Hospital,” National Film Network. PDF document downloaded from www. choicesvideo.net/guidebooks/WAV/LanCon_hosp.pdf on July 21, 2005. 61 Suplee, “Two Partisan of the Post.” 62 Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 132.

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It is likely the magazine would have self-destructed at some point; Hinckle and

Zion were strong personalities and big spenders, and even before the guerilla warfare issue the two were clashing.

At times Scanlan’s was inconsistent, poorly edited, and poorly laid out. Yet the magazine’s sloppiness was refreshing. It was far removed from the humorless perfection of established magazines such as Time and Newsweek.

Reading Scanlan’s today, it is easy to imagine a sleep-deprived staff hustling to complete an issue and send it to the printer, frantically making telephone calls to smoky, dimly-lit Manhattan taverns to track down Hinckle and Zion, who were editing galleys with a red pen in one hand and a drink in the other. The magazine embodied sloppy exuberance and, most of all, fun. It represented the personalities of the men who ran the magazine. Hinckle and Zion were opinionated, eccentric, controversial, witty, publicity-mongering, and heavy- boozing individuals who always sought a good time. Even so, Scanlan’s was significant for many “legitimate” historical and cultural reasons. Yet this author believes Scanlan’s should be remembered because its history is an immensely entertaining story, filled with outrageous personalities and incidents, a whole lot of controversy, and plenty of laughter. In Read All About It!, Zion seemed to take the same lesson from the Scanlan’s experience, and wrote a fitting tribute:

[T]he point is we stayed true to our dream. We combined muckraking with literature and laughs—always there were laughs. Which is how Hinckle and I started. . . .

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[T]hough the laughs ran out for Hinckle and me, I drink to us every year on the anniversary of our death. To Scanlan’s, not to Warren, not to me, to Scanlan’s.63

63 Zion, Read All About It!, 52.

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Appendix: Illustrations

1.1 Warren Hinckle with one of his beloved basset hounds in an undated photograph. 2.1 Sidney Zion and Hinckle as photographed in the March 1970 issue of New York magazine. 2.2 The cover of Scanlan’s’ March 1970 issue. 2.3 One page of Jim Nutt’s two-page illustration for Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy,” which appeared in Scanlan’s’ March 1970 issue. 3.1 The doctored Lufthansa Airlines advertisement that appeared in the April 1970 issue of Scanlan’s. 3.2 A version of the “You Trust Your Mother But You Cut the Cards” advertisement, as seen in Scanlan’s’ August 1970 issue. 4.1 The Robert Crumb-illustrated cover of Scanlan’s’ August 1970 issue. 4.2 The one-page memorandum allegedly from Vice President Agnew’s office that appeared in Scanlan’s’ August 1970 issue. 4.3 “The Famous Agnew Memo” advertisement that appeared in the July 30 and August 2, 1970, editions of the New York Times. 5.1 “Nixon and the Bums: An Editorial,” from Scanlan’s’ September 1970 issue. 5.2 “The Great White House Tea Party” advertisement that appeared in the September 15 and September 20, 1970, editions of the New York Times. 5.3 The cover of Scanlan’s’ September 1970 issue. 5.4 Gas gun and kit advertisement from Police Chief magazine that appeared on the back cover of Scanlan’s’ September 1970 issue. 5.5 The cover of Scanlan’s’ January 1971 issue. 5.6 “We’ve Moved to Canada,” from Scanlan’s’ January 1971 issue.

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Note: The illustrations on pages 125 through 139 are omitted due to possible copyright violations.

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Newspaper Articles Balderston, Jim. “Muzzling Warren Hinckle.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, January 30, 1991. Boulware, Jack. “Hinckle, Hinckle, Little Star.” San Francisco Weekly, February 14, 1996. http://sfweekly.com/issues/1996-02-14/feature.html/print.html and http://sfweekly.com/issues/1996-02-14/feature2.html/print.html. Burman, Tony. “Police Seize U.S. Magazine.” Montreal Star, December 12, 1970. -----. “Scanlan’s Charges Studied.” Montreal Star, December 15, 1970. -----. “’Unexpected Welcome’ Given Scanlan’s Since Quebec Move.” Montreal Star, December 18, 1970. -----. “Quebec Slaps Ban on Scanlan’s.” Montreal Star, December 18, 1970. -----. “Scanlan’s Copies May Be Out Today.” Montreal Star, December 23, 1970. Carmody, Deirdre. “A Journal Is Sprouting from Seeds of the 60’s.” New York Times, August 8, 1994. Carroll, Jerry. “Hinckle’s Literary Latest: Gadfly Editor Starts Up a Quarterly.” San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1993. “Censors at the Source.” New York Times, February 24, 1971. Corkery, P.J. “Hunter Thompson: The Last Prank.” San Francisco Examiner, February 23, 2005. Dougherty, Philip H. “Advertising: Wilkinson Shows ‘The Blade.’” New York Times, February 18, 1970. Draper, George. “A Curious Episode at Scanlan’s.” San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 1970. “Editor’s Choice.” New York Times, January 5, 1975. “F.B.I. Continues Investigation of How Times Got Documents.” New York Times, June 18, 1971. Galeota, William R. “Censors in the Shop: Some Printers Refuse Controversial Copy.” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 1970. Garchik, Leah. “Daily Notebook.” San Francisco Chronicle, November 1, 2004.

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Hinckle, Warren. “Bay Guardian ‘Family Values.’” San Francisco Examiner, January 29, 2004. -----. “Power Grab at City Hall.” San Francisco Examiner, February 17, 2004. -----. “S.F.: Gay Divorce Capital.” San Francisco Examiner, March 2, 2004. -----. “The Old Town Comes Back—for a Night.” San Francisco Examiner, June 8, 2004. “If You Write Scanlan’s, Kindly Enclose a Check.” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 1970. Lydon, Christopher. “Administration Is Stressing Political Loyalty for Jobs.” New York Times, September 9, 1970. “Magazine Seized on Choquette’s Order.” Montreal Gazette, December 18, 1970. Montgomery, Paul. “Scanlan’s Issue Delayed By Union.” New York Times, October 3, 1970. “Montreal Police Seize Scanlan’s ‘Guerilla’ Issue.” San Francisco Chronicle, December 12, 1970. Naughton, James M. “Agnew Attacks Memo as Fraud.” New York Times, July 22, 1970. -----. “A New Challenge: Ex-Counsel Is Firm—Differs on Series of Explanations.” New York Times, June 27, 1973. “New Magazine Called Scanlan’s Monthly Arrives on Thursday.” Wall Street Journal, February 20, 1970. “Police in Montreal Seize a Monthly.” New York Times, December 12, 1970. Raymont, Henry. “Head of Ramparts Resigns in Crisis Over Its Finances.” New York Times, January 30, 1969. -----. “Scanlan’s, a Monthly Magazine, Promises to ‘Vilify’ Institutions.” New York Times, February 25, 1970. “Rights of Newsmen To Be Essay Subject.” New York Times, February 13, 1970. “Scanlan’s: An Act of Suppression.” Montreal Star, December 18, 1970. “Scanlan’s Issue Given Clearance.” Montreal Gazette, December 26, 1970. “Scanlan’s Magazine in Bankruptcy Move.” New York Times, March 18, 1971. “Scanlan’s Sues Union and Barnes Press Inc. in Printing Dispute.” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 1970. Sheahen, Kyle. “Magic Aura Defines Western Heroes.” Cornell Daily Sun, March 17, 2005. http://www.cornellsun.com Shirley, Matt. “Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005.” Berkeley Beacon, February 24, 2005. http://www.berkeleybeacon.com

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Steadman, Ralph. “Hunter S. Thompson RIP: ‘I Would Feel Real Trapped in This Life if I Didn’t Know I Could Commit Suicide at Any Time.’” The Independent (online edition), February 22, 2005. http://enjoyment. independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=613513&host=5&dir=497. Suplee, Curt. “Two Partisan of the Post: Into the ‘80s; Warren Hinckle: Voice of the Old New Left.” Washington Post, October 8, 1981. Thomas, Robert McG. Jr. “Dean’s Book Says Nixon Proposed Tax Inquiry of Scanlan’s Magazine.” New York Times, October 20, 1976. “U.S. Seizes and Then Releases 6,000 Copies of a Magazine With Article on How to Make Bombs.” New York Times, December 11, 1970. Weaver, Warren Jr. “Mitchell Decries Rumor on ’72 Vote.” New York Times, July 29, 1970. Zion, Sidney E. “Four Ramparts Editors Facing Draft Card Burning Prosecution.” New York Times, July 18, 1968. -----. “Once a Rat, Always a Rat.” Montreal Gazette, February 3, 1999. -----. “Capital Games.” New York Daily News, January 5, 2004. -----. “Searching in Vain for the Gonzo Legacy.” New York Daily News, February 24, 2005.

Internet Articles d’Arcy, BarTel. “The Hinckle File: A One-Eyed Man in the Kingdom of Way-Old Journalism.” Suck.com, March 31, 2000. http://www.suck.com/daily/ 2000/03/31/1.html and http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/03/31/2. html and http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/03/31/3.html. “Discussion Guide: Landmark Consumer Rights Trials: A Hospital on Trial: Zion v. New York Hospital.” National Film Network. PDF document downloaded from http://www.choicesvideo.net/guidebooks/WAV/ LanCon_hosp.pdf. “Fear and Loathing at the America’s Cup: An Interview with Ralph Steadman.” Gadfly Online, June 1998. http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/June98/ archive-steadman.html. Nel, Philip. “About the Newspaper PM.” http://www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/ purple/miscellaneous/pm.html. Nesbitt, Rebecca Gordon. “Between the Lines.” Apexart, March 15-April 12, 2003. http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/nesbitt.htm. Passman, Arnie. “Me and My Two Suicides: Treasure Hunting Hunter?” MediaChannel.org. http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/ affalert330.shtml.

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“Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police.” C-SPAN “Booknotes” Interview with John Leo. http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1214. “Warren Hinckle.” Biography on “The Great Thompson Hunt” Web site. http:// www.gonzo.org/hst/friends.asp?ID=3.

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Newspaper Advertisements Advertisement (“You Trust Your Mother But You Cut the Cards,” version one). New York Times, May 10 and May 14, 1970. Advertisement (“You Trust Your Mother But You Cut the Cards,” version two). New York Times, June 3, 1970. Advertisement (“You Trust Your Mother But You Cut the Cards,” version three). New York Times, July 5 and July 11, 1970. Advertisement (“The Famous Agnew Memo”). New York Times, July 30 and August 2, 1970. Advertisement (“The Great White House Tea Party”). New York Times, September 15, 1970 and September 20, 1970. Classified Advertisement (“Editorial Assistant”). New York Times, August 16, 1970.

Articles in Scanlan’s Monthly March 1970 Beban, Rick. “The Anatomy of a Small Town Strike.” 119-121.

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Cohen, Rob. “The High Schools and S.D.S.” 113-117. Collier, Peter. “Antique Forms of the English Novel, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Divisions.” 121-123. Geismar, Maxwell. “Mark Twain and the Robber Barons.” 32-36. Grove, Gene. “The CIA, FBI & CBS Bomb in Mission: Impossible.” 2-4, 15-21. Hecht, Ben. “The Incomplete Life of Mickey Cohen.” 55-80. Henry, James D. (as told to Donald Duncan). “The Men of ‘B’ Company.” 26-31. Kahn, Joseph. “Dirty Kitchens of New York.” 22-25. Kempton, Murray. “Acheson.” 109-111. “On a Theory of the First Amendment.” 7-8. Severo, Richard. “The Lost Tribe of Alabama.” 81-88. Silber, Frederic. “Down on Easy Rider.” 117-118. Stern, Sol. “Altamont: The Woodstock Nation’s Pearl Harbor.” 37-54. Thompson, Hunter S. “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy.” 89-100. Waugh, Auberon. “The Short Outrageous Political History of Biafra.” 101-108. “What If We Don’t Do It? No. 1: The Alaska Pipeline.” 127-129. “Who Are We to Make a Magazine?” 7.

April 1970 Arthur, Gavin. “An Astrological Portrait of President Nixon.” 36-41. Fleming, Thomas. “A Political History of Jersey City.” 62-69. Gold, Herbert. “The Log of the Anguilla Free Trade & Charter Company.” 20-35. “Hello, Informer.” 72-74. “The Jewish Establishment and Pompidou.” 70-71. Kahn, Joseph. “Dirty Kitchens of New York.” 16-19. “Letters to the Editor.” 74. McCoy, Alfred and Angus McDonald. “Pan Am Makes the Fighting Great.” 48- 58. Schneck, Stephen. “At Last I’ve Found Someone Who Actually Likes Zabriskie Point: Me.” 75-77. Terkel, Studs. “The Conspiracy Women.” 42-47. Thompson, Richard. “Robert Mitchum Is Better than Dean Martin.” 12-15. “What If We Don’t Do It? No. 2: The California Water Plan.” 59-62.

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May 1970 Altman, Robert. “The Wheeler Ranch.” 35-42. Greene, Graham. “God Blessed Brighton Rock.” 6-8. Grove, Gene. “Sorry About That, Jack Webb.” 27-34. Hemingway, Ernest. “Hemingway: Cub Reporter.” 50-52. Hinckle, Warren and Joel E. Solkoff. “Russia’s Underground Political Pornography.” 1-4. Lacouture, Jean. “The Demi-god: African Power and Kwame Nkrumah.” 59-70. “New Hot Water for Teddy Kennedy.” 17-19. “News From South Africa.” 46-49. Rodell, Fred. “Alexander Bickel and the Harvard-Frankfurter School of Judicial Inertia.” 76-77. Schneck, Stephen and William Turner. “Mrs. Machine Gun Kelly: J. Edgar Hoover Gets His First Woman.” 53-58. “That Lufthansa Ad.” 72-73. Unger, Jon. “The NLF Radio Scooped the American Press By a Year and a Half on Song My. That Makes It News.” 73-75. “The Wesleyans Are Alive and Well in Washington, D.C.” 71-72. Zion, Sidney E. “Who’s Afraid of Judge Henry Friendly? (Besides the New York Times Et Al).” 11-16.

June 1970 Altman, Robert. “Ken Kesey’s ‘Atlantis Rising.’” 62-69. Beban, Rick. “Remember Kent State. And, Remember Isla Vista.” 13-20. Blotnick, Elihu. “How to Counterfeit Credit Cards and Get Away with It: The Confessions of a Plastic Man.” 21-28. Coleman, Kate. “Turning On Newsweek.” 44-53. “The Cover.” Table of contents page. Kifner, John. “Socking It to the Panthers.” 29-43. Mander, Jerry. “Six Months and Nearly a Billion Dollars Later, Advertising Owns Ecology.” 54-61. Thompson, Hunter S. “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” 1-12. “Where Did the Robbery Take Place.” 73-74.

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July 1970 “America’s Pravda Consider the Alternative.” 73-74. Barnes, Clive. “Stranger than Fact, Stronger than Fiction.” 74-77. Geismar, Peter. “The CIA’s Cancer Cure: An Account of the Strange Dying Days of Frantz Fanon.” 62-66. Goldberg, Hyman, alias Prudence Penny. “The Rotten Truth About Cookbooks.” 56-61. Griffin, Susan. “Post-Abortion Interviews.” 47-55. Hinckle, Warren. “Maoists in Limerick and Other Pogroms of Modern Ireland.” 14-22. “Latin American Revolutionary Poetry: ‘Colombia Ripped Off.’” 36-46. Lockwood,Lee. “May Day at Yale.” 69-72. Passman, Arnold. “The Bastard Children of Cecil B. DeMille Are Making Films in San Francisco.” 2-13.

August 1970 Chrisman, Robert. “Ecology Is a Racist Schuck.” 46-49. Hinckle, Warren. “O.K. About Christopher Robin, But What Happened to Alice?” 28-36. Kimball, George. “The Great Grass Harvest in River City.” 21-26. “Left-Wing Indians.”65. Parker, Richard. “An Annual Anti-Report on the Bank of America.” 53-63. Sherrill, Robert. “The Conveniences of Being Lockheed.” 39-45. “This Document Recently Came Into the Hands of the Editors.” 1. Tichborne, Roger. “How Life Magazine Paid $5000 for Marijuana Fields in Mexico and Other Tales.”6-20 “Will Leonard Bernstein Give a Party for Joe Colombo?” 64.

September 1970 Blotnick, Elihu. “Check One: Syracuse University Does ( ) Does Not ( ) Give a B.S. in Guinea Pigs.” 18-22. Duke, Raoul. “The Police Chief—The Indispensable Magazine of Law Enforcement.” 63-66.

150

Hinckle, Warren. “The Law Firm That Runs California.” 48-52. Kahn, Joseph. “The Dirty Kitchen Conspiracy.” 67-69. Kamstra, Jerry. “Captain Garbage and The Fishing Ship Havana Chase the Russians at Sea.” 34-43. -----. “One Long Tactile Embrace of Mother India.” 72-73. Karol, K.S. “The Two Honeymoons of Fidel Castro.” 4-17. “Nixon and the Bums. An Editorial.” 1-3. Raskin, Jonah. “The Irving Howe Times Book Review Axis Welcomes John Leonard.” 70-72. Stetler, Russell. “Gassing the Irish: The Many Uses of CS-Gas in Derry.” 58-62. Stewart, Jon. “Splitting Apart and Holding Together in New Mexico.” 23-33. Surface, Bill. “Cock Fights in America.” 44-47.

January 1971 “A Bomber’s Tactical Description of the Attack on a Military Installation.” 16-19. “Captured: A White Panther,” and “Captured: An Underground Priest.” 70-73. “December 1969: Weatherman Goes Underground.” 13-15. “Georgia Jackson Interviewed.” 79-81. “Guerilla Acts of Sabotage and Terrorism in the U.S., 1965-1970.” 24-47. “Guerilla Attacks in the United States, 1965-1970.” 48-51. “Guerillas in the Military.” 54-61. Hinckle, Warren. “An Editorial Preface.” 2-12. -----. “The Future for Guerillas.” 95. “Interviews with Guerillas.” 87-93. “The Student Who Burned Down the Bank of America.” 20-23. Thompson, Hunter S. “The Aspen Wallposter.” 96-97. “We’ve Moved to Canada.” 1. “What Guerillas Read.” 62-69. Zion, Sidney. “The Future for Guerillas.” 94.

ABSTRACT

GILLIS, WILLIAM. M.S. November 2005.

E.W. Scripps School of Journalism

The Scanlan’s Monthly Story (1970-1971): How One Magazine Infuriated a Bank, an Airline, Unions, Printing Companies, Customs Officials, Canadian Police, Vice

President Agnew, and President Nixon in Ten Months (152 pp.)

Director of Thesis: Dr. Patrick Washburn

If a magazine’s achievements can be measured in part by whom and how many it infuriated in the shortest amount of time, then surely Scanlan’s Monthly deserves to be honored. The brainchild of former Ramparts editor Warren

Hinckle and former New York Times law reporter Sidney Zion, Scanlan’s printed only eight issues in 1970 and 1971. But during its short lifetime the magazine drew the attention—and often the ire—of business, labor, law enforcement, and government leaders including Vice President Spiro Agnew and President

Richard Nixon.

In the midst of such special attention, Scanlan’s managed to print some of the most provocative muckraking journalism of its time. Scanlan’s published the first examples of Hunter S. Thompson’s now-celebrated “Gonzo journalism,” and two years before anyone outside of Washington, D.C., had heard of

Watergate, Scanlan’s called for President Nixon’s impeachment.

Scanlan’s’ eighth issue, dedicated to the subject of guerilla violence in the

U.S., was subjected to a nationwide boycott by printing unions, and was then seized by Montreal police after it was printed in Quebec. The issue, which turned out to be Scanlan’s’ last, finally appeared in January 1971 after a three-month delay. Scanlan’s’ insistence on taking on and not backing down from power doomed it to an early death, and its brushes with the U.S. government demonstrate the extent of the Nixon administration’s war on the dissident press.

Scanlan’s is a sobering lesson on how government power can be wielded to harass, and in some cases silence, the press.

Approved: ______

Professor of Journalism