Warren Hinckle and the Glory that was Ramparts

[Scott Kaiser]

Now I think its true that Moulitsas actually served an internship with the CIA, right?

Markos Moulitsas Is a Fake, His Daily Kos a Fraud

[FONT=&amp]Posted on June 15, 2016 by Eric Zuesse.[/FONT]
Eric Zuesse

Markos Moulitsas is a CIA asset whose service to the organization, certainly after he started his popular Democratic-Party propaganda-site "Daily Kos" in 2002, has been to shape the minds not of real progressives but of liberal fools (suckers such as this, a person who believed the lies of and supported Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders) in order to boost the candidates whom the U.S. aristocracy's Democratic-Party contingent (which comprises around 25% of the U.S. aristocracy) want to be elected in Democratic Party primaries, to run against the Republican nominee, so that regardless of which of the two Parties wins, the aristocracy remains in charge of the U.S. Government. (This function, of manipulating Democratic Party primaries, is important in order to maintain the U.S. aristocracy's control over the Democratic Party, and not only over the Republican Party over which they've long had a total lock-hold.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/06/m...fraud.html

[Scott Kaiser]

http://truth-about-kos.blogspot.com/

[Peter Lemkin]

Warren Hinckle passed away about 12 days ago. I surveyed almost all the notices and was stunned at how few of them mentioned or discounted his editorship of Ramparts. Actually it kind of stunned me, because not only was it the highlight o this career, in my view, it was the last great glossy American magazine. Nothing has touched it since.

Among its many achievements it was the only such magazine that put the JFK case on the cover more than once. In fact I think it dis so three times. And it featured writers like Penn Jones, David Lifton, and Bill Turner. IT was so well read, 250,000 circulation at its peak, and so politically potent, the CIA launched operations against it. Time and the NY Times singled it out for numerous attacks. There has been nothing like it since, and it makes online journalism look like a joke.

IF you know not of what I speak, please read and be reminded of what real journalism was and can be:

http://www.ctka.net/2016/hinckle/hinckle.html

It was a great magazine! Those were the days, my friends.......
I found one of the JFK pieces at internet archive https://archive.org/details/JfkAssassina...tsJune1967
If anyone can find any other issues online, kindly let us know....

[Martin White]

But here is the question I was posing, perhaps a little too subtly:

Why would the online generation want to mimic the MSM?

...

Ramparts did not do that and they succeeded. That is why I tried to hold them up as model of what real journalism was and can be. I really don't understand it.

Here's a completely unjustified opinion. Today's culture is fame-driven, not ideology driven like it was in the 60s. The people writing online are hoping to get a "better" (read: richer, more famous) gig at CNBC or Fox or CNN or even the print media. In other words, the online journalism is just a means to an end rather than a heartfelt protest or an appeal to a fuller debate, like Ramparts. They are parroting the type of journalism that they see either because they know no better (as Jim said, lack of an alternative role model), or in fact they DO know better but know how to "play the game".

For the people writing for Ramparts, the object of the journalism was protest. For the people writing online in the way Jim describes, its about compiling a professional portfolio of fawning crap. The journalistic equivalent of celery - i.e. bland with no calorific content.

Look at someone like Geraldo Rivera. Did he switch out of actual physical fear, occupational pragmatism or some other reason? I highly doubt that it was simply a change of his opinion on the topic.

[Tracy Riddle]

Absolutely, Martin. Today, it's all about being famous and "successful" (a big empty term, but everybody wants it). Ideas don't matter to most people anymore. It's the triumph of conspicuous consumer culture.

[Scott Kaiser]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/busine....html?_r=0

[Jim DiEugenio]

Peter:

I am pretty sure, this site has a catalog of Ramparts past issues.

http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts

Its amazing to look at the stuff they printed. Because a lot of it still holds up. And that was nearly fifty years ago.

Like I said, nothing like it since.

[Jim DiEugenio]

But here is the question I was posing, perhaps a little too subtly:

Why would the online generation want to mimic the MSM?

...

Ramparts did not do that and they succeeded. That is why I tried to hold them up as model of what real journalism was and can be. I really don't understand it.

Here's a completely unjustified opinion. Today's culture is fame-driven, not ideology driven like it was in the 60s. The people writing online are hoping to get a "better" (read: richer, more famous) gig at CNBC or Fox or CNN or even the print media. In other words, the online journalism is just a means to an end rather than a heartfelt protest or an appeal to a fuller debate, like Ramparts. They are parroting the type of journalism that they see either because they know no better (as Jim said, lack of an alternative role model), or in fact they DO know better but know how to "play the game".

For the people writing for Ramparts, the object of the journalism was protest. For the people writing online in the way Jim describes, its about compiling a professional portfolio of fawning crap. The journalistic equivalent of celery - i.e. bland with no calorific content.

Look at someone like Geraldo Rivera. Did he switch out of actual physical fear, occupational pragmatism or some other reason? I highly doubt that it was simply a change of his opinion on the topic.

This is something that I never really thought of. Probably because coming from where I do, that is writings on CTKA about the assassinations of the sixties, I have never even contemplated leapfrogging to a job at CNN. But there is probably some truth to that since I have seen some of these people on the MSM.

But then why start a new online journalism school if you are simply going to follow the people who brought us down the yellow brick road in the first place? I mean in addition to those terrible scandals I listed in my Hinckle piece, I left out all the signals about the 2007-08 economic crash that almost threw us into 1929 again.

Not my idea of what real journalism is all about. Well, blogging was always a cheap substitute for investigative reporting anyway. THe worst part of it, is that it snookered tens of thousands of commenters into thinking they were actually a part of a revolution.

Hillary Clinton is not my idea of a revolution. She is part of the problem. Her foreign policy is pretty much the neocon brand.

[Richard Coleman]

May I put in a small addendum to this thread? The first publication that began to change my thinking when I was a kid fresh out of the Navy in '65 was a non-slick mag called A Minority Of One. I believe it was published by someone named M.S. Arnoni. It featured great articles on the JFK assassination and Vietnam, etc. Stuff by Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and many others. I waited for it to appear at the only newsstand I knew of that carried it with tremendous anticipation. It never had the circulation or influence of Ramparts, but it was in the same vein. From The Education Forum:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....opic=11001

From the same thread, an interesting article by Arnoni: (Note the date!)


Who Killed Whom and Why?
Dark Thoughts About Dark Events

M.S. Arnoni, The Minority of One, January 1964

All speculation about the forces behind the shocking murder of the late President John F. Kennedy and about its political repercussions suffers from a severe limitation; for while any analysis must aim to embrace the whole epos, the assassination itself is probably a mere prelude to an historical tragedy the scope of which is not yet discernable. Another problem for the analyst is the border line between the believable and the unbelievable in the mind of the public. This border line is set by national biases to a far greater extent than by actual objective judgment of facts, events and likelihoods. What Americans reject as inconceivable developments culminating in the assassination is largely based on mental preconditioning.

The popular view of the American body politic as a free and democratic set-up responsive to the spontaneous wishes of the majority lulls many people into rejecting without examination any theory predicated on sinister schemes within the power structure. The distance and strangeness of foreign peoples enable Americans to recognize and even to exaggerate the degree of cynicism involved in the internal power struggles of other countries, especially if they happen to be hostile toward those countries. No tale of intrigue ever sounds too wicked to American ears if the setting is the Kremlin, or some Latin American palace. But when it comes to America, well, we know we are "basically" the most decent and democratic of nations, and that shadowy deeds probable elsewhere are impossible here; and that even if they do occur, they are exceptions, dark spots on an otherwise innocent national record.

This prejudice is a virtual guarantee against penetrating popular inquiry into the facts behind the assassination of President Kennedy; yet it is probable that the truth here is in direct proportion to its unacceptability by the popular American mind, and that its sinister nature is far more marked than Americans can imagine of the American Establishment. It is no coincidence that the foreign press, including the friendly foreign press, was immeasurably more ready than newspapers here to treat the assassination as an outcome of a possible political plot within high echelons of effective American power.

Hundreds of circumstances and details pertaining to the killing, the suspected assassin, the assassination of the assassin, the behavior of the Dallas police, etc., etc., will give rise to a whole new field of literature. Scores of books will be written over decades, pointing out the incompatibility of accounts which are now being taken at face value. This literature will be justified by the truism that the closer we are to historic events in place and time the more difficult it is to perceive the truth about them.

In spite of all these disadvantages, the political observer cannot subdue his urge to theorize and speculate. Man's intellect includes a blind stubbornness about admitting ignorance; and we often pretend to know best that about which we know least, as witness religion.

Thus, on the assumptionnot necessarily correctthat we can already discern some major implications of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, we can choose between the theory that the President fell victim to a lone maniac, and the theory that his murder was carried through by an organized conspiracy.

The theory of the lone killer seems less feasible when one considers the perfectly smooth machinery of the assassination, plus the obvious glibness with which the authorities in Dallas came up with a quick and popularly acceptable solution of the case. Indeed the local head of police seemed eager to close the case in spite of the distinct possibility that it has not yet been opened. Serious questions arise. Why were the Dallas police so eager falsely to link Lee Harvey Oswald with leftist groups and causes? Why was it made possible for Jack Ruby to kill him? Did anyone help Oswald to establish a biography which would seem to link him both to the shooting and to an expedient political motive for it? Did anyone help him to get to Mexico when he went there in late September, and to apply there for both Cuban and Soviet visas? Under what circumstances was Oswald hired, so short a time before the Presidential visit, to work at the warehouse from which the fatal shots were allegedly fired? Was the trajectory of the fatal bullets consistent with the geographic relation between the target and the window from which the shots were allegedly fired? Did the public announcement of the route of the Presidential party give Oswald enough time to plan, prepare and place himself within the range of the target? If not, from whom did Oswald learn the route before it was publicly announced? Who knew the route before a public announcement was made of it? Why was Lee Oswald allowed to leave a building surrounded by police, and from which the U.S. President had been shot, merely upon establishing that he was employed in it?

As it is now clear that Oswald was not connected with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, what motivated him to make statements prior to the assassination which would enable the police to link him with that organization after the shooting? Was Lee Harvey Oswald a walking corpse, a fall guy, doomed even before the assassination to die? And if so, did he die after fulfilling an assassin's role, or only as a decoy? Was the assassin condemned to death by the very people who assigned him to shoot? If so, when did the execution take placewith the shooting of Lee Oswald, or with the shooting of Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippit? The first reports of the murder of Patrolman Tippit also related that a Secret Service man had been wounded; since then, nothing has been heard about that Secret Service man. What was his relation to Patrolman Tippit; and is it possible that the two were shot in a duel between them?

These and many other questions remain unanswered; but this does not necessarily mean that the answers are not known in Washington's upper echelons of power. On the contrary; if those in high circles had no answers at all, vigorous investigations would have been undertaken immediately, and many secrets exposed. The clues provided by the contradictions in the initial accounts are so voluminous that any swift and sincere investigation would undoubtedly penetrate the veil. If the assassin had acted all alone, or if he represented an insignificant group of fanatics, the formidable investigative machinery of the authorities could soon pick up the threads, without leaving us in the dark for even this long.

[Richard Coleman]

How Strong Is the Junta?

By M.S.Arnoni

The Minority of One, September 1964, [(Vol 7, No 9), 58)], pp.1, 11-15

To follow, the first page and a third of one of the very best pieces written in the year following the coup:

Quote

The United States is the site of a titanic power struggle, which has already cost it the life of one President, constantly endangers the life and Constitutional powers of a second, the incumbent, President, and may deliver the country to the whims of a military-industrial cabal, whose effective power even now brings to naught many a Constitutional provision. Concealed at this struggle remains from public view, it is nonetheless involves a constant danger of civil war, in which various services and units of the U.S. military would combat each other. This is not a struggle between "ins" and "outs"; the two competing camps are integral parts of the United States power structure. Their competition is for hegemony and as long as it is not resolved, each of the two contenders has to reckon with the existence and the factual veto power of the other. This state of affairs accounts for the fact at the present juncture the United States Government lacks the effective power to make decisive moves in world diplomacy.

The challengers of the Constitutional government are an aggregate of powerful forces within the executive and legislative branches as well as in private industry. Specifically, they include such organizations as the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Air Force and identifiable defense contractors. In Congress, the insurrectionists are so strong that on many important issues, and especially on arms procurement, the Government has repeatedly lost out to them. The cabal made concentrated efforts to influence the Presidential elections in 1960; in 1964, it is actually presenting its own candidate, Barry M. Goldwater, and hopes with him to capture the rest of the government as well as the cloak of Constitutional legality.

The junta controlling the insurrectionist forces is so power-entrenched that for years it has been blackmailing the White House and other echelons of the Constitutional power hierarchy into silence concerning the life-and-death struggle behind the scenes, President Johnson, even while offering determined resistance to the junta, does not dare openly to complain about its existence and activities. The U.S. Chief Justice, while investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, does not dare to tell the truth about it to this generation. Congress does not dare to turn down procurement requests of the junta even when they are made over the heads and against the explicit recommendations of the Administration. The Administration's reorganization plans for the armed services and for the intelligence agencies have been repeatedly over-ruled by the junta. Both the Administration and the armed forces are dangerously infiltrated by the insurrectionists. In most instances, the Administration's effective power does not suffice for the removal of these infiltrators, General Curtis E. LeMay, the Chief of the Air Force, being the most notable and frustrating case in point. In fact, General Curtis LeMay is one of the principal leaders of this rebellious junta.

Even though the allegations made here are the result of conjecture and speculation, the margin of error seems to be limited to detail, the specific composition of the junta and its specific undertakings; the actual existence of a wide rebellion in the ranks of the Administration and outside its immediate framework is presented as evident fact. Then, too, it is probable that in this conjecture there are more errors of omission than errors of statement.

The warning of the military-industrial complex,' which President Dwight D. Eisenhower sounded in his farewell address, remained something of a solitary voice in the maze of official U.S. pronouncements, but the concern which prompted it was more than shared by John F. Kennedy. Even before he had taken office, he had a study conducted with the view of asserting civilian authority over the military. The panel was headed by Senator Stuart Symington and included Clark M. Clifford, Kennedy's liaison aide with the retiring Eisenhower Administration, Thomas Finletter, one-time Air Force Secretary, Roswell Gilpatric, one-time Air Force Under-Secretary and attorneys Fowler Hamilton and Max Leva. The report of that study group was published around the middle of December, 1960, and made the following main recommendations:

* All defence funds would be appropriated directly to the Secretary of Defense, who would have authority to spend them as he saw fit.
* Service chiefs would report directly to the Secretary of Defense; the separate departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, with their various Secretaries, Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries, would be abolished.
*The Joint Chiefs of Staff would be replaced by a Military Advisory Council made up of senior officers who would be permanently separated from their respective services. The council would be headed by a Joint Staff Chairman, who would be principal military adviser to the President and the Secretary of Defense.
* Individual services would maintain their identity but would be subordinate to three separate commands: a Strategic Command, responsible for the strategic missions of all-out nuclear war; a Tactical Command, responsible for all limited war operations; a Defense Command, responsible for all continental defense missions. (Time magazine, December 19, 1960.)

Undoubtedly, the enforcement of these recommendations would suffice to bring an end to the virtually sovereign status which the military had gained and to re-establish its subordination to civilian authority. But it was precisely this potential effect which doomed the plan from the outset. President Kennedy knew how strong Congressional support of the military was and had no illusions about his chances to have curtailing legislation approved. Even Eisenhower's reorganization plan for the Pentagon, nowhere nearly as radical and sweeping as that of the Symington panel, remained unrealized despite the fact that Congress had approved it as far back as 1958. With Carl Vinson, the traditional defender of the war industry interests, as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Symington's recommendations would not stand a chance; the Congressman thought even Eisenhower's reorganization plan to be much too extreme.

Aware that a frontal attack on the usurped position of the military establishment could not be successfully undertaken, John F. Kennedy, upon becoming President, tried to curtail the military by gradual measures. By the middle of 1961, the controversy over the open participation of the brass in right-wing political activities had reached its point of culmination. President Kennedy gave his unqualified support to Senator J. W. Fulbright's campaign against the military sponsoring radical right-wing speakers, conducting "freedom" and Cold War seminars and otherwise participating in political propaganda directed to the armed forces as well as the civilian population. During a press conference on August 10, 1961, President Kennedy stated:

"The United States military, due to one of the wisest actions of our Constitutional founders, have been kept out of politics, and they continue their responsibilities, regardless of changes of Administration.

The problem always is how can the military remain removed from political life and how can civilian control of the military be effectively maintained…([i]The New York Times[i], August 11, 1961)."