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The unlikely instrument Hinckle and Scheer selected to achieve this ambition was Ramparts, a literary journal founded in Menlo Park, California, in 1962, by Catholic convert and millionaire Edward Keating (another man who owed much of his wealth to a good marriage, in his case to Helen English, a gypsum heiress). Brought in by Keating as his promotional director, then fired and hired back again, all in the space of the first year of publication, Hinckle set about trying to expand the magazine’s base of appeal beyond Catholic literati by covering such burning political

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issues of the day as the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam.35

Scheer joined Ramparts’ editorial board in 1964, after signing a contract written on a brown paper bag in a crowded New York bar, as part of this process of reinvention.

In addition to challenging what Hinckle saw as the “don’t rock the boat” attitude of the previous journalistic generation, the young editors of Ramparts thumbed their noses at other conventional wisdom of the news magazine publishing world. Although they eventually quit suburban Menlo Park for offices in a seedy neighborhood of San Francisco, they remained firmly rooted in the Bay Area, providing them with “a natural, relatively unspoiled talent pool,” as Hinckle described it, and enabling them to defy “the shibboleth that a national magazine need be produced from New York.” Moreover, whereas most previous left-wing publications had eschewed commercial ambitions and concentrated on minimizing their overhead by, for example, using “butcher paper,” Hinckle aimed to make Ramparts a well-produced, glossy title that would not only cover its costs but even make a profit. This he never achieved, inheriting as he did an operating deficit of about $100,000 from Keating—although Ramparts managed, at the height of its popularity, a laudable readership of 250,000.

Still, through a combination of attention-grabbing stunts and muckraking scoops, Hinckle succeeded in getting his magazine noticed well beyond the normal confines of the left, even being credited with inventing a new kind of journalism, “radical slick.”36

The noisy arrival on the national scene of the “new journalism” coincided with a sudden reversal in the fortunes of the CIA. Even during the late 1950s, there had been warning signs—most conspicuously, a botched attempt to unseat President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1958—that covert operations were not all that they were cracked up to be. However, it was not until April 1961, and the disastrous failure of an effort to topple Fidel Castro by landing a small army of Cuban émigrés at the Bay of Pigs, that the CIA’s Golden Age truly came to an end. The Kennedy administration, initially as enthralled by the Agency’s mystique as its predecessor, decided that the time had come “to take the CIA away from the Club” (as Arthur Schlesinger, now a White House aide, advised the president on April 21, 1961).37 “If this were the British government, I would resign, and you, being a senior civil servant, would remain,” JFK told DD/P Richard Bissell, the planner of the abortive operation. “But it isn’t. In our gov-

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ernment, you and Allen have to go.”38 Dulles stepped down in November 1961, his publicly brave face concealing a profound inner sense of humili-ation and betrayal; Bissell followed in February 1962. Their replacements, John McCone and Richard M. Helms respectively, both clearly conformed more to the Prudent Professional type than the Bold Easterner, stressing as they did “the need to develop more professional espionage and counterespionage operations” (a policy rapidly vindicated by the Agency’s detection of nuclear missile emplacements on Cuba in October 1962)

“and to tighten the discipline in the covert-action arena.”39 The advantage in the struggle between covert operations and intelligence, as old as the Agency itself, appeared at long last to be tilting in favor of the latter.