In 1966, William F. Buckley hosted an episode of Firing Line titled “Is Ramparts Magazine Un-American?” Gesturing to his guest, Ramparts editor Bob Scheer, Buckley went on the offensive, saying, “Here is a man  . . .  whose magazine defends a lot of positions that are uniquely defended by communists. I don’t think he understands the consequences of it.” For Scheer, playing to a hostile audience, it was Buckley — a “Stalinist with an $11-million inheritance” who had a “contempt” for freedom.

The Firing Line host’s charges were hyperbolic, but the target made sense. Though forgotten today, it’s hard to imagine a New Left without Ramparts. The magazine played a key role in the rise of the Black Panthers, blew the whistle on the CIA more than once, inspired Martin Luther King Jr to speak out against the Vietnam War, and was granted exclusive rights to Che Guevara’s diaries by Fidel Castro himself. It gave a platform to Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Bobby Seale, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, Cesar Chavez, Murray Bookchin, Christopher Hitchens, and many more. It was, as Peter Richardson writes in A Bomb in Every Issue, “the journalistic equivalent of a rock band, a mercurial confluence of raw talent, youthful energy and high audacity.”

The magazine notably gave us David Horowitz, one of its final editors, who went from dour Marxist to anti-imperialist firebrand to right-wing reactionary in a few decades. But Ramparts alumni ended up all over the map: some landed on the far left (Maoist Bob Avakian is a former Ramparts researcher), others on the center left (three editors founded Mother Jones), and some drifted from politics to culture (two editors departed to found Rolling Stone). Even Fox News’s Brit Hume served as Washington correspondent for Ramparts.