Ramparts was established in June 1962 by Edward Michael Keating Sr. in Menlo Park, California, as a "showcase for the creative writer and as a forum for the mature American Catholic".
[2] The magazine declared its intent to publish "fiction, poetry, art, criticism and essays of distinction, reflecting those positive principles of the Hellenic-Christian tradition which have shaped and sustained our civilization for the past two thousand years, and which are needed still to guide us in an age grown increasingly secular, bewildered, and afraid".
[4] The early magazine included pieces by Thomas Merton and John Howard Griffin,[5] but one observer compared its design to "the poetry annual of a Midwestern girls school".
Its April 1966 cover article concerned the Michigan State University Group, a technical assistance program in South Vietnam that Ramparts claimed was a front for CIA covert operations.
That piece led Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to oppose the war publicly for the first time,[14] and he offered Ramparts the sole rights to publish the text of his speech.
Moving to monthly production, combined subscriptions and newsstand sales increased from just under 100,000 at the end of 1966 to nearly 250,000 in 1968, a figure more than double that of the liberal weekly, The Nation.
[23] The magazine also published articles written by Anthony Russo, one of the men involved in the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, about the RAND Corporation.
[24] The magazine's temporary shift to a biweekly format and an expensive trip to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention led to financial instability, as did a drop in subscriptions.
At Scanlan's Monthly, editor Warren Hinckle paired Hunter S. Thompson and illustrator Ralph Steadman for what is widely regarded as the first example of Gonzo journalism.
Robert Scheer later became a featured columnist in the Los Angeles Times, edited the Truthdig website, and appeared on the NPR program Left, Right and Center.