The Realist

The Realist was a magazine of "social-political-religious criticism and satire",[1] intended as a hybrid of a grown-ups version of Mad and Lyle Stuart's anti-censorship monthly The Independent.

Edited and published by Paul Krassner, and often regarded as a milestone in the American underground or countercultural press of the mid-20th century, it was a nationally-distributed newsstand publication as early as 1958.

[8] Other cartoonists featured in The Realist included Howard Shoemaker, Dick Guindon, Mort Gerberg, Bhob Stewart, Jonathan Richards and Lou Myers.

[10] According to Elliot Feldman, "Some members of the mainstream press and other Washington political wonks, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, actually believed this incident to be true.

It worked because Jackie Kennedy had created so much curiosity by censoring the book she authorized – William Manchester's The Death of a President – because what I wrote was a metaphorical truth about LBJ's personality presented in a literary context, and because the imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men.

The Montreal police confiscated the issue and Rocke Robertson, principal of McGill University, charged student John Fekete, the supplement editor responsible for the publication, before the Senate Discipline Committee.

When the magazine ran into financial difficulties in the 1970s, it was the conspiracy theory element that attracted ex-Beatle John Lennon[3] to donate; saying, "If anything ever happens to me...it won't be an accident.