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Posts published by “Warren Hinckle”

Trapping the French Casanova

At one point in my tumultuous Executive Editorship of Ramparts Magazine in the 1960s, it seemed time either to retreat or send in reinforcements. So I bludgeoned Larry Bensky, the current victim on the sacrificial…

The Tunnel at the End of the Light

Beware the caption writers of the sixties. They lump it all as a decade of protest and malcontent, which it of course was. But to sloganize the whole slurs the very parts that make it…

Eyeball To Eyeball With The Jesuits

At various times during the checkered decade past (the 60s) I have been called licentious, a profligate, and adventurer, a sensationalist, a wastrel, a capitalist guerrilla, a boozer, a corporate wrecker, a degenerate, a wheeler-dealer,…

Catholic Reform School

My Catholic education taught me never to trust a priest under or over 30. They became quite vicious if anyone threatened their sense of authority or in any way profaned their pride, which I was…

Ransoming Pagan Babies

There is something to be said for the disadvantages of Catholic education, at least as it was in San Francisco of the logy, foggy 50s. For one thing, in grammar school I learned about ransoming…

Millionaire Publisher Declares He’s Broke (1974)

On the night before the Thanksgiving of 1964 I was comfortably seated in the neo-Edwardian lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City having a drink with Ramparts Magazine publisher Edward Keating. The occasion…

Anti-Smoking Expert All Wet

What do you do when you have to say, “I’m sorry”? If you’re the professor who holds the anti-smoking chairmanship at the University of California, San Francisco, you say it in small print, duck under…

Bill Clinton, Ireland, and SF Politics

Limerick, Ireland — On Cecil Street in the ancient fortress city of Limerick, there is a pub called Bill Clinton, named after the American you-know-what. Above the doorway Irish and American flags are wrapped in…

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