Fall of the Archangel

Muckraking Ramparts magazine has uncovered dark plots all over the place --in Dallas, in the CIA, in Michigan State University. Last week it discovered a plot in still another place--Ramparts magazine. Early in the week three Ramparts employees were fired by Editor Warren Hinckle, who said darkly that they were "plotting against the magazine and we couldn't allow that." At week's end the conspiracy culminated in the removal by the board of directors of President and Publisher Edward Keating, who had started the magazine in the first place.

Keating and Hinckle had been at loggerheads for a long time. There were no ideological differences: both are doctrinaire leftists with a passion for disparaging U.S. policies and institutions. The disagreements were largely over money and approach. Keating, the magazine's financial archangel, charged his opponents with "fiscal irresponsibility" and an "inability to practice budgetary controls." Circulation of the last issue was 228,730, more than half newsstand, but the magazine is still losing money at the rate of $350,000 a year. Hinckle believes he can break even by raising another $250,000--and without Keating.

The Case of the Hollow Heel. Keating ran out of ready cash two years ago and tried to raise more money from other sources. His efforts failed to impress his editors. As they tell it, he once made a trip to Chicago to see if Playboy's Hugh Hefner could help. It took some doing just to see Hefner. "He was always sleeping or swimming in his pool," recalls Managing Editor Robert Scheer. When Keating finally got to Hefner, he drew a blank. By contrast, Hinckle and Scheer succeeded in selling stock to assorted wealthy sympathizers like Frederick C. Mitchell, a University of Kansas history professor, who has put $300,000 into the magazine.

Hinckle also quarreled with Keating over story ideas. While Hinckle favored conventional exposes of the CIA and the Warren Commission Report, Keating proposed more offbeat investigations. He suggested sending an undercover man to Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish to poke around a rumored "slave camp" for civil rights workers. Not only that, charged a Ramparts man, he even wanted to equip the gumshoe with a hollow heel containing a compass--so that he could find his way back again.

Keating let it be known that he has only begun to fight. Denouncing the board meeting that ousted him as "illegal," he called a stockholders' meeting for May 8 to present his case. He also demanded the return of a $215,000 loan that he claims he made to Ramparts, threatens to go to court for the cash. "I put $860,000 into the magazine," Keating said on television, "and they threw me out like an old shoe. That's the history of Ramparts. When people are no longer financially important, out they go."

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