The Role of ‘Ramparts’ Magazine in the Campaign Against Pius XII

“The ramparts of Ramparts were used for attacking the Church, rather than defending it.” — Ramparts editor Warren Hinkle

During World War II the Catholic Church sheltered Jews and other victims of the Nazis, provided falsified travel documents to help them escape, distributed food and clothing to those who suffered, comforted the injured and grieving, and transmitted vital information to worried relatives. In Nazi circles it was axiomatic that Pope Pius XII sympathized with the Allies and assisted their cause. In the West he enjoyed near-universal acclaim for aiding Jews and other victims with diplomatic initiatives, frequent calls for peace, thinly veiled public condemnations, and an unprecedented continent-wide network of sanctuary. Yet, more than sixty-five years later, many people fault Pius XII for not publicly and repeatedly denouncing Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

The charge that Pius XII was overly tolerant of the Nazi regime was leveled by communist leaders and their agents toward the end of World War II and in the years immediately thereafter. Most people, however, trace the beginning of the so-called black legend of Pius XII to a play titled The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter), written by a then-unknown German playwright named Rolf Hochhuth. Not long after it opened in Berlin in 1963, Pius XII’s reputation flipped so quickly and so completely — without any new evidence being uncovered — that the Jesuit magazine America was prompted to ask the following questions:

What has happened since 1958 to erase with one sweep these informed and unsolicited tributes to the memory of Pope Pius XII? Why do they count for nothing when The Deputy comes to town? By what dialectic, or through what human fickleness, has a great benefactor of humanity, and of the Jews particularly now become a criminal?

As these questions suggest, this change in Pius XII’s reputation was not an organic result of honest inquiry. Something else was at play.

In early 2007 Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence chief and the highest-ranking official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc, wrote an article explaining that in the late 1950s Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev approved a plan to destroy the Vatican’s moral authority by smearing the reputation of the late pontiff. This marked a shift in post-war policy. Shortly after the war, the Soviets had framed numerous Catholic leaders, charging them with having collaborated with the Nazis. Among the best-known victims of these campaigns were Cardinals Beran of Prague, Stepinac of Croatia, Wyszynski of Poland, and Mindszenty of Hungary. Mindszenty, however, escaped captivity, obtained sanctuary in the U.S. embassy, and wrote memoirs revealing the Soviet duplicity. Some of the agents involved in the framing of Stepinac also revealed their techniques. This time, Khrushchev decided, disinformation experts from across the Soviet bloc would target the recently deceased Pope, who would not be able to defend himself.

With support from its satellite intelligence agencies (including the Romanian DIE, which Pacepa headed), the KGB purloined Vatican documents, shaped Hochhuth’s play, and had one of its longtime influence agents, theatrical legend Irwin Piscator, produce it in a new theater built for the express purpose of producing pro-communist propaganda in West Berlin. After a short run in East Germany, communist agents helped translate the play and get it published and produced around the globe. They also fomented discussion about Pius XII and the Holocaust in the media.

The Deputy premiered on Broadway on February 26, 1964, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. It ran for three hundred sixteen performances. Director Herman Shumlin won a Tony Award for the production. At the time, Shumlin was the only Broadway producer who advertised in the communist Daily Worker. In 1947 he had been fined and given a suspended sentence for failing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Just before The Deputy was about to open on Broadway, so many associates of the late Pope and other diplomats had spoken against its thesis that the play had become an international scandal. The National Council of Catholic Men and the American Jewish Committee were joined by Protestants under the name of the National Council of Churches in an effort to dissuade television networks from promoting what New York’s Cardinal Spellman called “an outrageous desecration of the honor of a great and good man.”

With the play’s ability to open in serious jeopardy, a little-known magazine from San Francisco, with Catholic roots and a communist future, took the lead in defending it. In fact, without Ramparts magazine, The Deputy might never have played on Broadway. (A few years later, similar concerns about the historical honesty of Hochhuth’s next play, Soldiers, kept it from opening at the National Theatre in London.) Hochhuth repaid Ramparts by granting the magazine one of the very few interviews he gave back then. It was conducted by Judy Stone, sister of I.F. Stone, a Washington publisher and muckraker who had been a Soviet intelligence agent on the KGB payroll (and who wrote in support of The Deputy).

Ramparts had been founded in 1962 by Edward Keating as a liberal Catholic quarterly. Soon, however, Keating became disillusioned with the Church. He apparently was offended in late 1963 by some Jesuits who agreed to write articles responding to criticisms of the Church. After seeing the criticisms, they backed out of their commitment, leaving Ramparts without sufficient content for the next issue. As Ramparts editor Warren Hinkle explained, “The holy beating these holy men gave Ed Keating was to prove pivotal in the leftward development of Ramparts.”

Keating said, “From now on, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy.” He solicited an article from a Louisiana priest that was critical of the Church’s record on race relations. Before it went to press, both the priest and his bishop tried to stop publication, but Keating ignored their requests and ran the piece. In the next issue, Ramparts called for a change in the Church’s teaching on contraception. In the same issue that promoted The Deputy, another article explored the “natural” connection between Catholics and the right-wing John Birch Society. Hinkle explained that Keating went from a “respectfully orthodox convert to a brazen anti-cleric who would make jokes in public and even in the presence of nuns about ‘taking a bite out of the Pope’s ass.'”

Both Keating and Hinkle had ties to M.S. (“Max”) Arnoni, publisher of the magazine A Minority of One. Former KGB Chief of Counterintelligence Oleg Kalugin explained in his book The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West that “A Minority of One was a highbrow magazine for the liberal American elite, and we decided to use Arnoni and his publication to further the Soviet cause in the United States.” Kalugin at first relied on his friendship with Arnoni to place KGB-written articles into A Minority of One. Later, Kalugin used the magazine’s financial difficulties to infiltrate it. Soon, according to Kalugin, Arnoni “unwittingly did the bidding of the KGB.” Wittingly or not, Ramparts also ended up serving KGB interests.

Hinkle said that he talked Keating into defending The Deputy. Keating was reluctant because he thought the play was “dramaturgically flawed.” Hinkle, however, appealed to Keating’s ego, arguing that “he could become famous overnight if he, a Catholic publisher, headed a committee to defend the Pope-baiting play.” Keating finally agreed — with a vengeance.

In early 1964, as the battle over whether The Deputy would open on Broadway was raging, Keating wrote articles supporting The Deputy for three different publications: Ramparts, This World magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. He also made an important appearance on WABC’s television program New York, New York defending the play. Keating’s biggest contribution to the debate over The Deputy, however, came when he released a wartime letter that had been written by Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, the archbishop of Iconium, to Emanuel Cardinal Suhard, the archbishop of Paris. In it Tisserant wrote, “I fear that history will reproach the Holy See for having followed a policy of comfort and convenience, and not much else.”

As soon as Keating made this letter public, Cardinal Tisserant issued a statement explaining that he had not been referring to Pope Pius XII or the Jews. Tisserant had written it in a fit of anger the day after Italy joined the war. “The pope’s attitude was beyond discussion,” he explained in a 1964 interview. “My remarks did not involve his person, but certain members of the Curia. In the dramatic period of the War, and what a period that was, Pius XII was able to guide the Church with invincible strength.” Tisserant told The New York Times: “It seems evident to me that the principles, reaffirmed by Pope Pacelli in his first encyclical, and repeated forcefully at every circumstance, above all in the Christmas messages of the war years, constitute the most concrete condemnation of the Hitlerian type of absolutism.” In fact, the Times published excerpts from an address Tisserant had given during the war in which he praised Pius’s wartime conduct. Nevertheless, the timing of Keating’s release garnered significant attention for the letter.

Tisserant’s letter apparently had been seized from Cardinal Suhard’s files by the Gestapo when the Nazis took Paris late in World War II. Precisely how it got from the Gestapo archives to Keating is unclear. It may have fallen into Soviet hands after the war and from there made its way to the magazine’s headquarters. Throughout the 1960s, Ramparts came up with many documents and stories that cast the Soviet Union in a positive light or its enemies in a negative one, and the sources of information were often hard to uncover. In his memoirs, Hinkle acknowledged his own suspicion about the source of some of the information received at the magazine, suggesting that it was either the KGB or a rogue operation from inside the CIA. He eventually took to setting up secret meetings and using coded language with his sources and, on occasion, with his staff.

Hinkle also played a big role in seeing that the Broadway curtain went up on The Deputy. By his own account, he invented an “ecumenical conspiracy” in support of the play. He formed a committee called the “Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the Right of The Deputy to be Heard.” He found “a few prominent Protestants,” like social activist John C. Bennett, author of Christianity and Communism Today, who agreed to join, but he had trouble finding any Catholic leaders who would do so. Hinkle spoke to one auxiliary bishop, “highly regarded for his liberalism, who told me he would rather endorse a company that put the picture of Jesus Christ on packages of contraceptives than get involved on the side of the author of The Deputy.” In desperation, Hinkle signed up some laymen he called “Catholic window dressing.” The laymen, Gordon Zahn and John Howard Griffin, were rewarded by later being named associate editors of Ramparts.

Hinkle also drafted two Jews: Rabbi Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Maxwell Geismar, a critic and literary historian. Hinkle described Geismar as “a wonderful man about whom I cannot marshal enough superlatives, who, from our chance meeting during the white-heat controversy over The Deputy, was to become almost instantly my closest friend, confidant, foster father, and soul mate, and the most important intellectual influence on the developing Ramparts.” This most important intellectual influence on Hinkle and Ramparts was an avowed Marxist who wrote the introduction to Eldridge Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice, a collection of essays written while Cleaver was in prison serving time for drug dealing and rape. (Cleaver later became a senior editor at Ramparts. He also joined the Black Panthers, was arrested following a shootout, fled to various communist nations, became disenchanted with communism, and returned to face charges.)

Hinkle later admitted that his ad hoc committee was “in the finest tradition of Potemkin villages.” It “barely had as many members as words in its cumbersome title.” It did, however, serve his purpose: “Armed with press release, we marched out to do murder in the Cathedral.”

Hinkle, who had never been to New York before, took over the town. He sent out provocative press releases and threw a catered press conference (likened by many to a party) in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. He sent long — and expensive — telegram invitations and followed up with telegram reminders to “everyone in New York City in possession of a pencil or camera.” In length, according to Hinkle, the telegrams were “somewhere between the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence, and kept the Western Union lady on the telephone for nearly three hours, as I dictated to her the names and addresses of an eclectic group of invitees drawn at whim and whimsy from the Yellow Pages.” Among the recipients of the telegrams were not only the major publications but also The American Organist, Bedside Nurse, Casket and Sunnyside, Detergent Age, Elementary Electronics, Floor Covering Weekly, and dozens of similar trade and industry publications.

It took far more money than a magazine like Ramparts would logically have been able to devote to such a project to pull this off, but Hinkle attracted a huge crowd. One photographer said it was the biggest press conference he’d seen since Adlai Stevenson conceded the presidential race. When a reporter questioned why no other members of the “blue ribbon committee” had showed up besides Hinkle and Keating, they said that the “room was too crowded.”

Ramparts’ defense of The Deputy overshadowed most of the news critical of the play in the lead-up to opening night, and it made sure the curtain went up. It was never really clear why the San Francisco-based Ramparts decided to promote the New York play or how it could justify the cost, but subsequent history sheds some light on the matter.

Ramparts dropped most of its Catholic identity shortly after The Deputy episode. In October 1964 Keating said that Ramparts “more or less” came from a Catholic viewpoint, adding that the magazine could be described as Catholic with a small “c.” Soon, and routinely, it began publishing “no holds barred” criticisms of members of the Catholic hierarchy — unprecedented in the Catholic press at the time. In December 1964 Ramparts took out full-page ads in major metropolitan newspapers announcing a shift in its editorial direction. The following year the president of the Catholic Press Association denounced the magazine as “unethical.” By 1965 Ramparts had an “ecumenical” editorial board. The October issue that year showed the late Pope John XXIII with a tear in his eye, because — according to Ramparts — his council, Vatican II, had lost its direction. In December the magazine described itself as “New Left,” not Catholic. Hinkle explained, “There weren’t enough Catholic laymen to write for and to buy the magazine. Besides, we got bored with just the church.”

In 1967 Time magazine editorialized, “No other left-wing publication in the U.S. pursues shock more recklessly or plays around more with facts.” As former Ramparts insider Sol Stern explained, “Ramparts would stretch or deny the truth to sell our counter narrative about America and the world.” He also said, “The passions that moved us were not those that moved the Founders. We were not liberals. We were socialists and anti-imperialists….”

Ramparts ran some early investigative reports on environmental degradation, warning about damage being caused by the Army Corps of Engineers. It also published stories attempting to link the CIA to the Kennedy assassination. It gave unprecedented coverage to the Middle East, usually taking anti-Zionist stances critical of official U.S. policy toward Israel.

In 1961 Ramparts managing editor Robert Scheer had co-authored a book defending Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution. The magazine later made a deal with the Cuban government to publish Che Guevara’s diaries, with an introduction by Castro. According to Stern, the agreement “required us to publish a Fidel Castro rant, filled with Communist propaganda and denunciations of American ‘barbarism.'” Stern explained:

We believed that the [Cuban] revolution was a great leap forward for the socialist cause. We followed the lead of one of our intellectual heroes, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills, in arguing that Fidel Castro was a new breed of revolutionary leader — more humanist, more open, even more hip than old-style bureaucratic Communists. In fact, we imagined Fidel and Che as fellow New Leftists.

Ramparts was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. One of the magazine’s best-known covers showed the hands of four of its editors burning their draft cards. Ramparts also embarrassed the CIA by revealing that the agency had backed the National Student Association, a pro-war student group, as part of its Cold War strategy. Explaining the magazine’s position in favor of withdrawing from Vietnam, Stern said:

I suppose you might say that such a withdrawal would have let the Vietnamese people “make their own history.” But the real reason that Ramparts was for total withdrawal of American troops was that we wanted the Communists to win and were sure that they would. In the view of most of the editors, the Communists were Vietnam’s rightful rulers.

It was not just America’s involvement in Vietnam that drew criticism from the magazine. “Instead of urging Americans to take pride in the founding ideals of the Republic,” Stern said, “Ramparts’ editors and writers were preoccupied with attacking America’s liberal institutions.”

While it no longer claimed a Catholic identity, until at least 1969 Ramparts devoted special attention to the Catholic Church. According to former communist and onetime Ramparts editor Peter Collier, Hinkle encouraged articles on “the new spirit of dissent” in the Church. Articles from this era opposed magisterial teaching on sexuality, especially Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on birth control; complained about abuse of authority by the Catholic hierarchy; and promoted leftist theology. Ramparts religion editor James F. Colaianni identified priestly celibacy, authoritarian­ism, suppression of socially aware priests, lack of communication, absence of grievance procedures, and summary disciplinary actions as some of the greatest structural problems in the Church.

Among the criticisms leveled against the Church was that she helped get the U.S. into Vietnam. Managing editor Robert Scheer argued that a cabal of American Catholics, but particularly New York’s Cardinal Spellman, had pushed the U.S. into the war. These Catholics kept the American public from seeing that the conflict was really a civil war, he said, and they wrongly kept communist leader Ho Chi Minh from ruling a united Vietnam. The cabal had “maneuvered the Eisenhower administration and the American press into supporting the rootless, unpopular, and hopeless regime of a despot,” the Catholic and fiercely anti-communist leader of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem.

An article from April 1966 proclaimed: “Every Catholic who is not a revolutionary, and is not on the side of the revolutionaries, lives in mortal sin.” All of the Catholic hierarchy, but especially the archbishops of San Francisco and Los Angeles, drew criticism for insufficiently embracing the civil-rights movement. Hinkle later explained, “The ramparts of Ramparts were used for attacking the Church, rather than defending it as Keating first intended.”

Ramparts eventually adopted a communist operational model, but that proved unsustainable. David Horo­witz, one of today’s leading neoconservatives, acknowledged having been a communist when he edited the magazine in the late 1960s. He explained:

Without a formal hierarchy at Ramparts, every issue that came up had to be debated. The need to justify decisions was not only time-consuming for us, but at times cruel to others, as I discovered when we attempted to reduce the mailroom budget at Ramparts and were met with a political revolt. The mailroom was staffed by members of Newsreel, a “collective” of radicals who had made promotional films for the Black Panthers and the Vietcong. They had no respect for our publication. The revolution’s pecking order had again shifted to the left, and we could not overcome the view that Ramparts was part of the power structure that needed to be overthrown.

When Ramparts collapsed once and for all in 1975, three of its principals formed the leftist magazine Mother Jones. They were supported in this effort by the Institute for Policy Studies, which has been linked to KGB disinformation campaigns.

CIA documents released under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that at least as early as 1966 Ramparts was a reliable outlet for Soviet propaganda. The CIA eventually devoted twelve full- or part-time agents to investigating Ramparts. They identified and investigated one hundred twenty-seven Ramparts writers and researchers, as well as nearly two hundred other people linked to the magazine who were suspected of advancing the Soviet cause. As we have seen, many of them today have admitted that they indeed were trying to advance communism.

The evolution of Ramparts from a Catholic literary magazine to a left-leaning political periodical and finally to a reliable anti-Catholic outlet for Soviet propaganda makes for an interesting case study. The clearest evidence of the transformation comes later in the 1960s, but the events surrounding The Deputy indicate that something other than honest journalism was already taking place in 1964.

It is time to look past the disinformation and see the truth. During and after the Second World War, the victims thanked Pius XII, the perpetrators despised him, and the rescuers pointed to him as their inspiration. These are the real witnesses. They are the people to whom we should listen.