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| Affiliation | Democratic |
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| Name | Edward Michael Keating |
| Address |
, California , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
April 17, 1925 |
| Died |
April 02, 2003
(77 years) |
| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Last Modifed | Thomas Walker
Jun 18, 2004 12:01pm |
| Tags |
Agnostic - Catholic -
|
| Info | The rise and fall of the American radical magazine Ramparts involved only a few years of the life of its founder, Edward Keating, who has died aged 77, but it changed his life and his faith.
A lawyer and businessman who became a devout Roman Catholic in his late 20s, Keating launched Ramparts in 1962 in Menlo Park, California (now part of Silicon Valley), as a quarterly literary forum for Catholic intellectuals. But it quickly took on a life of its own as he began to receive letters and ideas from black priests involved in the civil rights movement.
Keating realised this was the premier moral question of the day and he started printing articles on both race and the growing protest against the war in Vietnam. The magazine became a monthly and developed a secular approach and an editorial stance that unequivocally supported both causes, while maintaining a crisp and credible appearance.
On its own this might not have made much impact, but Keating was also a natural journalist and under his guidance Ramparts became the most important American alternative publication of its era. He published articles on topics that mainstream publications were ignoring, and also encouraged talented new young writers of the left, including Susan Sontag, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh (now with the New Yorker), the radical journalist Robert Scheer (later an editor of Ramparts) and John Howard Griffin (author of the bestselling Black Like Me, 1961).
Events that Keating seized upon included early reports of the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and the CIA's secret financing of the National Students Association so that it could vet students who travelled abroad and met communists. One Ramparts issue displayed dozens of photographs of wounded Vietnam children. This prompted the Rev Martin Luther King to publicly oppose the war. Keating hired Scheer because of an article he had written, but could not publish, about Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, and his support for the war. Ramparts ran the story.
Like many on the left at the time, Keating was not immune to the wiles of two charlatans of his time. He gave a job to Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice in 1968, in which he boasted about raping women. As a lawyer, he helped to defend Black Panther leader Huey Newton, a charismatic speaker but later the victim of a street drug murder. Keating wrote about Newton's case in a 1971 book, Free Huey: The True Story Of The Trial Of Huey P Newton For Murder.
The success of Ramparts caused Keating, author of an early book on Catholic denial of the Holocaust, The Scan dal Of Silence (1965), to confront more doubts about his faith. A few years after launching the magazine, he became an agnostic. Then in 1967, when new investors took control of the magazine's board, he was ousted as president and publisher. "They threw me out like an old shoe," he commented. His place was taken by Warren Hinckle, a journalist he had originally employed.
The magazine, which reached a circulation of 400,000 at its peak, closed in 1975. Meanwhile Keating continued in radical politics and teaching. After his dismissal, he ran unsuccessfully for congress as a peace candidate against the former child actress Shirley Temple Black, a Republican, and four others, and served as chairman of the West Coast Committee to End the War in Vietnam. He also continued to write and published short stories, novellas and, in 1975, Broken Bough, a book about science, philosophy and human nature.
Keating was born in New Jersey and his father was a prosperous industrialist. In 1940 the family moved to Menlo Park, where he went to school. During the second world war he served for three years in the US Navy in the Pacific and then entered Stanford University law school, graduating in 1950. He only practised law for four years before going into business, including the acquisition of commercial properties, in which he prospered as California boomed.
He was raised as a nominal Protestant but converted to Catholicism in 1954. He later taught English at the University of Santa Clara. He used his own private wealth and money from his wife Helen to found Ramparts, but never imagined in the early days what the magazine would become. His achievement was in allowing and encouraging that.
His papers, including recordings of conversations with Black Panthers in the 1960s, were donated to Stanford University.
Keating is survived by his six children, three sons and three daughters.
· Edward Michael Keating, radical publisher and author, born April 17 1925; died April 2 2003
[Link]
(AP) - Edward Keating, activist and founder of the Catholic magazine Ramparts, died April 2 of pneumonia. He was 77.
Keating used Ramparts to fight the hypocrisy he saw in the church. Ramparts eventually grew to a circulation of 400,000, taking on other centers of power, particularly the federal government.
During the 1960s, the New Jersey native's idealism drove him to start the leftist magazine, which became more political over the years, but also to defend Black Panther leader Huey Newton, and to lead the West Coast movement against the war in Vietnam.
Frustrated with the Catholic Church, Keating became an agnostic. He spent his last years practicing law, teaching and writing fiction.
Keating is survived by six children and six grandchildren.
[Link]
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