Hinckle, Warren. If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1990. 370 pages. First published in 1974.
In 1961, when he came aboard the new Catholic magazine Ramparts,
young San Franciscan Warren Hinckle was already a veteran newshound --
as well as a hardened parochial-school survivor not burdened with overly
romantic ideas about the Church. But given that time and place, Hinckle
wasn't destined to spend the next decade writing about liturgical reform.
Instead, as Hinckle chronicles in this take-no-prisoners memoir, Ramparts
unexpectedly became the leading magazine of the U.S. New Left, and broke
one mind-bending investigative story after another. Cardinal Spellman and
the pro-Diem lobby that greased U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Training in
torture for U.S. Special Forces. The CIA's use of Michigan State University
as a front for training Diem's secret police. The squeaky-clean National
Student Association as a CIA cutout. The philanthropic J.M. Kaplan Fund
ditto. Hinckle also gave an important early boost to critics of the Warren
Commission -- although he spells out their frequent excesses in the same
gleeful detail that he does his own. By the dawning of the 70s, Hinckle's
bet-the-rent managerial style, plus the changing times, had finished off
Ramparts. Hinckle himself, fortunately, is still with us.
-- Steve Badrich
ISBN 0-393-30636-4
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