encounters with Richard Nixon, jackbooted Canadian Mounties, San
Francisco Jesuits, Hunter S. Thompson, a barfly Bassett hound, rogue
CIA agents, William Randolph Hearst's grandson, and a drug-crazed
self-pleasuring monkey named Henry Luce. He recounted highlights of
his career and his views on the current state of the City in a
wide-ranging interview over a half dozen vodka tonics at the new
O'Reilly bar on Polk Street.
The gift for storytelling, the irreverence, the raucous sense of
humor, and the pride of ownership of the City are all features of
Hinckle's Irish San Francisco persona. His style of journalism is
currently in disuse, but it is not anachronism. He sees hometown San
Francisco as "a series of eccentric and colorful characters and
neighborhoods with their own local-fixture bars and people."
Hinckle's stories knit together an encompassing narrative of this
unique City experience. His old friend Kevin Starr considers Warren
Hinckle to be "the absolute last in a long line of colorful San
Francisco journalists, going back to the Gold Rush…I believe him to be
one of the most brilliant journalists to come out of this city in its
155-year history."
Hinckle grew up in the foggy, insular Sunset District of the 1940s and
50s and started writing for the Chronicle right after graduation from
USF in 1961. At USF he had "started having conflicts with authority"
so perhaps it was natural that he would end up doing stories for
Ramparts magazine, a liberal Catholic journal that became one of the
top journals of the 60's New Left. Ramparts consistently broke some
of the biggest stories of Vietnam War era at a time when most of the
mainstream press was solidly pro-war."
We took a conservative journalistic approach to these issues, which
turned out to be very radical at the time…most of the papers,
Washington Post, New York Times, were supporting the war in Vietnam"
and did not go after hard or critical stories. Ramparts became a key
source for investigative journalism, "for about four years we'd break
these stories and the New York Times would have to follow them, put
them on page one".
Hinckle laughs about it today, but the government regarded him and
Ramparts as a serious threat. "We had a lot of CIA stories, agents
coming and telling us how they were infiltrating American
organizations, national student association, the Boy Scouts, all this
shit." As author Angus McKenzie documents in his 1997 book Secrets:
"On April 18, 1966, Director of Central Intelligence William F. Raborn
Jr. notified his director of security that he wanted a "run down" on
Ramparts magazine on a 'high priority basis'" because they were about
to publish a story about the long history of the CIA's illegal
infiltration of American universities to monitor dissent and provide
technical and logistical support for the Vietnam War.
They rode out the government scrutiny without ending up dead or in
jail, but eventually the magazine lost popularity and folded. Around
1970 Hinckle started Scanlan's Monthly, according to John Dean's book
Blind Ambition "the magazine that Richard Nixon hated the most." In
those crazy, paranoid times Hinckle wrote about the serious
possibility of guerilla war in the US because "there was so much
unrest in the country around the time of Kent State".
Richard Nixon responded to these stories by having the magazine
destroyed at its Canadian printing plant: "the Canadian Mounties went
in at Nixon's behest, invaded the printing plant, beat the shit out of
the printers, then they grabbed the truck as they were coming to the
border with the papers, confiscated the printed copies of the goddamn
magazine…so they destroyed them all, and that was the end of the
magazine."
After several other print ventures and a Charles Bronson movie in the
mid-1970s Hinckle returned to the local dailies and began his humorous
and politically charged man-about-town columns that led to the H.L.
Mencken award in 1988 as the nation's best newspaper columnist. This
was the era of "fantastic pranksterism and journalism", and much of
the action centered on the Dovre Club, a classic Mission dive bar
barely lit by seedy green neon. Owner "Paddy Nolan became my best
friend, he was the alter ego for the Chronicle's many adventures and
stories". The sincere purpose behind this writing was "real advocacy
journalism combined with a sense of fun, to get the whole town
involved in an issue". Many of his issues involved the Irish
community, for example when he coordinated and then covered a special
reception for Princess Margaret at the Fairmont Hotel that included
the release of thirty filthy, squealing pigs in the lobby.
In 1983, they formed a "truth squad" to stalk Mayor Feinstein and the
Cork Sister City Committee on their annual visit to Cork City "to make
sure that there was no screwing around", and he reported back to his
readers on the progress of the trip, what the Mayor said and so forth.
"Boy was she pissed off".
It was during this tour that he met the illustrious Bernie Murphy who,
"as an alderman of the Cork City Council, was unique because he
couldn't read or write, and he had no teeth. "The Cork bookies got
him elected by putting a lot of money into his campaign." Bernie was
a very funny old guy and everybody loved him.
So they decided that Bernie should come to San Francisco "to the
horror of the Corconians…so we got him teeth, took him to the Dovre
Club, fed him Guinness, brought him to the Mitchell Brothers (strip
joint), packed the Irish Cultural Center to present him an award from
New College…all of these were front page stories in the Examiner."
San Franciscans loved these stories, "because this is a town that
thrives on its own crazy innards - its characters, and its
contrariness." Good writing brought out "all of these vibrant stories
and characters that made everybody feel good about San Francisco".
Unfortunately nothing like that is going on in journalism today.
He still talks like a fighting journalist about today's news; he is
for example a passionate defender of the RBA: "Joe O'Donohue's one of
my best friends, fuck all what everyone says about them, they're
right" about the deplorable state of housing construction here.
Hinckle now aims to re-launch The Argonaut, an old-new magazine
originally published by Ambrose Bierce here in the 1870s, which will
combine advocacy journalism with art and opinion. "The City is in
neutral right now, there is no narrative… we're going to give a
narrative to the city, an understanding of what the public's about…go
back to the neighborhoods as they are now, which are fun, and look
back a hundred or a hundred fifty years ago and come out of that with
a sense of 'hey, this is what this town should be' and then get political
issues out of that that you've got to oppose or promote".
Many of his readers sincerely hope that we will again be able to enjoy
his perennial talents in the future and continue to applaud his
amazing resilience in the face of many, many cocktails. Starr writes
"I do believe that Warren – now that he is approaching his eighth
decade – has achieved a kind of defiance against the ravages of time
and the peculiar demands of his lifestyle that should be examined and
noted in the appropriate scientific journals." As our friend Charlie
Meyers would say, 'take good care, friend Warren'.
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