KEATING, Edward M. 1925-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born April 17, 1925, in New York, NY; died of pneumonia April 2, 2003, in Palo Alto, CA. Publisher, attorney, educator, and author. Keating is remembered as the founder of the left-wing magazine Ramparts. An attorney by training, he earned his law degree from Stanford University in 1950 after serving in the U.S. Navy for three years. He practiced law for four years before becoming a businessman, exploring various business options, including real estate. Raised in a Protestant family, Keating converted to Catholicism in his late twenties, and this eventually led to his founding in 1962 of Ramparts, which was originally intended to be a quarterly Catholic magazine for writers and intellectuals. Soon, however, it became noted as a left-wing monthly periodical with a circulation of 400,000. Keating's stand against the Vietnam War and strong pro-civil rights ideas made the magazine a leading voice for what was called the New Left. He had great sympathy for even the most radical African Americans, including the Black Panthers, hiring Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice, straight out of prison and publishing the writings of John Howard Griffin, among other black writers. Within the pages of Ramparts could also be found contributions by such authors as Susan Sontag and Seymour Hersh. When Ramparts was taken over by new investors in 1967, Keating was dismissed from his own magazine, which continued on only until 1975. He subsequently abandoned Catholicism for agnosticism and made an unsuccessful bid for Congress. Next, he plunged into anti-war activism, was chair of the West Coast Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and resumed practicing law. Typically, he defended underdogs such as Black Panther leader Huey Newton. An account of this experience was published in his Free Huey!: The True Story of the Trial of Huey P. Newton for Murder (1971). Keating was also the author of two other books, The Scandal of Silence (1965) and the novella The Broken Bough: The Solution to the Riddle of Man (1975), as well as a number of short stories.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2003, p. B19.

New York Times, April 12, 2003, p. A20.