Muckraking SF journalist Warren Hinckle dies at 77

Journalist and author, Warren Hinckle waits for his turn to speak during a public hearing at the San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission in City Hall on Feb. 15, 2012, in San Francisco.

Journalist and author, Warren Hinckle waits for his turn to speak during a public hearing at the San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission in City Hall on Feb. 15, 2012, in San Francisco. Photo: Mike Kepka Photo: Mike Kepka Image 1 of / 33 Caption Close Muckraking SF journalist Warren Hinckle dies at 77 1 / 33 Back to Gallery

Warren Hinckle, a happily hard-drinking swashbuckler of San Francisco journalism who mixed leftist leanings with an everlasting contempt for the powerful, died Thursday. He was 77.

Mr. Hinckle had been in declining health and died of complications from pneumonia at a hospital near his home in San Francisco, said his daughter Pia Hinckle. He was surrounded by his family.

From his groundbreaking days of editing the iconic liberal magazines Ramparts and Scanlan’s Monthly in the 1960s and ’70s to his reliably irreverent columns for newspapers, including The Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, Mr. Hinckle delighted in tweaking anyone in charge of anything and muckraking for what he fiercely saw as the common good.

As the years went on, Mr. Hinckle was known as much for being a character of the city as for the journalism he produced. With his ever-present basset hound, Bentley, in tow, Mr. Hinckle held forth at watering holes and strip clubs, tossing off one-liners in a low growl like a late-night comic. Along the way, the one-eyed rapscallion — he’d lost his left eye in a childhood car accident and wore a patch — drew the wrath of mayors, police and anyone who got in his way, and he reveled in it.

“He had a great, great time, and no regrets,” said Pia Hinckle, who followed her father into a writing career. “He never looked back, and he was always looking for the next thing to do.”

Moments after his death just before 5 a.m., she said, “we had a drink for him around the bed. Jameson’s and Guinness. Last call.”

Mr. Hinckle’s renown extended far beyond San Francisco. Before he was 35, he had helped to change the way young journalists looked at their jobs.

One of the milestone moments for Mr. Hinckle came when he assigned Hunter S. Thompson to cover the Kentucky Derby in 1970 for Scanlan’s Monthly. The resultant rollicking article, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” not only launched the over-the-top, personalized journalism that came to be known as gonzo, it began a lifelong friendship between Mr. Hinckle and Thompson.

Mr. Hinckle’s final book, “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?” is expected to be published this year. He began writing it in 2005 and was making changes to the manuscript until near his death.

“It was kind of like the portrait of Dorian Gray,” said longtime friend Ron Turner, founder of the book’s publisher, Last Gasp Books. “If Warren stopped working on it, he’d die. He kept moving paragraphs around and changing captions, but now it’s finally ready to go.”

There is no mystery about how Thompson died — suicide — but Turner said he liked the title of the book because “Warren was so into conspiracy theories.”

That taste for conspiracy theories is part of what made Mr. Hinckle an effectively aggressive magazine editor, particularly as the U.S. was turned upside down in the 1960s.

While executive editor of Ramparts from 1964 to 1969, Mr. Hinckle pioneered “radical slick” — publishing early denunciations of the Vietnam War and diaries by such leftist figures as Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in a mass-marketed magazine. Under Mr. Hinckle’s direction, Ramparts garnered a huge national following and won the prestigious George Polk Award in 1966 for exposing CIA recruitment practices on college campuses.

The magazine began in 1962 in Menlo Park as a stodgy, intellectual Catholic publication, but when Mr. Hinckle signed on he moved the headquarters to San Francisco and tacked its direction hard left.

“Warren was the godfather of California — and, you could say, national — progressive journalism,” said David Talbot, whose book, “Season of the Witch,” details the tumultuous history of San Francisco from the 1960s to the early ’80s. “As a newsman, he just loved the ’60s as a story, with all its weirdness, from the Black Panthers to hippies in the Haight to the Kennedy assassination. No publication caught it better than Ramparts — it led directly to publications like Rolling Stone, Mother Jones and Salon,” the Web magazine Talbot co-founded in 1995.

“He was a great showman, too, and he knew that putting out each issue was like putting out a show ... like an album release,” Talbot said. “Each one brought controversies, drunken celebrations, government investigations, and he just rolled with it all.”

After Ramparts was buried under an avalanche of debt, Mr. Hinckle started Scanlan’s with a New York partner in 1970. Although it made a splash with Thompson’s Kentucky Derby piece and investigations of President Richard Nixon, in 1971 it too collapsed because of financial difficulties — as did Mr. Hinckle’s next short-lived venture, the Francis Ford Coppola-funded City magazine.

Mr. Hinckle then embarked on a career as a newspaper columnist for The Chronicle, Examiner and San Francisco Independent, earning a reputation for filing notes from a barstool or ambling into the newsroom just before — or after — deadline to bang out his prose. He also created and published, off and on, the quirky Argonaut journal from 1992 until 2012.

“He literally stands with the best,” said former Mayor Willie Brown, who was championed to run by Mr. Hinckle and now writes a weekly column for The Chronicle. “Warren’s imagination and his incredibly diverse interests made him unique. He was not Pacific Heights and he was not South of Market — he picked up all sides of the city.”

Even when he was no longer the boss, Mr. Hinckle answered only to himself. Chronicle reporter Steve Rubenstein, who worked alongside him as a columnist in the 1980s, recalled Mr. Hinckle dictating his copy “an hour from deadline from any of a number of watering holes in San Francisco, where his beverage of choice was not the same as Bentley’s.”

The scruffy Dovre Club Irish saloon in the Mission District was one of Mr. Hinckle’s favorites, and when it was forced to move a few blocks away in 1997 to make room for a building housing service agencies for women, he was so angry he tried to barricade the doors with his pals on its last day.

“Warren was a prize,” former Examiner editor Dan Brekke said of the writer, whom the paper hired in 1985 in a push to brighten up its pages with talent, including Thompson.

Brekke, now a reporter and editor at KQED-FM, said Mr. Hinckle “was seen as one of the fine Chronicle columnists, only more pugnacious and brawling.”

The long list of the high and mighty skewered by Mr. Hinckle included then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein in the ’80s. Incensed by police raids on the Mitchell Brothers strip club — where he often convened with Thompson to rail against restrictions of sexual expression — he once helped post the mayor’s unlisted phone number on the marquee with, “For a good time, call Dianne.”

Later, she dumped a drink on his head at a public event. “He loved it. It made his night,” recalled his daughter Hilary Hinckle.

In print, Mr. Hinckle at times pushed — or exceeded — the bounds of what some big-city journalists considered fair play. For all the people who praised him as a pioneering muckraker, there were some who declined to be quoted in his obituary.

In 1984, Mr. Hinckle railed against making “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” the city anthem by calling Tony Bennett “an over-the-hill Italian croaker” in The Chronicle. As editor of the Argonaut in 1995, he ran a notorious photo of then-Mayor Frank Jordan in a shower with two radio-show deejays, all pictured from the waist up — only Mr. Hinckle had it doctored to depict the mayor fully nude.

It wasn’t just in the newspaper pages where Mr. Hinckle’s influence was felt. He wrote more than a half-dozen books on subjects ranging from himself to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and in 1987 he ran for mayor, facing off one night with comedian and fellow candidate Will Durst in a debate moderated by Jello Biafra, lead singer of the punk rock band Dead Kennedys.

His most memorable campaign poster featured a plate full of dog feces with the words, “Tired of the same old crap?” He pulled 2.8 percent of the vote.

Warren James Hinckle III was born in San Francisco to Angela Hinckle, a native of the city who had survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, and Warren J. Hinckle Jr., a dockworker who died on a barstool at the Philosopher’s Club pub in 1972.

He was raised Catholic, attended Archbishop Riordan High School and, while earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of San Francisco, became editor of the campus Foghorn newspaper.

“Warren was always the smartest guy in the room, and at college he was smarter than the teachers,” said Chronicle reporter Carl Nolte, who was then working in media relations for the university and later worked alongside Mr. Hinckle. “But he was eccentric and wanted to be a character. So he became one.

“It wasn’t always pleasant dealing with him because he didn’t have any patience for anyone who wasn’t as smart as him, but people forgave him because he was full of ideas. He was like a comet.”

After graduating, he joined The Chronicle as a reporter covering mostly crime news, but soon moved on to his magazine work at Ramparts.

In 1974 he wrote an autobiography, “If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade,” and it served as a sort of manifesto for the puncher’s attitude he carried throughout his life.

“In the beginning, we all believed,” Mr. Hinckle wrote on the first page of the book. “We believed in many things, but mostly in America. If the decade must be summarized, it could be said that the youth of America, who had so recently studied it in civics classes, tested the system — and it flunked.”

Pia Hinckle said her father was filled with a crusading spirit to the last.

“Being an Irish kid with one eye from a not very wealthy family had a lot to do with it,” she said. “But honestly, I think a Catholic sense of social justice really drove him.”

Mr. Hinckle is survived by his longtime partner, Linda Corso; daughters Pia Hinckle of San Francisco and Hilary Hinckle of New York; a son, Warren J. Hinckle IV of Boston; a sister, Marianne Hinckle of San Francisco; a brother, Robert Hinckle of Reno; and five grandchildren.

The funeral will be held at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at SS Peter and Paul’s Church, 666 Filbert St., San Francisco. The public is invited.

Donations in Mr. Hinckle’s name may be made to St. Mary’s Medical Center Foundation.

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com

Twiiter: @KevinChron