R.I.P. Paul Krassner, Satirical Godfather of Fake News
Talking humor and hoaxes with the legendary satirist and independent press pioneer, who died last week at age 87.
By Jesse Walker
Back in the 1960s, long before the phrase “fake news” had come into general circulation, a magazine called Cheetah published a premature obituary for the journalist and satirist Paul Krassner. Krassner had committed more than a few hoaxes himself over the years, so he took the prank in good humor; when a guy from the AP called to see what was going on, he explained that the obit had been a joke.
“Are you sure?” asked the reporter.
“Of course,” Krassner replied. “I would tell you if I was dead.”
On July 21, Krassner really did die, at the age of 87. He had led a rich life: He’s one of those figures who was present at all kinds of vivid historical moments, from the tribulations of Lenny Bruce to the trial of Patty Hearst. He is best known for founding and editing The Realist, which is sometimes called the first underground newspaper but was much more varied and interesting than that label might suggest. While it was being published — initially from 1958 to 1974, with a return engagement from 1985 to 2001 — The Realist was a wild free-speech zone that went out of its way to tweak taboos, including the taboos held by its own readers. It ran incisive interviews, freethinking commentary, and articles by figures ranging from Richard Pryor to Kurt Vonnegut to Jean Shepherd to Norman Mailer (who became Krassner’s father-in-law for a spell).
Krassner’s magazine was most famous, and infamous, for blurring the line between satire and journalism. This was especially true in the editor’s own writing: Krassner came to consider himself an “investigative satirist,” inserting as much reality as possible into stories that eventually took a grotesque or absurd or deeply paranoid turn, leaving many readers stumped about how much of the articles they could believe. His best-known hoax was “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” published in 1967, which was framed as a series of outtakes from William Manchester’s The Death of a President; it begins with some perfectly true material but builds to a scene where someone catches Lyndon Johnson in an act of necrophilia with one of the president’s wounds.
But that wasn’t Krassner’s only claim to fame. He was a child prodigy violinist who played Carnegie Hall at age six. He co-conceived and sold one of the most memorable posters of the ’60s: It said FUCK COMMUNISM!, with the word “Fuck” decked out in a red, white, and blue stars-and-stripes pattern. (He used some of the profits to send the antiwar writer Robert Scheer to Vietnam.) He co-founded one of the more colorful offshoots of the counterculture, the Yippies, and he gave the group its name. He served as publisher of Hustler during Larry Flynt’s born-again Christian period. He coined the term “Twinkie defense.”
You could fill a fat book with stories about his adventures, and
indeed Krassner did just that: His memoir, Confessions of a Raving,
Unconfined Nut, is one of the most entertaining autobiographies I’ve
ever read. Despite his history of hoaxing, I’m inclined to believe it’s
all true, or at least as true as any other memoir. I even believe the scene where he loses his virginity beneath a portrait of Alfred E. Neuman in the offices of Mad magazine.
The below interview took place in 2012.
Walker: When you started The Realist, did you conceive of it primarily as a humor magazine or as a freethought journal?
Krassner: Well, what inspired it was I was doing freelance stuff for Mad magazine. You had to pitch an idea and then they’d assign it to an artist. The first thing that I got published in Mad was “If Comic Book Characters Answered Those Little Ads in the Back of Magazines.” And so it was, you know, Little Orphan Annie getting Maybelline because she had those blank oval eyes, and Dick Tracy getting a nose job, and Alley Oop getting facial hair removed. But they took out Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend, who was objectively flat-chested, sending away for falsies.
Bill Gaines [Mad’s publisher] said, “My mother would object.” And I said, “She’s not a typical subscriber.” And he said, “No, but she’s a typical mother.” At that point, circulation had gone up to a million and a quarter. And so I said, “I guess you don’t want to change horses in midstream,” and Gaines said, “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass.”
So it was frustrating. There was no adult satirical magazine at that point. This was before Spy, before National Lampoon, and before other outlets for good adult satire. So that’s what inspired it, combined with Lyle Stuart, who was my mentor at The Independent — [a 1950s monthly that] was a forerunner to the alternative press. I started out selling book orders and ended up being the managing editor. Lyle Stuart was buddies with people who put out a freethought magazine called Progressive World, and so they offered me access to their publishing list. It had about 3,000 names and I offered them a subscription to The Realist, and if they didn’t like the first issue, then they get their money back. And of about 600 subscribers, only one asked for his money back.
At the beginning, it was maybe 50 percent satire and 50 percent items about church and state and the lack of separation. And even then — there were 18 states that had laws against contraception — I lost a couple of subscribers who…a lot of the freethinkers were kind of old and conservative about sexuality.
Walker: In 1991 you wrote, “The Realist never labels an article as satire or journalism in order not to deprive you the pleasure of discerning for yourself whether it’s actually true or metaphorically true.” Did that start as a deliberate decision to make the reader question what he was reading, or was that something that just evolved?
Krassner: I think I realized it early on, as I got a lot of reader feedback. Sometimes something meant as satire was so close to reality that they took it as investigative journalism. And vice versa: There would sometimes be a serious report of what happened, and people would take it as a satire because it was such a bizarre story. I hadn’t labeled them because I assumed they would be recognized for what they were.
And so it culminated with “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” I started it with something that was public knowledge: Lyndon Johnson during the primaries referred to JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, as a Nazi sympathizer. And that was a fact. I would peel layers off it and talked about the affair with Marilyn Monroe, which reporters knew about but was never reported. And just layer after layer, so when I got to the necrophilia scene, it had been like a seduction.
Walker: When you published Mae Brussell’s piece on Martha Mitchell [a very early Watergate conspiracy article, written in 1972], there was a lot of skepticism. This is in your book: “It had been five years since I published ‘The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book,’ and I began to feel like the little boy who cried ‘wolf!’” I wondered if you could talk a little about that skepticism and how it manifested in the context of you being sort of infamous for publishing hoaxes and satires.
Krassner: I don’t know if that much had to do with it, because there was nothing really funny about this. I think it was more that I lost credibility.
When she died, I said that if Mae were alive, she would be convinced that she had died from a conspiracy. It just became her life’s work. She would be in line in a supermarket and start talking to somebody and say, “Do you think that so-and-so really committed suicide?” (laughs) She would talk to strangers about it. And I understood, because when I got into it, I felt like I was on a mission from the God I didn’t believe in. [Krassner fell into a period of intense conspiracy theorizing in the 1970s, which culminated with what he later described as a breakdown.] But there was also a feeling that I see with a lot of conspiracy researchers. I don’t want to generalize, but some of them really have their identity tied in it so much because they feel they know something more than other people — but they want to share it. I told one 9/11 movement guy, I [brought up Popular Mechanics’ effort to debunk 9/11 conspiracy arguments]. And they said, “Oh, Popular Mechanics, that’s a Hearst magazine.” So they were already prepared. I realized they rationalized their belief system when they believe they have an absolute truth. And I went towards everything as a subjective truth. I realized you couldn’t argue with them any more than you could argue with people outside abortion clinics.
Walker: There was this made-up quote in the Paul Kangas article you ran. [In 1991, The Realist published an article by Kangas claiming to link presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush to the JFK assassination. Krassner later learned that it included a fabricated quote, which Kangas tried to justify by saying he was “trying to smoke out the truth.”] Do you remember this?
Krassner: Oh, absolutely. I was furious with him. And I apologized and straightened it out in the next issue. [Krassner misremembered this slightly: It was two issues later.] And I don’t answer his calls.
Anyway, Bob Wilson had this book [with] a lot of different conspiracy stories in there, a great many, in encyclopedia form. But he had one conspiracy report there that he made up, which I appreciated, just to keep himself pure. And I don’t know if I ever knew which one it was. [The libertarian writer Robert Anton Wilson, whose corpus included several satiric novels about conspiracies, was a frequent contributor to The Realist.]
Walker: I always thought there was a really strong parallel between what you were doing in your investigative satires and what he was doing in his conspiracy spoofs. You were both taking this information that was out there and then assembling it into this coherent picture. Not really to debunk or espouse conspiracy — except when you fell into yours — but just kind of to mine it for understanding the truths lurking underneath it.
Krassner: Oh, yeah. When The Realist changed from magazine to newsletter, I gave him a clipping about some kind of orgasm conference in India. And I assigned him to write his report on the orgasm conference as if he had been there. And so he did that. And there was another one like that — a married priest convention — and he wrote that too, as if he were there.
It was the same purpose. He would write these things that kept their balance between credible and incredible. Again, it’s a kind of seduction, because it has to have some truth to it to give it more sense of credibility. I could never start an article saying that Johnson was fucking Kennedy in his throat wound. You had to lead up to it.
Last night, I performed at a gay bar after a drag queen show and signed copies of Pot Stories for the Soul. The guy who introduced me, who was an old fan of The Realist, tried to say how The Realist changed his life. He said, “It was never the same when I read this piece about Lyndon Johnson fucking Kennedy in the throat wound.” And he’s introducing me at an event Saturday, and I just emailed him today. I said, “Please skip that ‘fucking in the throat wound’ thing, because it’s too much out of context to give to people.”
So, yeah. Wilson liked to play these games. He liked to fool people and keep them guessing. And I think he did a lot of that in the Illuminati trilogy.
Walker: What was the editorial process like with him?
Krassner: I would just tell him not to censor himself and hold back. If there was something I didn’t understand, I would have to assume I was the common denominator of the reader, and so I would ask the most questions. I would have to look up words in the dictionary when I was reading his manuscript, and I figured the reader would have to look it up too if they didn’t understand what it meant.
He would do a thing on Ezra Pound’s poetry. And I really didn’t quite understand it, but it was interesting that he could transcend the Nazi aspect of him and just deal with this poetry. Because he was a taboo, you know. So for me, it was like, “Can you separate art from the personality of the artist?” It’s like Wagner.
Walker: You ran that George Lincoln Rockwell article with the introduction on how to cancel your subscription to The Realist. [Rockwell was the head of the American Nazi Party. The article, published in 1962, was about Philadelphia’s efforts to block one of his rallies.]
Krassner: Oh, yeah.
Walker: How did that originate? Did he send it to you, or —
Krassner: No, I had already interviewed him. And so he read The Realist then. When the JFK thing was published, he called me and said, “For a Jew, you’ve got balls of steel.” Something like that. Flattery will get you nowhere.
You know, when I interviewed him, [and he was] spouting anti-Semitism and racism, I remember saying to him, “OK, this will be the June issue.” And he said, “The Jew issue?” I ended it right there.
I don’t think I ever assigned anything to him. He sent that to me, and I thought it would shake up readers. But I thought it was making an interesting point, and if it wasn’t under his byline, people might have a different approach to it.
Walker: I asked earlier about the reaction to Mae Brussell’s piece. Was there ever a problem with other serious investigations that you published after that, where people just assumed you were pulling their leg? I remember you published a piece on George W. Bush in 2000, and I saw this heated argument online about whether it was a spoof or a real leak. And I was pretty sure that one was a spoof. [The article claimed to be the report of a private investigator hired by the Bush campaign to dig up oppo on their own candidate, along with the campaign’s analysis of the information.]
Krassner: Oh, yeah. You know who wrote that? It was written by Nick Kazan, the screenwriter. I did more editing with him, because he didn’t know what form to take it in. He loved the fact that people weren’t sure about it.
Walker: Besides your connection with one of Ford’s would-be assassins [Krassner met Squeaky Fromme while researching an “investigative satire” about Charles Manson], you brushed up pretty close against the Larry Flynt assassination attempt [Krassner was working for Hustler when Flynt was shot] and the Andy Warhol assassination attempt [Krassner had lunch with Valerie Solanis a few days before she shot Warhol]. Did you have any of those old paranoid feelings being sparked again?
Krassner: Squeaky Fromme, Andy Warhol, and Larry Flynt. I guess it must have been the Krassner curse.
Walker: These people survived, though. If you had met Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby Kennedy would be president.
Krassner: (laughs) I saw a poster recently, which has become my favorite poster. A real placard, it wasn’t photoshopped. It said, “What do we want? Time travel! When do we want it? It’s irrelevant!”
A version of this interview first appeared at Reason.com.
Jesse Walker is an editor at Reason magazine and the author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. Find him on Twitter @notjessewalker
Production DetailsV. 1.0.0
Last edited: July 28, 2019
Author: Jesse Walker
Editor: Alexander Zaitchik
Artwork: The Realist Archive
