The New Yorker, May 6, 1996
Before “Primary Colors,” before the Unabomber’s manifesto, there was “Report from Iron Mountain,” a top-secret document by an anonymous “Special Study Group” brought together during the Kennedy Administration to assess—in the words of the report’s subtitle—”the possibility and desirability of peace.” Lasting peace is unlikely, it concluded, because war “fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained.” As substitutes for war, the report suggested “alternate enemies,” such as environmental pollution, fictional extraterrestrials, and state-sanctioned slavery.
The report’s 1967 publication, by Dial Press, set off a debate over its findings and frenzied speculation about its authorship. The book was an instant best-seller, but over the years interest subsided, and it eventually went out of print. Then, in the late nineteen-eighties, the incipient militia movement rediscovered “Report from Iron Mountain” and began citing it as evidence of a government conspiracy to restrict individual liberties and impose a United Nations-dominated New World Order.
One day in 1966, the staff of Monocle (a “radical sporadical” humor magazine edited by Navasky) spied a news item about a dip in the stock market which was attributed to a “peace scare.” The staff instantly shifted into satire mode. Navasky contacted Lewin, who agreed to write a suppressed government ”report,” and Doctorow, then the editor-in-chief of Dial Press, who contracted to publish it.
But, for “Report from Iron Mountain” to succeed, people had to be convinced that it was genuine. Doctorow presented Lewin’s perfect rendering of bureaucratic think-tankese to Dial’s marketing and sales force as he would any other serious nonfiction book. Lewin devised a foolproof method for evading questions about its origins. “I became an expert in tautology,” he recalled. “I’d simply say, ‘All I’m permitted to tell you is that it is what it is.’ “
Doctorow said, “While most of the reviews mentioned the possibility that it was a hoax, Leonard had done such a superb job that the book was always poised on the verge of plausibility.” John Kenneth Galbraith, who was privy to the deception, vouched for its authenticity in a pseudonymous Washington Post Book World review, writing, “My reservations relate only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public.”
In 1972, Lewin confessed to writing “Report from Iron Mountain,” and he thought that the whole caper would be forgotten. When he discovered that right-wing publishers were reprinting the book themselves, he sued for copyright infringement; hundreds of bootleg editions are now lying around his house. “The more Leonard denied that the book was real, the more the right-wing conspiracy theorists thought he was part of the government plot to cover it up,” Navasky said with a chuckle. As George Eaton, the publisher of the pro-militia Patriot Report, told the Wall Street Journal last year, “It was an official document done by the will of the President and secreted away so that it wouldn’t be released to the public.”
Between sips of coffee, the three men noted the irony of a New Left book’s being revived by the New Right. “There’s a theory in literary criticism which holds that a book can have a meaning entirely different from the one its author intended,” Doctorow said. “So, Leonard, I’m afraid you’ve been deconstructed. How does it feel?”
“Terrible,” Lewin moaned, fingering his much misunderstood book. “But, deconstructed or not, I’m not doing any book tours in Montana.”