Ghosts of Iron Mountain

Starred review from February 1, 2025
In which a zany '60s leftist hoax becomes a progenitor of Trumpism. In 1967, Victor Navasky of theNation, with fellow pranksters that included publisher-cum-novelist E.L. Doctorow, concocted a fake government report that, among other things, revealed that the rationale for the Vietnam War and indeed all war was to keep the economy humming. The ground was fertile for such a revelation: As British journalist Tinline chronicles, a decade earlier sociologist C. Wright Mills had persuasively argued that the "power elite" were bent on creating a "dreamworld...in which war had 'become seemingly total and seemingly permanent' and was 'the only reality.'" When Dwight Eisenhower left office warning of the unchecked power of the military-industrial complex, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated by an improbable lone shooter, and when it dawned on Robert S. McNamara "that it's not the anti-war movement that is lost in a cloudland of illusion but the administration itself," the course was well laid for a Strangelovian conspiracy theory that held that the rich didn't much care if the planet was consumed by nuclear bombs as long as their bottom line held. The problem, as the report's true author, Leonard Lewin, soon came to realize, was that people took the hoax seriously, and even after the pranksters revealed that their left-wing hoax was just that, the report took its place in the dogmatic "deep state" literature of the far right. One enthusiastic adopter became a conspiracy unto himself, recruiting a right-wing cabal to spread the word. His "secretive mission," writes Tinline, "has something to tell us about how American politics got into its current state," where truth is meaningless thanks to what he calls "a resolute refusal to distinguish fact from metaphor." An account of a jest gone terribly wrong makes for fascinating--and eye-opening--reading.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2025
A satirical hoax launches decades of conspiracy theories, revealing pervasive (and occasionally destructive) anxieties about government power. Published in 1967, Report from Iron Mountain purported to present a top-secret government study into the economic collapse that was sure to befall the U.S. should peace be given a chance. Authored by down-on-his-luck writer Leonard Lewin, with the assistance of left-leaning luminaries Victor Navasky, E. L. Doctorow, and John Kenneth Galbraith, the book was released as nonfiction, tongue firmly planted in cheek, a Swiftian "modest proposal" for the Vietnam era. But while the book's premise was parody, it spoke to increasingly common fears about the power of the U.S. government and the military-industrial complex. That the events the book described never took place didn't matter: the story felt true. As diligently traced by Tinline, the fictitious report's depiction of an "evil cabal in the heart of power" would be seized upon by far-right conspiracy theorists and reflected in such mainstream cultural narratives as Oliver Stone's 1991 blockbuster film JFK, as well as contemporary complaints about the "deep state." Tinline offers nothing less than an alternative history of the late twentieth century, in which an off-beat satire ends up perpetuating the "paranoid style" of American politics.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.