GHOSTS OF IRON MOUNTAIN

In which a zany ’60s leftist hoax becomes a progenitor of Trumpism.

In 1967, Victor Navasky of the Nation, 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.