Aside from that, Leonard Lewin has kept a fairly low profile. Then again, a great many authors from his era did -- even penning a single best-seller was no guarantee of success in the 60's-70's era of publishing, because styles were changing so fast. (Now, of course, things have sufficiently dumbed down to the point where there is only a market for 5 different books, tops -- way easier to judge a manuscript now! They might actually use computers.) My stepdad penned a NYT bestseller but you've never heard of him, and shit, he's barely heard of himself, either.
Yet Leonard Lewin makes a credible claim, namely that he wrote Iron Mountain as a parody. It would all be relatively straightforward if not for one weird detail: John Kenneth Galbraith has insisted that Iron Mountain is not only a genuine document, but a project he was actually a part of.
Statements made by John Kenneth Galbraith in support of authenticity
On November 26, 1976, the report was reviewed in the book section of The Washington Post by Herschel McLandress, the pen name for Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith wrote that he knew firsthand of the report's authenticity because he had been invited to participate in its creation; that although he was unable to be part of the official group, he was consulted from time to time and had been asked to keep the project secret; and that while he doubted the wisdom of letting the public know about the report, he agreed totally with its conclusions.
He wrote: 'As I would put my personal repute behind the authenticity of this document, so would I testify to the validity of its conclusions. My reservation relates only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public.'
Six weeks later, in an Associated Press dispatch from London, Galbraith went even further and jokingly admitted that he was a member of the conspiracy. The following day, Galbraith backed off. When asked about his 'conspiracy' statement, he replied: 'For the first time since Charles II The Times has been guilty of a misquotation... Nothing shakes my conviction that it was written by either Dean Rusk or Mrs. Clare Booth Luce. '
The original reporter reported the following six days later: 'Misquoting seems to be a hazard to which Professor Galbraith is prone. The latest edition of the Cambridge newspaper Varsity quotes the following (tape recorded) interchange: 'Interviewer: 'Are you aware of the identity of the author of Report from Iron Mountain?' Galbraith: 'I was in general a member of the conspiracy, but I was not the author. I have always assumed that it was the man who wrote the foreword - Mr. Lewin
Those who state that the book is really the report of a government panel state that on at least three occasions -- including one tape-recorded exchange -- Galbraith publicly endorsed the authenticity of the report, but denied that he wrote it.
A word about covert projects. I have just finished the (excellent) Howard Blum book "Out There," and the author implies that the entire subject of his book, the UFO Working Group, was never intended as an actual top-level commission...they were a red team. In other words, an actual ongoing clandestine study group had assembled these men and tasked them with uncovering as much as they could. They were under close supervision every step of the way and the value of the exercise was determining what, exactly, an interested third party could determine. They were testing the effectiveness of their own compartmentalization.
Please note that this is not rare or even unusual, but SOP in conventional DOD doctrine at every level of scale. (For instance, Seal Team Six got their start doing red team assaults on US Army and Naval barracks to give the troops some "realistic" combat experience. Which it was, because they demonstrated that a small, highly trained team of exceptional warriors could take over an entire US military base with ease.)
So I think it's a credible possibility that both Lewin and Galbraith were being used for a similar red team "investigation" project looking into Continuity of Government, and being used by an actual working group who had already devised and implemented a similar system.
I think it's equally credible, however, that Lewin really did write a satire, an arch in-joke, and Galbraith was playing along.
Anyways, here's Lewin's take:
The book came out in November, 1967, and generated controversy as soon as it appeared. It purported to be the secret report of an anonymous "Special Study Group," set up, presumably at a very high level of government, to determine the consequences to American society of a "permanent" peace, and to draft a program to deal with them. Its conclusions seemed shocking.
This commission found: that even in the unlikely event that a lasting peace should prove "attainable," it would almost surely be undesirable; that the "war system" is essential to the functioning of a stable society; that until adequate replacement for it might be developed, wars and an "optimum" annual number of war deaths must be methodically planned and budgeted. And much more. Most of the Report deals with the "basic" functions of war (economic, political, sociological, ecological, etc.) and with possible substitutes to serve them, which were examined and found wanting. The text is preceded by my foreword, along with other background furnished by the "John Doe" who made the Report available.
The first question raised, of course, was that of its authenticity. But government spokesmen were oddly cautious in phrasing their denials, and for a short time, at least in Washington, more speculation was addressed to the Group's members and of their sponsorship than to whether the Report was an actual quasi-official document. (The editors of Trans-action magazine, which ran an extensive round-up of opinion on the book, noted that government officials, as a class, were those most likely to accept it as the real thing.)
Eventually, however, in the absence of definitive confirmation either way, commentators tended to agree that it must be a political satire. In that case, who could have written it? Among the dozens of names mentioned, those of J. K. Galbraith and myself appeared most often, along with a mix of academics, politicians, think-tank drop-outs, and writers.
Most reviewers, relatively uncontaminated by overexposure to real-politik, were generous to what they saw as the author's intentions: to expose a kind of thinking in high places that was all too authentic, influential, and dangerous, and to stimulate more public discussion of some of the harder questions of war and peace. But those who felt their own oxen gored-who could identify themselves in some way with the government, the military, "systems analysis", the established order of power-were not. They attacked, variously, the substance of the Report; the competence of those who praised its effectiveness; and the motives of whomever they assigned the obloquy of authorship, often charging him with an disingenuous sympathy for the Report's point of view. The more important think-tankers, not unreasonably seeing the book as an indictment of their own collective moral sensibilities and intellectual pretensions, proffered literary as well as political judgements: very bad satire, declared Herman Kahn; lacking in bite, wrote Henry Rowen, of Rand. Whoever wrote it is an idiot, said Henry Kissinger. A handful of far-right zealots and eccentrics predictably applauded the Report's conclusions.
That's as much background as I have room for, before destroying whatever residuum of suspense may still persist about the book's authorship. I wrote the "Report," all of it. (How it came about and who was privy to the plot I'll have to discuss elsewhere.) But why as a hoax?
What I intended was simply to pose the issues of was and peace in a provocative way. To deal with the essential absurdity of the fact that the war system, however much deplored, is nevertheless accepted as part of the necessary order of things. To caricature the bankruptcy of the think-tank mentality by pursuing its style of scientistic thinking to its logical ends. And perhaps, with luck, to extend the scope of public discussion of "peace planning" beyond its usual, stodgy limits.
Several sympathetic critics of the book felt that the guessing-games it set off tended to deflect attention from those objectives, and thus to dilute its effects. To be sure. Yet if the "argument" of the Report had not been hyped up by its ambiguous authenticity-is it just possibly for real?-its serious implications wouldn't have been discussed either. At all. This may be a brutal commentary on what it sometimes takes to get conspicuous exposure in the supermarket of political ideas, or it may only exemplify how an oblique approach may work when directed engagement fails. At any rate, the who-done-it aspect of the book was eventually superseded by sober critiques.
At this point it became clear that whatever surviving utility the Report might have, if any, would be as a point-of-departure book-for the questions it raises, not for the specious "answers" it purports to offer. And it seemed to me that unless a minimum of uncertainty about its origins could be sustained-i.e., so long as I didn't explicitly acknowledge writing it-its value as a model for this kind of "policy analysis" might soon be dissipated. So I continued to play the no-comment game.
Until now. The charade is over, whatever is left of it. For the satirical conceit of Iron Mountain, like so many others, has been overtaken by the political phenomena it attacked. I'm referring to those other documents-real ones, and verifiable-that have appeared in print. The Pentagon papers were not written by someone like me. Neither was the Defense Department's Pax Americana study (how to take over Latin America). Nor was the script of Mr. Kissinger's "Special Action Group," reported by Jack Anderson (how to help Pakistan against India while pretending to be neutral).
So far as I know, no one has challenged the authenticity of these examples of high-level strategic thinking. I believe a disinterested reader would agree that sections of them are as outrageous, morally, and intellectually, as any of the Iron Mountain inventions. No, the revelations lay rather in the style of the reasoning-the profound cynicism, the contempt for public opinion. Some of the documents read like parodies of Iron Mountain, rather than the reverse.
These new developments may have helped fuel the debates the book continues to ignite, but they raised a new problem for me. It was that the balance of uncertainty about the book's authorship could "tilt," as Kissinger might say, the other way. (Was that Defense order for 5,000-odd paperbacks, someone might ask, really for routine distribution to overseas libraries-or was it for another, more sinister, purpose?) I'm glad my own Special Defense Contingency Plan included planting two nonexistent references in the book's footnotes to help me prove, if I ever have to, that the work is fictitious.
Via: http://www.prouty.org/lewin.html
