On January 23, three days into his second term, Donald Trump mandated the release of all remaining classified files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Unlike the other 36 executive orders he signed that week, this one was perfectly harmonious with U.S. law—in this case a 1992 bill called the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act—even if it also struck a chord with him personally.
The J.F.K. Act was drawn up and passed just months after the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK, which ended with a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington–style plea for the government to open its unseen archives to the public. As Phil Tinline writes of the $40 million production in his new book, Ghosts of Iron Mountain, “It was the most expensive Freedom of Information request ever made.”
But the key to the film, and to Stone’s own theory of the conspiracy, is the famous “X” speech. In the scene, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) meets an unnamed former Pentagon official identified only as X (Donald Sutherland) on the National Mall. As the two men stroll by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, X divulges a series of shocking revelations: Kennedy was preparing to end the Vietnam War, slash military spending, disband the C.I.A., and make friends with the Soviets. “All that ended,” he says, “on the 22nd of November, 1963.”
It’s a long speech, loaded with references to various national-security memos and obscure Cold Warriors, but X helpfully sums it up for Garrison, and the audience, when he says, “No war, no money. The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war.” Here, then, was the motive, the answer to what X calls “the most important question: Why? Why was Kennedy killed?”
When Garrison asks if he’ll testify, X replies, “No chance in hell. I’d be arrested and gagged. Maybe sent to an institution.” But the real-life basis for the character, former air-force colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, was determined to speak out, come what may. In a 1992 book, he revealed the source for his secret knowledge: a “suppressed” think-tank paper called Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.
Published by the Dial Press in 1967, the document was said to have been leaked to the writer Leonard Lewin by “John Doe,” one of 15 pseudonymous experts summoned to a camouflaged nuclear bunker in upstate New York for the purpose of gaming out an end to armed conflict. After much consideration, the “Special Study Group” concluded that “permanent peace” would be a catastrophe. Or, as they put it, in a line quoted by Prouty and re-worded only slightly in JFK, “the organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer.”
Although Stone, in his introduction to Prouty’s book, writes that the “fabled” report was commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, in fact it was a hoax. There never was any John Doe, only Lewin and his colleagues at Monocle, a short-lived but influential journal of political satire (not to be confused with the humorless lifestyle magazine of the same name). Its motto: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
The Hoax That Would Not Die
One morning in January 1966, Monocle’s editor, Victor Navasky, read a short news item about a dip in the stock market reflecting fears that “cutbacks in military production would cause widespread economic dislocations”—what was known on Wall Street as a “peace scare.” From this bit of found irony came an absurd yet all too plausible idea: What if a government-appointed task force decided that peace and prosperity were incompatible?
Lewin wrote the report, with input from economist John Kenneth Galbraith, among others, in the unnervingly unsentimental mode of Herman Kahn, the author of On Thermonuclear War and an inspiration for Dr. Strangelove. Dial’s publisher, Richard Baron, and its then editor, E. L. Doctorow, agreed to market the book as nonfiction without clueing in their sales team.
They made enough of a splash to merit a front-page story in The New York Times about the debate over the report’s authenticity, though it was clear that most early readers were impressed but not fooled: “Generally publishers, reviewers and Government officials who have seen advance copies consider the book a hoax.” (Possibly they were tipped off by the proposed substitutes for war, which included blood games and the re-introduction of slavery.)
Lewin finally dropped the charade in 1972. “The satirical conceit,” he wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “has been overtaken by the political phenomena it attacked.” Actual state-sponsored studies such as the Pentagon Papers “read like parodies of Iron Mountain, rather than the reverse.” With this confession, he put to rest “whatever residuum of suspense may still persist” about the book’s origins, once and for all.
Or did he? In the mid-1980s, Lewin discovered that Report from Iron Mountain had found a new following, despite being out of print. Pirated copies were being sold by entities linked to Willis Carto, a Holocaust denier once described as “the major engine behind right-wing conspiracism in the United States.”
“Does editor Leonard Lewin’s claim of authorship represent the truth?” read the new jacket copy. “Or was it just another game being played with exceptional cunning and skill?” Lewin sued Carto, who was represented by noted J.F.K. conspiracist Mark Lane, for copyright infringement. He won $100,000 in damages plus a thousand or so copies of his own book.
Then, in the aftermath of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, a Wall Street Journal reporter interviewed a group of Texas militiamen. The key texts of their movement, he learned, were William Pierce’s race-war novel, The Turner Diaries, Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, and Report from Iron Mountain. “This is the plan for the destruction of the U.S.,” one militia member was quoted as saying.
The 1995 story led to a new, authorized edition of the book, this one clearly labeled as satire. And yet it continued to circulate as samizdat. A New York Times obituary for Lewin, who died in 1999, called Report from Iron Mountain “the hoax that would not die.” But, as Tinline shows in Ghosts of Iron Mountain, they didn’t know the half of it.
The report is cited over and over in the modern conspiracist canon, from Hartford Van Dyke’s Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars to Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, to G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island. In 2016, Report from Iron Mountain was referenced in a blog post on the Web site of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government group whose members were among the rioters at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
Conspiracy Case Study
Ultimately, conspiracy theories are an extreme form of motivated reasoning to which we’re all susceptible. Even Navasky, who died in 2023, could never bring himself to admit that Alger Hiss was a spy, no matter how high the evidence piled up. As recently as 2015, he and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Kai Bird, who wrote the introduction to Ghosts of Iron Mountain, blurbed Joan Brady’s Alger Hiss: Framed, published in the U.K. as America’s Dreyfus.
But “the Iron Mountain affair” is a particularly fascinating case study. As Tinline points out, “Tracing how people interpreted the Report, after Lewin had confessed, allows us to see with unusual clarity how a certain kind of thinking unfolds.” By following the trail of an acknowledged fraud, we can observe the political equivalent of the placebo effect in action. In contemporary terms, if you took Report from Iron Mountain at face value, you’ve been sugar-pilled.
The report is also worth revisiting as an early instance of what Michael Kelly, in a 1995 New Yorker article, called “fusion paranoia.” Of “the rapidly growing alternative media that traffics in conspiracism,” Kelly wrote, “there is no left and right here, only unanimity of belief in the boundless, cabalistic evil of the government and its allies.” This is what links the seemingly strange bedfellows who read the report with such alarm, from Stone and Prouty to Carto and Lane.
Kelly was writing in a period marked by third-party insurgencies. The presidential campaigns of David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot ended in defeat, but their relative success was a warning that went unheeded. Kelly, for one, saw the handwriting on the wall: “The paranoid style has become the cohering idea of a broad coalition plurality that draws adherents from every point on the political spectrum—a coalition of fusion paranoia.” A minority movement 30 years ago, the fusion-paranoia coalition has crossed over.
Put aside the president’s offhand comments that Ted Cruz’s father palled around with Lee Harvey Oswald (he didn’t), or that Antonin Scalia might have been whacked (he wasn’t). The fact is that the political career of Donald Trump is built on two conspiracy theories: the obviously unfounded claim that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, which Trump repeated endlessly in the years leading up to his first run for office; and the equally baseless charge that the 2020 election was stolen, which he will never retire.
More than any ideology or policy agenda, it’s paranoia that unites his somewhat heterogeneous Cabinet. According to Vice President J. D. Vance, the trafficking of fentanyl into the U.S. was a plot to kill Republican voters. F.B.I. director Kash Patel and his deputy director, Dan Bongino, think January 6 was the work of undercover federal agents. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, blames the riot on Antifa. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claims U.S.-funded labs in Ukraine produced biological weapons. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy believes “it’s beyond a reasonable doubt” that the C.I.A. was involved in his uncle’s murder.
Fusion paranoia rejects the right-left divide “for a more primal polarity: Us versus Them,” Kelly wrote. “In this construct, the Us are the American people and the Them are the people who control the people—an élite comprising the forces of the state, the money-political-legal class, and the producers of news and entertainment in the mass media.”
But when “Us” controls the White House, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the N.S.A., the military, both chambers of Congress, and the Supreme Court, when hedge-fund managers donate millions in campaign donations and Silicon Valley C.E.O.’s crowd the inauguration, when major law firms, universities, and media companies bend the knee, and the country’s richest man is furloughing government workers by the thousands, there’s no “Them” left to blame.
Ash Carter is a Deputy Editor at Air Mail