For April Fools' Day, I thought I'd look into the fascinating story of a major source of one of the longest-lasting and widely believed conspiracy theories in American history. According to a 2023 YouGov poll, 54% of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone when he gunned down president John F. Kennedy in 1963—so most Americans are wrong about this, and they're wrong about it partly due to a work of fiction published in the late 1960s.
But what if the basis of the most widely accepted Kennedy conspiracy theory was a work of satirical fiction? That's the premise behind Phil Tinline's recent book Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today, an examination of the history and impact of Report from Iron Mountain, a 1967 work of fiction that started as left-wing satire but became one of the most influential texts in American history.
Oliver Stone's JFK and the "CIA did it" conspiracy
Main character Jim Garrison lays it out like this in the film: "What took place on November 22, 1963 was a coup d'état ... The war is the biggest business in America worth $80 billion a year. President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy that was planned and advanced at the highest levels of our government, and was carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors in the Pentagon and CIA's covert-operation apparatus."
Back in 1966, Victor Navasky, editor of The Monocle, read a news item about a dip in the stock market caused by a cutback in military spending; Wall Street called it a"peace scare." This inspired Navasky to commission writer Leonard Lewin, with help from economist John Kenneth Galbraith and others, to write Report from Iron Mountain, supposedly the leaked findings of "Special Study Group" tasked by the Kennedy Administration to plan the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Its conclusion: Peace would likely bring about the collapse of the USA.
The strange afterlife of Report from Iron Mountain
The real point of Iron Mountain was to highlight the absurdity of the Cold War through exaggeration and satire—the book tips its hand fairly heavily by suggesting UFO hoaxes, "blood games," and bringing back slavery as possible replacement for war—but its ideas, shorn of their satirical context, spun outside the control of the literary types who dreamed it up. Iron Mountain started percolating in the poisonous coffee pot of fringe thinkers, combining and metastasizing with other seminal, fictional, conspiracy texts like Alternative 3 and The Protocols of the Brotherhood of Zion, until Iron Mountain became a foundational text for cranks, part of the ideological framework they can hang anything on.
It wasn't just Oliver Stone's source who mistook Report from Iron Mountain as truth. Much to the author's dismay, the book was also rediscovered by the burgeoning-right wing militia movement of the 1980s, and reprinted as non-fiction by the anti-semitic Noontide Press. Milton William Cooper excerpted Iron Mountain in seminal conspiracy theory text Behold a Pale Horse, said to be a favorite of Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh. From there, it's a straight shot to "The Deep State," Q-anon, Alex Jones, Covid cover-ups, and whatever else loonies are on about this week on X.
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