From the archives of The Memory Hole |
APPENDIXES
[From 1996 Free Press edition]
THE IRON MOUNTAIN
AFFAIR
APPENDIX 1
NEW YORK TIMES
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1967
Report on Peace Gets Mixed Views
Some See Book as Hoax, Others Take it Seriously
By John Leo
THE BOOK is variously described as a harmless subterfuge, a hair-raising analysis, the sinister work of a sick mind, and a serious fraud.
It is Report From Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, published last week by the Dial Press and described as a suppressed Government report arguing that the world would face an unparalleled catastrophe if the world ever achieved peace.
The report states that war and war preparations are politically, psychologically and culturally indispensable to world stability. Its unidentified authors conclude that lasting peace, while not theoretically impossible, is probably unattainable; even if it could be achieved it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society to achieve it.
If its authentic, its an enormous roaring scandal, said Lee Rainwater, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis. If its caricature, its a brilliant job. There are people who really think like that.
Richard Baron, president of Dial, says the report is authentic. Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire magazine,
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which is publishing a 28,000-word condensation of the book in its December issue, says he accepts Dials assurances on trustworthiness. But generally publishers, reviewers and Government officials who have seen advance copies consider the book a hoax. To our knowledge no such special study group ever existed, said a press spokesman for the State Departments Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. But its cleverly done, and who ever did it obviously has an appreciable grasp of the disciplines involved. However, no advance reviewer has flatly labeled the book fiction.
The book carries an introduction by Leonard C. Lewin, a New York freelance writer, who states that fohn Doe, a professor of social science from a large Middle Western university secretly passed the manuscript to him last winter.
Doe is described as one of the 15 members of a special Government study group convened at Iron Mountain, N.Y. from 1963 to 1966 to produce the report for an unspecified Federal agency.
Iron Mountain is described in the book as being near the city of Hudson, N.Y., apparently a reference to the Hudson Institute, the think tank where war games and studies on life in the future are developed under the direction of Herman Kahn for Government and private agencies.
We had nothing to do with it, said Mr. Kahn. It sounds nutty to mc cither a practical joke or something sinister. No analysis of conversion to the peacetime that Ive seen has suggested such radical measures.
Slavery and Poison
In a cold, flat styledescribed by some readers as perfect bureaucratesethe report suggests that if the social cohesion brought by war is allowed to disappear without
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extensive planning, the world may have to introduce a sophisticated form of slavery, invent enemies from outside the planet, or deliberately poison the atmosphere in a politically acceptable manner.
The book suggests that some flying saucer incidents may have been Government attempts to test public responses to outside enemies.
The end of war, it said, would necessarily mean the end of the nation-state, and would introduce world government and the need for wasteful spending on a large scale, perhaps through an unlimited space program airned at reaching unreachable points in space.
I disagree that the end of war would wrench and destroy the nation-state system, said Arthur I. Waskow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. But this is the best case Ive ever read on the other side. It gives me very tough arguments to answer.
Mr. Waskow said that if the report is authentic it would probably have come from the Bureau of the Budget or the Central Intelligence Agency. He added that he was surprised to see one of his privately circulated reports mentioned in the Iron Mountain book.
As far as I know, only about 60 people in Washington ever saw my report. If its a hoax, it must involve somebody high up.
Many analysts believe that the report reflects a grasp of the Washington scene as well as an understanding of social psychology, ecology, economics and sociology that is beyond the ability of most satirists.
Publishing figures who asked not to be identified said that the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith had such qualifications. Under the pseudonym Mark Eparnay, he has written several political satires, including The
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McLandless Dimension, which appeared in Esquire several years ago.
Galbraith to Review
He is reviewing the Iron Mountain book under the pseudonym Herschel McLandless for Book World, a weekly supplement to The Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post. Book World is edited by Byron Dobell, who was a managing editor at Esquire until recent weeks.
When asked if he was reviewing his own book for Book World, he said: That would be unethical. Is the Times suggesting I acted unethically?
He added that he couldnt say whether he had a hand in writing Iron Mountain because some things are so far removed from reality that they cant be commented on.
According to the books introduction, the study group met between 1963 and 1966. That was when a study was made by the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The study, published July 10, 1966, said President Johnsons disarmament plan could upset world stability instead of promoting peace.
APPENDIX 2
News of War and Peace Youre Not Ready For
THREE QUESTIONS ARE RAISED by the unauthorized publication of this deeply controversial document. The first concerns its authenticity. The second concerns the validity of the several considerations that caused one of the authors, on his own motion and in violation of his implicit oath, to release it for publication, and the collateral question of whether, within the genially accepted ethical framework of the free enterprise system, Dial Press was justified in publishing it. The third question concerns the empirical-theoretical validity of the conclusions.
As to the authenticity of the document, it happens that this reviewer can speak to the full extent of his personal authority and credibility. In the summer of 1963 I received a telephone call from a scientist frienda well-known astronomer, physicist and communications theorist. This was on the eve of my departure for a month-long seminar on modern psychometric theory at the Villa Cerbolloni in Italy. I was asked to attend a rneeting a week hence to discuss a project of high national influence at Iron Mountain in upstate New York. I knew the place well, for Iron Mountain was the working headquarters of the committee of selection set up by the Chase Manhattan Bank which, after establishing working criteria, designated the nucleus
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WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
NOVEMBER 26, 1967
By Herschel McLandress
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of bank executives to be protected in the event of nuclear attack. But the Italian meetings were also of high urgency and had been planned long in advance. Accordingly, I was forced to decline. I was then instructed to keep the invitation strictly confidential. On two subsequent occasions I was consulted by the psychiatrist and specialist on the relationship between individual and group behavior whom, more than incidentally, I recommended to take my place. I have concluded that I do not now violate any controlling ethical precepts in relating this history. As far as I personally am concerned, it leaves no doubt as to the credibly of this document. The public would not be more assured had I written it myself.
As to the ethics of the author in releasing it I do have grave reservations. In a democracy there must be the fullest and frankest and freest discussion of all matters of fundamental public concern. On this issue there can be no compromise; it is what makes us a free country and a leader of what the Secretary of State has called the Free World. But the precise timing of such democratic discussion is of the highest importance. As a matter of elementary prudence, it should not occur before the public is psychologically conditioned to the issues. Otherwise there is danger that anger, hysteria or immature and unsophisticated moral indignation will replace conditioned perception of fundamental truth. The authors of this document rightly saw that the public was not yet prepared for a rational discussion of the indispensability of war for the preservation of the modern social fabric. For generations there has been intense socially unscientific conditioning to the opposite view. This cannot be quickly offset.
In recent years, it is true that at the Institutes of International Relations at the leading universities, at the Hudson
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Institute and Rand and in seminars for the discussion of peace and international conciliation, there has been analysis of what, suggestively, is still called the unthinkable. New scholarly disciplines have come into being, schooled in systems analysis and game theory, which are capable of considering objectively the relative social advantages and disadvantages of differing levels of annihilation. But the public impact of this work has so far been limited. In consequence, the public is not now prepared to deal rationally with the kind of discussion this report will provoke. The member of the Special Study Group who decided upon its premature release bears heavy responsibility for his action. At an absolute minimum it should first have been discussed at strictly off-the-record meetings with responsible and conservative Congressional leaders, key private citizen in New York and sympathetic editors. Only then should the public have been brought into the debate.
The third question concerns the conclusions. Here one can be brief, for these, without question, are thoroughly sound. This was inevitable. The reaction to war, hitherto, has been moralistic, emotional and even oratorical. This is the first study of its social role to be grounded firmly on modern social science and buttressed by modern empirical techniques as extended and refined by computer technology. That it should find that war provides the only dependable system for stabilizing and controlling national economies; that it is the source of the public authority that makes stable government possible; that it is indispensable sociologically for the control of dangerous social dissidence and destructive antisocial tendencies; that it serves an indispensable Malthusian function; and it has long provided the fundamental motivational source of scientific and technological progress is only what was
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to be expected from any soundly conceived scientific application of modern team research.
Many of us, no doubt, would have stressed additional advantages. In recent times it has been my privilege to draw attention to what is now being called, perhaps a bit awkwardly, the anticipatory retrospective national guilt complex as an important motivational factor growing out of war. It deserves a word of explanation. In wartime the disruption of family life patterns, combat morbidity and mortality, and in those countries suffering actual combat or air attack, destruction of personal property, civilian casualties, defoliation of landscape and malnutrition have caused Perceptive Thought Leaders who previously had been relatively indifferent to the well-being of others to anticipate the guilt feelings of the community when, in postwar years, it comes to reflect on how some individuals and subcultures have suffered more than others for the common good. Accordingly, while the war continues these PTLs address themselves to planning measures of ameliorationfull employment, G. I. Bills of Rights, homes for heroes, international peacekeeping arrangements, physical reconstruction, new power dams and irrigation projects, and such international relief efforts as those of Herbert Hoover and UNRRAwhich will act as a social solvent for guilt by providing those afflicted with a compensating economic or moral gain. The years immediately following any war, as a result, are ones of no slight social progress on various national and international fronts. This progress only comes to an end as the feeling of war guilt is exorcised and normal psychological patterns of thought are restored.
But this is a detail. As I would put my personal repute behind the authenticity of this document, so I would tes-
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tify to the validity of its conclusions. My reservations relate only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public.
APPENDIX 3
Peace--It Could Be Horrible
REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTATN purports to be a secret think tank report prepared between 1963 and 1966 for an anonymous high-level interagency Government committee by an interdisciplinary civilian Special Study Group (also anonymous) on the implications of world peace for the future stability of American society with recommendations to maximize present and future Government policy options.
The report was supposedly delivered to Leonard C. Lewin by John Doe, one of the 15 members of the Special Study Group, in an act of conscience: the reports findings are, he is said to have said, so revolutionary and farreaching that they should be made available for public discussion.
It is, of course, a hoaxbut what a hoax!a parody so elaborate and ingenious and, in fact, so substantively original, acute, interesting and horrifying, that it will receive serious attention regardless of its origin. No one has yet admitted its true origin, and my calling it a hoax must be taken as pure assertionthough it is based, I think, on clear and ample internal evidence.
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NEW YORK TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
NOVEMBER 20, 1967
By Eliot Fremont-Smith
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Who Did It?
There has been much speculation about the identity of the parodist: John Kenneth Galbraith has been mentioned, so have Kenneth Boulding and other known strategic thinkers, on the questionable assumption that only an insider could have done it. But granted genius and a will, anyone moderately familiar with the published strategic studies of the Rand Corporation, Herman Kahns Hudson Institute (It is maintained that Iron Mountain is near Hudson, N.Y.), etc., could have done it. My own guess is that the report is the work of Mr. Lewin himself, perhaps with some consultative aid from the editors of Monocle magazine. Not incidentally, Mr. Lewin put together the splendid collection of political satire, A Treasury of American Political Humor (1964), a fact that isagain, not incidentallyomitted from this book.
In any case, Report From Iron Mountain is a shocker. Its basic argument is that social stability is, and has always been, based on a war system; and that, contrary to the incorrect assumption that war, as an institution, is subordinate to the social system it is believed to serve, . . . war itself is the basic social system. This is presented with intriguing reference to a variety of important economic, political, sociological, ecological, cultural and scientific functions of war (or the threat of war or preparedness for war).
The focus of the report, however, is on how social stability might be maintained in the unlikely but not theoretically impossible event that a lasting peace (world disarmament is subsumed in the term) is thrust upon us; on how the most crucial functions of the war system could be adequately transferred to a peace system.
The prospect the report outlines is truly Orwellian. It
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includes planned but credible threats from an enemy, a space research program that is deliberately costly (and not subject to open market fluctuations) and deliberately unproductive, programmed air and water pollution, computer-controlled procreation, the reintroduction of slavery and possibly of ritual-killing and genocide. Since the effectiveness of some of these methods would be severely compromised and even nullified by public awareness of their deliberate implementation, they must be kept secret.
The War System
Clearly, the report concludes, peace is not desirable, either for social stability or for the survival of the species. Yet evidence is suggested that the war system may be breaking down, willy-nilly. The report therefore explores the application of some of its findings to maintaining the war system against the possibilities of peace, should that be determined the most desirable option.
Report From Iron Mountain is a hoax, a biting conceptual and stylistic parody of modern, sophisticated think tank speculation. But it is a parody with a difference, more suggestive and disturbing than funnyin fact, hardly funny at all. It is ridiculous; it is also a telling and oddly lucid outline of some important theoretical problems of peace and war that have rarely been admitted to in public or in private.
APPENDIX 4
Hoax or Horror? A Book That Shook White House
Yesaccording to the mysterious new book, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.
Nocame a resounding chorus from worried Government officials, who, nonetheless, were double-checking with one anotherjust to make sure.
The response of experts and political observers ranged from nutty to clever satire to sinister.
Is war necessary?
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U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT
NOVEMBER 20, 1967
There can be no peace, but endless war may be good for the U.S. anywaythat is the conclusion reported in a volume causing a severe case of jitters in official Washington. Reason: The book purports to be based on a secret, Government-financed study by top experts. Some say it is grimly serious. Others call it leg-pulling satire. Whatever the truth, it is something of a sensation in high places
DID A SELECT GROUP of prominent Americans meet in secret sessions between 1963 and 1966 and produce a report that advised the U.S. Government it could never afford an era of peace?
Central theme of the book, which purports to reflect the unanimous view of 15 of the nations top scholars and
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economists, is this: War and preparations for it are indispensable to world stability. Lasting peace is probably unattainable. And peace, even if it could be achieved, might not be in the best interests of society.
All this set off a blazing debate in early November, cries of hoaxand a manhunt for the author, or authors.
Sources close to the White House revealed that the Administration is alarmed. These sources say cables have gone to U.S. embassies, with stern instructions: Play down public discussion of Iron Mountain; emphasize that the book has no relation whatsoever to Government policy.
LBJs reaction.
But nagging doubts lingered. One informed source confirmed that the Special Study Group, as the book called it, was set up by a top official in the Kennedy Administration. The source added that the report was drafted and eventually submitted to President Johnson, who was said to have hit the rooPand then ordered that the report be bottled up for all time.
As the turmoil mounted, so did the speculation about those who participated in writing Iron Mountain.
John Kenneth Galbraith, former Ambassador to India, was quoted by The Harvard Crimson as having parried the question of authorship.
Mr. Galbraith, who reviewed Iron Mountain under a pseudonym, was reported to have said: I seem to be, on all matters, a natural object of suspicion. And he added: Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, even Robert Bowie could as easily have written the book as I. Yes, Rusk could.
Several sources turned toward Harvard in general as the site of authorship. One even went so far as to suggest
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that the book is an effort by Kennedy forces to discredit Lyndon Johnson.
A big spoof?
Whatever else it was, Iron Mountain raised fears at high levels that it would be a mother lode for Communist propagandists. There was also a feeling that if the book is just an elaborate spoof, it is not likely to find understanding or sympathy in world capitals.
In the academic community, many held the view that Iron Mountain was a hilarious hoaxa kind of deadpan parody of the studies emanating from the nations think tanks.
One history professor at a large Midwestern university, telephoned by U.S. News & World Report, came on the line with these words: I didnt do it. But he added: Whoever did is laughing his sides off. Hes saying, in effect, Look, if you read and take seriously some of the bilge in these exalted studies, you might as well read and take seriously my little exercise.
In all the furor, a literary analogy cropped up. Not since George Orwells 1984 appeared some 18 years ago has there been such a controversial satire.
War is Peace
Mr. Orwells characters spoke a language called newspeak. They lived by the all-powerful states slogan: War is Peace.
In Report From Iron Mountain, the language is the flat, metallic jargon dear to the U.S. bureaucrat. The message: War is, in itself, the principal basis of organization on which all modern societies are constructed.
APPENDIX 5
Who Wrote It? A Fad In Political Comment Is Using Pseudonyms
Cryptic Iron MountainBook Is Written by a John Doe; Americus Criticizes LBJ
The book is expensive for its size ($5 and 109 pages) and the title sounds leaden: Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. But it is a pre-publication sensation.
No wonder. Iron Mountain purports to be a high-level, once-secret Government study of war and peace. Its chilling conclusion is that continuation of war is indispensable to the stability of our society and possibly even to its survival.
But the real focus of controversy is the authorJohn Doe. He is described as an eminent social scientist who was clandestinely recruited to serve on the special study commission. The writing is authoritatively bureaucratic but quietly preposterous as it concludes that an outbreak of peace would be disastrous.
The Guessing Game
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WALL STREET JOURNAL
NOVEMBER 13, 1967
By Felix Kessler
Who is John Doe? John Kenneth Galbraith? Mr. Galbraith says no. Then is it Kenneth E. Boulding, the economics professor? He also denies authorship. Whether
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hoax, satire, or authentic, Mr. Does work is but the most recent in a wave of pseudonymous political commentary.
Iron Mountain implicitly takes to task all the nuclear planners and Doomsday thinkers. But much of the pseudonymous political writing has been sharply partisan. In the Oct. 28 issue of the New Republic, for instance, a well-known historian identified as Americus suggests hopefully that President Johnson could be defeated if dissident Democrats oppose him strongly and if Republicans run a candidate attuned to the electorate.
Mr. Johnson is the target in the Sept. 16 issue of the New Yorker, where a writer with the pseudonym of Bailey Laird argues through a mythical Democratic leader called Daley Unruh that the President has little appeal to the average voter.
Much of the gossip in publishing would have it that Bailey Laird is Richard N. Goodwin, formerly a speechwriter for Mr. Johnson. But Mr. Goodwin says no. Ive denied that steadily, he complains. But no one wants to believe it.
In fact, while others are speculating about Mr. Goodwin, he is busy pondering the identity of Americus. Could it be Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., another former White House aide? I doubt that its Arthur, Mr. Goodwin decides. He would have told me. Historian Eric Goldman, yet another erstwhile White House aide, is Mr. Goodwins candidate.
The Man and the Name
Matching the man with the pseudonymor ruling out contendersis hazardous. For one thing, the disavowals tend to be ambiguous. Mr. Galbraith, former U.S. Ambassador to India and now a Harvard University professor,
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more or less denies that he wrote Iron Mountain. Some things are so removed from reality that they cant be commented on, he says.
Mr. Goodwin is convinced that anyone who thinks he has more freedom to write under a pseudonym is crazy, because that kind of secret cant be kept. And Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire magazine, adds, Nothing is written thats so hot that it couldnt go under an authors own name.
Nonetheless, Esquire is publishing a 28,000-word excerpt of the pseudonymous Iron Mountain Report. We think its an important piece, Mr. Hayes says.
Publishing sources speedily recall that Mr. Galbraith had written pseudonymously for Esquire before, as Mark Epernay. And Mr. Galbraith reportedly is to write a book review of the Iron Mountain Report using the name Herschel McLandress.
Herschel McLandress is the fictional subject of the articles written by Mark Epernay. But, from behind an apparently impenetrable thicket of pseudonymity, Mr. Galbraith seems determined to evade the question of whether or not he authored the writings at issue.
The only reason for using a pseudonym is to disguise ones identity, he says, accurately enough.
Dial Press, which will publish Iron Mountain Nov. 30, is running out 25,000 copies, a large initial printing for a specialized book. It contains a 20-page foreword by Leonard Lewin, a freelance writer who says he received the book from Mr. Doe and brought it to Dial.
For this Mr. Lewin is receiving all the authors royalties, according to Dial Press, but he denies being John Doe. (Mr. Lewin readily concedes, however, that he has used the pseudonym L. L. Case in the past for satirical articles.)
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Political pseudonymity has a long, distinguished history. The most celebrated example in modern American times is the 1947 article proposing containment of the Soviet Union, written by George F. Kennan, then in the State Department, as Mr. X.
The magazine in which it appeared, Foreign Affairs, was called to account recently on the morality of disguising an authors identity. Foreign Affairs published an article about the Vietcong, identifying the author as George A. Carver Jr., a student of political theory and Asian affairs.
The magazine neglected to mention that Mr. Carver is employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Sen. J. William Fulbright and historian Henry Steele Commager, among others, bitterly criticized this as an instance of unethical propagandizing by the CIA.
I think we made a mistake, says Philip W. Quigg, managing editor of Foreign Affairs. It would have been better to give him a pseudonym and let it go at that. Some critics say this would have been an even graver deception. (Mr. Quigg says the CIA was adamant in its refusal to have the author identified fully.)
Disguising a CIA mans identity, Mr. Commager says, is immoral because it would fool readers into thinking the article is an honest, scholarly work. the only pseudonymity he condones is when a writer feels he must criticize his contemporaries or even close friends, and doesnt want to bruise personal feelings.
Some observers think the pseudonym is in vogue simply because people enjoy speculating who is eviscerating whom. One guessing game involved a critic of defense policy who withholds his identity but leaves no doubt about his convictions. He uses the pseudonym Raymond D. Senter (dissenter).
APPENDIX 6
In Praise of War
WHAT IS AN EFFECTIVE VOICE of despair? The unusual answer offered by Leonard Lewin in this mini-bombshell of a book is the language of bureaucracy. Accordingly, he has created a bureaucratic fantasy, at least as plausible in its details and argument as Richard Roveres celebrated revelation of the inner secrets of the American Establishment. Let us assume, Lewin instructs us, that the President appoints a highly secret, extremely prestigious study group, charged with the analysis of the consequences of transition from the semiwar economy of the 1960s to a truly peaceful world.
This Special Study Group, as it soon dubs itself, includes social scientist, natural scientists, an industrialist, even a literary critic. Although its initial opinions and prejudices are as varied as its members backgrounds, the group decides early in its deliberations that it will examine its difficult assignment with as little reliance as possible upon either professional or personal preferences for peace or war. In the best American tradition its ethic will be severely empiricalit will seek to discover what peace will mean, and it will judge the merits of peace according to its practical consequences.
All of this is couched in the costive language of the pub-
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NEW YORK TIMES
NOVEMBER 26, 1967
By Robert Lekachman
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lic commission, conscientiously devoid of personal style or picturesque phrase. The manner is echt committee writ, the natural tone of a contemporary bureaucratic society. The groups conclusions disconcert its own members: there is no satisfactory substitute for a war economy. Only a war economy can furnish the minimum stability and coherence a society requires to survive. Lewin, a Hobbesian at heart, perceives the state as an organization whose raison dêtre is defense against the foe, domestic and foreign. It follows that a statesman who is faced with a shortage of enemies will invent some. The prudent statesman best defends his society by attacking foreigners, ever careful, of course, to deploy the rhetoric of peace and pacification.
War, or at least preparation for war, is indispensable to social integration. More than that, defense expenditure is the only truly acceptable technique for the maintenance of reasonably high employment, satisfactory profits and suitable rewards for the engineers, experts and miscellaneous wizards who operate the levers of our technological economy. Hence in Lewins judgment the long 81-month boom, which still continues, is a tribute much less to the conversion of American influentials to Keynesian economics than it is to the persistent escalation of military spending.
Within this context, Vietnam is a fine illustration of the ease of securing acceptance of any level of spending so long as it promotes certified military objectives, just as the sad fate of appropriations for Great Society programs amply demonstrates the grave inadequacy of social improvement as an outlet for surplus resources and idle men. And of course the Pentagon decision to finance a thin anti-ballistic missile system, soon, doubtless, to be succeeded by a plumper one, insures massive spending even if Vietnam phases out instead of escalates.
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Are there really no substitutes for war? If we believe our guide, the answer is no, for the trouble with substitutes is their tendency to develop their own momentum. One cannot as readily regulate social as military spending. Almost any plausible, peaceful use of resources soon comes to be an expected part of the Gross National Product and therefore difficult to manipulate as an economic regulator. The space race is the best alternative to a war economy because the supply of planets and galaxies should suffice to allow practically perpetual and ever more expensive tooling-up for more and more grandiose missions. Even so the space economy is less satisfactory than the war economy because it contains less of an indispensable binding element, hostility to foreigners. Perhaps if we are lucky our space explorers will find hostile life on other planets.
Thus in the end Lewins study group as honest men can only condude that peace is far too expensive a state of affairs for responsible men seriously to contemplate. Is this no more than a bad dream Lewin has obligingly shared with us? If would be reassuring to say so. But without accepting every detail of the authors somber speculations, there is, I freely concede, a certain nasty plausibility about his conclusion. If we (and others) really cherished the values we so tediously articulate, among them world peace, elimination of poverty, racial inequality and social justice, whythe question will not stay downdo we find it so depressingly easy to fight wars and finance the Pentagon, and so exceedingly difficult to rebuild the cities, rehouse the poor and educate decently the nations children? There must be something that as a society we get out of the values that we actually act out.
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Lewin has chosen an apt form for the expression of an enormous pessimism about the drift of our society. It is a part of the grim joke of his book that he may only think that he has invented his study group. Such a group may in truth even now be working. One suspects that in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war, committees will be creeping out of their shelters to assess the consequences of massive social folly.
APPENDIX 7
The Guest Word
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 conclusion 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 should 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 1ohn 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
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NOVEMBER 19, 1972
NEW YORK TIMES
By Leonard Lewin
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least in Washington, more speculation was addressed to the identity of the Groups 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 authors 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 goredwho could identify themselves in some way with the government, the military, systems analysis, the established order of powerwere 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 a disingenuous sympathy for the Reports 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 judgments: very bad satire, declared Herman Kahn;
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lacking in bite, wrote Henry Rowan, of Rand. Whoever wrote it is an idiot, said Henry Kissinger. A handful of far-right zealots and eccentrics predictably applauded the Reports conclusions.
Thats as much background as I have room for, before destroying whatever residuum of suspense may still persist about the books authorship. I wrote the Report, all o f it. (How it came about and who was privy to the plot Ill have to discuss elsewhere.) But why as a hoax?
What I intended was simply to pose the issues of war 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 authenticityis it just possibly for real?its serious implications wouldnt have been discussed either. At all. This may be 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 direct 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-
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of-departure bookfor 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 sustainedi.e., so long as I didnt explicitly acknowledge writing itits 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. Im referring to those other documentsreal ones, and verifiablc that have appeared in print. The Pentagon papers were not written by someone like me. Neither was the Defense Departments Pax Americana study (how to take over Latin America). Nor was the script of Mr. Kissingers 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 highlevel 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 reasoningthe 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 books authorship could tilt, as Kissinger might say, the other way. (Was that Defense order for 5,000-odd paperbacks, some one might ask, really for rou-
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tine distribution to overseas librariesor was it for another more sinister purpose?) Im glad my own Special Defense Contingency Plan included planting two nonexistent references in the books footnotes to help me prove, if I ever have to, that the work is fictitious.