Ghosts of Iron Mountain the hoax of the century, its enduring impact, and what it reveals about America today
"The story of a how a 1966 satirical hoax portraying a secret government study claiming war's end would be disastrous sparked media frenzy and evolved into a cautionary tale about the enduring power of deception to shape public beliefs. Delve into the labyrinth of America's conspiracy culture with t...
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Scribner,
2025.
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| Edition: | First Scribner hardcover edition. |
| Subjects: | |
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| Summary: | "The story of a how a 1966 satirical hoax portraying a secret government study claiming war's end would be disastrous sparked media frenzy and evolved into a cautionary tale about the enduring power of deception to shape public beliefs. Delve into the labyrinth of America's conspiracy culture with this investigative masterpiece that unearths the roots of our era's most potent myths. In 1966, amid unrest over the Vietnam War and the alarming growth of the military-industrial complex, little-known writer Leonard Lewin was approached by a group of ingenious satirists on the Left to concoct a document that would pretend to ratify everyone's fears that the government was deceiving the public. Devoting more than a year to the project, Lewin constructed a fiction (passed off as the honest truth) that a government-run Study Group had been charged with examining the "cost of peace," setting its first meetings in the very real Iron Mountain nuclear bunker in upstate New York. This gathering of the nation's academic elite concluded that suspending war would be disastrous, forcing all sorts of bizarre measures to compensate. Lewin didn't realize it at the time, but he'd created a narrative that fed the interests of both ends of the political spectrum--by promoting the idea that the government uses centralized power for evil. Lewin's fabrications are adopted by a seemingly endless string of extremist organizations which view it as supporting their ideology. In this riveting--and chilling--tale of a deception that refuses to die is an unsettling warning about how, in contemporary times, a hoax may no longer be a hoax if it can be used to recruit followers to a cause"-- |
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| Physical Description: | xvi, 336 pages ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographic references (pages 255-316) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781668050491 1668050498 |
| Author Notes: | Kai Bird is an acclaimed biographer and journalist. With Martin J. Sherwin, he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , which was the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer . Bird is Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians. |
