Cast of Characters

Meet the players who helped to perpetrate,
and prepetuate this incredible political hoax...

The Belivers

The Hoaxers

Leonard C. Lewin- The author of Report From Iron Mountain.

Victor Navasky- [Publisher & Editorial Director of The Nation]- As the editor of Monocle, a magazine of satire published in the 1960s, he came up with the idea of a "secret report" about the dangers of "permanent peace."

Richard Lingeman- [Executive Editor of The Nation]-Noted biographer of Theodore Dreiser; as Monocle's Executive Editor, he helped create the hoax.

Marvin Kitman- [Television critic of Newsday]-News managing editor at Monocle and the publication's candidate for President in 1964, he also helped shape the idea for the book.

E.L. Doctorow- [Novelist: Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, The Waterworks, etc.]-Dial Press Editor-in-Chief at the time of the book's original publication, he helped shape the book and colluded in the hoax by concealing the book's satirical nature from his own sales force.

John Kenneth Galbraith- [Economist] He perpetuated the hoax by adopting the pseudonym Herschel McLandress ("a noted psychometrist") and praising the book as authentic in a prominent review that appeared in the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.


Colonel Fletcher Prouty- A national security aide in the Kennedy Administration (and the model for the Donald Sutherland character in Oliver Stone's JFK), he continues to believe the report is authentic and cited it in his memoirs.

Willis Carto- White supremacist whose Noontide Press, Liberty Lobby and Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, were named by author Lewin in a 1992 lawsuit for copyright infringement when Carto allegedly published the now-discontinued, bootleg editions of the book.

Mark Lane- Bestselling Kennedy assassination conspiracist who served as Carto's lawyer, making the case that Report From Iron Mountain was indeed a real government document and therefore not subject to copyright laws. Lane enjoyed a 1992 New York Times bestseller in his Plausible Denial.

The Right Wing Citizen Militias include Report From Iron Mountain in their conspirational canon, along with such works as The Turner Diaries and New World Order.

The Scorned

Lyndon B. Johnson- He couldn't be sure that his predecessor hadn't commissioned Report From Iron Mountain. According to U.S. News & World Report, he "hit the roof" upon learning of it and ordered that the report be "bottled up for all time."

Herman Kahn-Then head of the Hudson Institute think tank, this now deceased "war gamer," was stung by the feeling that the satire was aimed at him; he vociferously criticized the book.

Henry Kissinger- Also taking the satire personally, he attacked the book as "sheer idiocy."

The Concerned

Oliver Stone- In a 1992 Preface to Proudy's memoirs, Stone cited the "fabled" Report From Iron Mountain as raising "the key questions of our time."

Tony Brown- The black commentator assailed Report From Iron Mountain in his 1995 book as the "seminal work on social triage, and...the precursor to The Bell Curve. He said both books should incite "paranoia and alarm in the Black community."

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