Victor Navasky’s tribute to his late writer friend is worth reading as a whole. But there was one part that I found amazing — I didn’t know about it before, and I guess you have to be of a particular age for it to resonate, but it’s a tantalizing nugget of information. It’s even right near the top of the essay:
I first met Edgar in the late 1960s, when he was editor in chief of Dial Press, where his authors included James Baldwin and Norman Mailer. At the time, I was editing and publishing Monocle, a small journal of political satire.
We had an idea for a book that became Report From Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. Its premise was that the US government had commissioned a special study group to plan the transition from a war economy to a peace economy—but the group, which met in secret, found that without war or the threat of it, the economy would collapse, so it quashed the report. The book was written by Leonard Lewin, with input from economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Monocle editors Marvin Kitman and Richard Lingeman (later executive editor of The Nation), and yours truly.
Although all of its footnotes were to real sources, the report itself was, of course, a hoax. But we wanted a publisher who would list it as nonfiction and not let the sales force know otherwise. In Edgar Doctorow, along with Dial Press publisher Richard Baron, we found the perfect coconspirators. When a reporter from The New York Times called to ask whether it was a real, government-commissioned study, Doctorow advised him: If you don’t believe it, check out the footnotes. And when the reporter called the Johnson White House, the officials—not knowing whether or not the Kennedy administration had commissioned it—simply responded, “No comment.”
The Times ran a front-page story saying this was possibly a hoax and possibly a secret government document, and the book ended up on the Times bestseller list!
Little did we know that this episode, exploiting the complicated line between fact and fiction, was to prefigure Doctorow’s remarkable career as he went on to write, among other works raising critical historical, political, and cultural questions, The Book of Daniel (inspired by the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March.
Report From Iron Mountain (I still have my copy, right next to On Thermonuclear War, another freaky vintage document) did not come out of nowhere. It was an era of pointed hoaxes — like Naked Came the Stranger. Mostly quaint and dated escapades by today’s perspective.
But Report From Iron Mountain — deliberately dry and not-much-fun to read, which made it seem more authentic, maybe, but guaranteed its rather quick obscurity — laid out an enduring, convincing argument that the Establishment, not mere radical protesters, could argue that nonstop war had become an American way of life. And that it was a good thing, for the military-industrial economy we had become. And it’s fascinating to think Iron Mountain was a warm-up, if not an outright inspiration, for Doctorow’s fact-based fictions.
Miles To Go 