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Ghosts of Iron Mountain
The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today
Table of Contents
About The Book
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 (which lent the resulting book, Report from Iron Mountain, its name). In Lewin’s telling, 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.
What fascinates about Phil Tinline’s revelation-filled recreation of that ingenious hoax is seeing how it explodes into America’s consciousness, dominates media reports, and sends government officials scrambling. And then, subsequently, how Lewin’s fabrication is adopted by a seemingly endless string of extremist organizations which view it as supporting their ideology.
In this riveting—and, at times, 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.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (March 25, 2025)
- Length: 352 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668050514
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Raves and Reviews
“[How] a zany ’60s leftist hoax became a progenitor of Trumpism….[This] account of a jest gone terribly wrong makes for fascinating—and eye-opening—reading.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Diligently traced…Tinline offers nothing less than an alternative history of the late twentieth century, in which an off-beat satire ends up perpetuating the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics.”
—Booklist (starred)
“DEEPLY REPORTED AND BRILLIANTLY TOLD…What a fascinating tale Phil Tinline unspools here. He's unearthed a strange, little-known key from the 1960s with which he unlocks America's descent into conspiracy madness and the dangerous blurring of political fiction and reality. Ghosts of Iron Mountain is unique, illuminating, and important.”
—Kurt Andersen, cofounder of Spy magazine and New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses
“ASTONISHING…an account of a brilliantly conceived spoof that has quite unintentionally changed the course of history.”
—from the Foreword by Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus, inspiration for the film Oppenheimer
“A TREMENDOUS JOURNALISTIC ACHIEVEMENT, A ROLLICKING PAGE TURNER, AND, ULTIMATELY, A PUBLIC SERVICE….Tinline provides the ‘why’ behind today’s most destabilizing extremist conspiracy theories.”
—Gerald Posner, author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK
"SPELLBINDING, A PROFOUND MEDITATION on a question that America has never figured out quite how to face: can government, for, by, and of the people ever live comfortably side by side with military empire?"
—Rick Perlstein, author of the New York Times bestseller Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
“A CLEVER, FAST-PACED READ OF DAZZLING ORIGINALITY that ranges from the Kennedy assassination to QAnon. In his gripping investigation Phil Tinline shows why Americans are so vulnerable to conspiracy theories and sinister hoaxes.”
—William I. Hitchcock, New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Eisenhower
“A SUPERB WORK OF JOURNALISM, HISTORY, AND POLITICAL INSIGHT, a brilliant true story about a brilliant fake story. We must all give thanks to Phil Tinline for exposing this conspiracy of conspiracies, this scheme of schemes—a story so good that, once you see it, you see it everywhere.”
—Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness
“THOUGHTFUL, PROVOCATIVE, UNIQUE, AND SMART are just a few of the adjectives that describe Phil Tinline's engrossing and highly readable Ghosts of Iron Mountain. You have to read this book to understand the roots of Trumpism in America today."
—Steven M. Gillon, author of America’s Reluctant Prince and 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America
“A BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED HISTORY written in prose that has the acid kick of a well-mixed gimlet.”
—Rana Mitter, ST Lee Chair in U.S.-China Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945
“A GRIPPING, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN, REAL-LIFE HISTORICAL THRILLER…Rollercoastering from past to present, Ghosts of Iron Mountain reveals why many among us clutch at yarns about evil cabals and shadowy powerbrokers.”
—Brian Klaas, Contributing Writer at The Atlantic and author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
“PERSPECTIVE SHIFTING…Ghosts of Iron Mountain tells a story that subverts expectations of a perfectly polarized leftwing and rightwing mindset in the US.”
—Whitney Phillips, coauthor of The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed US Religion, Media, and Politics
“A PAGE-TURNING, RIPPING GOOD READ…It is, in fact, a true story about us, our beliefs and fears, our political choices, and our paranoia about power. Read it and be awakened."
—Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational
“DEEPLY INSIGHTFUL…A masterly account of how post-World War II America succumbed to a paranoia that still has many of its citizens chasing extremes.”
—James Ball, author of Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World
“PACEY AND ENGAGING…Tinline retells the story of the hoax government study that declared permanent war indispensable to societal stability…Both the immediate response to the Report and its enduring legacy reveal the extent of Americans’ suspicions of and alienation from their government and help make sense of the apparent insanity of QAnon and other deep-state conspiracy theories.”
—Laura Beers, author of Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century
“UNPUTDOWNABLE. This superb story of a runaway hoax peels back like an onion. By the time you get to the deepest layer, everything you thought you knew about politics is transformed.”
—Bradley Garrett, author of Bunker: What It Takes to Survive the Apocalypse
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