Saint Fletcher the Obscure

[Jan Klimkowski]

"Iron Mountain" is mentioned on around a dozen pages in the index to Prouty's JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy. I haven't yet reread them all.

On pages 150-1, Prouty writes:

At the beginning of this book, reference was made to a novel by Leonard Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. It happened that the book concerned a reputed top level study that was officially commissioned in August 1963 but in fact dated back to early 1961. In other words, the study process started, according to Lewin, right after the inauguration, with the arrival of John F Kennedy and his new administration.

A purported member of the Iron Mountain Special Study Group believes that the group's mission was delineated by McNamara, William Bundy, and Dean Rusk. The members of the Kennedy circle were concerned that no real work had been done by any government instrumentality in planning for peace. The report contains a most portentous line: "The idea of the Special Study... was worked out early in 1963... What helped most to get it moving were the big changes in military spending that were being planned..."

The chronology of these developments, which are very cleverly woven into this novel by Lewin, is important. It begins with the inauguration. The first big-money item was the TFX. That orchestrated solution was stretched from the inauguration to November 1962. The reaction of the military, of the aeronautical industry, and of Congress was predictable. Then, in April 1963, McNamara announced that things had changed. A few days later, Gilpatric made his important speech, and the Special Study Group was selected in August 1963. The Kennedys were on their way. They were going to ride on the TFX $6.5 billion into a second term, and then they were going to prepare America for peace. The Vietnam War and its hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures were nowhere in their plans.

Could America afford the Kennedys?

The Kennedy agenda began to surface with the TFX decision and was confirmed by the existence - known to very few - of the Special Study Group for "the possibility and desirability of peace". Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have had a greater impact on the enormous military machine of this nation than the specter of peace. This Kennedy plan jeopardized not hundreds of milions, not even billions, but trillions of dollars. (The Cold War has cost no less than $6 trillion.) It shook the very foundation upon which our society has been built over the past two thouand years.

As the Report From Iron Mountain says:

"War itself is the basic social system. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today... The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise: war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social control... War-readiness is the dominant force in our societies... It accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world's total economy."

NB any typos are mine, as I'm transcribing this from the book.