Quite how compelling this imagery can be is illuminated by the story of a hoax, which appeared at exactly this moment. All that rising distrust was a gift to satirists keen to send up the administration’s dodgy logic. Specifically, a group of writers associated with a magazine called Monocle – a hyper-sophisticated New York quarterly that had helped to pioneer the “satire boom” a few years earlier.
To send up America’s addiction to military spending, the Monocle team, led by editor Victor Navasky, hired a writer called Leonard Lewin, who concocted what purported to be a leaked, top-secret government research paper. It would warn the government that if permanent global peace broke out, it would wreck the American economy, and even society as a whole. This was published in 1967 as though it were genuine, as the “Report from Iron Mountain”. The hoax “revealed” the real reason the state was perpetuating the war: to allow it to keep control over the population.
To ram home its satirical point, the report suggested that in the absence of conflict, Washington would have to find horrific, alternative ways to maintain its grip. Without military discipline controlling young men, there would need to be “blood games” and a “sophisticated form of slavery”. Without war to curb the population, the government might need to turn to eugenics. And without the fear of nuclear Armageddon, conformity would have to be enforced through another terrifying threat, perhaps “gross pollution of the environment” (although, as things stood, this was not yet severe enough to be tenable).
The report was convincing enough to cause a sensation. The New York Times broke the story on its front page; it soon appeared on the paper’s bestseller list. One newspaper called it “The hoax that shook the White House”. The report’s creators kept quiet; this was exactly the impact they’d dreamed of. If such a document was, just possibly, genuine, people asked, what did that say about how state power was being misused? Lewin did not publicly admit that he was the real author of the report until 1972.
The satirists picked their moment well. With the reforms of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programme, 1967 marked the last hurrah of the confident, optimistic era of big, high-spending government, turbocharged by the long postwar boom. But then it sputtered to a halt. Alongside defeat in Vietnam, the stagflation of the 1970s challenged the postwar dream that efficient government technocrats could run the economy and society to everyone’s benefit.
Yet somehow, even as the fortunes of the real state soured, the notion of the sinister power elite soared. The Watergate scandal broke President Nixon – but it also fostered the idea that large, nefarious forces were at work. Congressional inquiries exposed the illegal schemes of the secret state: the FBI’s attempts to destabilise the radical left, the CIA’s horrifying efforts to master “brainwashing”. These revelations humiliated the agencies involved, yet confirmed their sinister power. No wonder that in 1980, the proportion of Americans who told pollsters they thought government was “run for the benefit of a few big interests” hit 70 per cent. Or that so many Americans voted, that same year, for a president who declared that “government is the problem”.