On January 30, readers of the New York Times found a three-column obituary headlined: "L.C. Lewin, Writer of Satire of Government Plot, Dies at 82." On the same page an obituary of Thomas C. Mann, a career diplomat who played an important role in U.S. Latin America policy in the 1960s, received slightly less space. Whether intended or not, the two articles seemed to be contrasting political good and political evil.

Much of the Mann obituary was devoted to criticism by the Left-isolationist historian Walter LaFeber and by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who blamed Mann in large part for transforming U.S. Latin American policy "into an instrumentality for North American corporations." One of his mistakes, the Times implies, was opposing Fidel Castro's ally Salvador Allende: "In 1964 [Mann ] arranged help for Eduardo Frei Montalva, a moderate, in defeating Salvador Allende Gossens, a Socialist, to become president of Chile. Mr. Allende won the next election, in 1970, and died in a Washington-backed coup that overthrew his government in 1973."

Most of the laudatory Leonard C. Lewin obituary focused on Report From Iron Mountain, his 1967 hoax. Purporting to be the product of a secret 15-member government study group, the slim volume concluded that peace would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy and the "war system" propping up capitalism. Assisting Lewin in the concoction and publication of the work were several future luminaries of the American Left, including Victor Navasky and E.L. Doctorow. Under a pseudonym, John Kenneth Galbraith published a review in the Washington Post vouching for the book's authenticity. It fooled a great many people -- Esquire published a 28,000 word extract-and became a bestseller. In 1972, Lewin confessed his authorship in the Times Book Review, noting that the recently published Pentagon Papers "read like parodies of Iron Mountain, rather than the reverse."

Is Report From Iron Mountain as important a cultural document as the Times suggested? It ought to be possible to answer that question objectively, even if one disagrees with the views of Lewin and his allies about the Cold War, the Pentagon and American capitalism. In any case, it would be a mistake to respond to the Times' tribute with the outrage Norman Podhoretz expressed upon discovering in 1986 that the Air Force Academy in Colorado was holding a conference "in honor" of Joseph Heller's Catch-22. In his new memoir, Ex-Friends, Podhoretz writes that he was taken to task by "a colonel teaching at the Air Force Academy who wrote a letter to the Washington Post lecturing me about the great importance of literature in general and satire in particular..." Surely the colonel had a point. One can be amused by Heller's caricature of the military without being anti-military, just as one may enjoy the satire of office customs in "Dilbert" cartoons without being hostile to corporate capitalism.

Indeed, American literature would be poorer without the tradition of political satire that originated in the colonial era. Benjamin Franklin mastered the genre Report From Iron Mountain belongs to -- the fake government document. In September 1773, Franklin, residing in Britain, satirized British claims to sovereignty over the American colonies by planting his "Edict by the King of Prussia" in an English newspaper. Franklin himself described the reaction at the estate of Lord Le Despencer, where he was staying:

"[Paul Whitehead] had [the newspapers] in another room and we were chatting in the breakfast parlor, when he came running in to us, out of breath, with the paper in his hand.