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The Report covered a number of recommendations that the Federal government should do in
the event that they were thrust into an era of peace:
“(a) A comprehensive social-welfare program, directed toward maximum improvement
of general conditions of human life; (b) A giant open-end space research program, aimed
at unreachable targets; (c) A permanent, ritualized, ultra-elaborate disarmament
inspection system, and variant of such a system.”
It also recommended the invention of “alternate enemies.”
Then in 1972, in a New York Times article, Leonard C. Lewin, a New York free lance writer
and editor (A Treasury of American Political Humor), who wrote the introduction to the book,
confessed to being the author of the Report, and said he wrote it “to caricature the bankruptcy of
the think-tank mentality by pursuing its style of scientific thinking to its logical ends.”
In 1996 Simon & Schuster reprinted the Report with a new introduction. Evidently the
germination of the Report took place in 1966 when Victor Navasky (Publisher and Editorial
Director of The Nation ), who was editor of the Monacle a political satire magazine, read a New
York Times article about the stock market declining because of a ‘peace scare.’ Navasky said
something to Lewin who then wrote the report, and they presented the Report to E.L. Doctorow,
Editor-in-Chief (and co-conspirator) of Dial Press, who agreed to publish it as nonfiction.
Navasky said the purpose of the hoax was “to provoke thinking about the unthinkable- the
conversion to a peacetime economy and the absurdity of the arms race.”
However, some still believe the Report to be authentic because a large portion of it has come
to pass.
At the Conference on Conditions of World Order, which met from June 12-19, 1965 (which
no doubt led to the establishment of the Club of Rome), at the Villa Serbelloni (facilities
obtained through the Rockefeller Foundation) in Bellagio, Italy, which was sponsored by the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (with a grant from the Ford Foundation and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences), 21 scholars, writers and scientists from all over the world met to
define the concepts of world order. A segment of their report, by Helio Jaguaribe said:
“The establishment of world order depends not only on its intrinsic desirability and
viability, but also on the support of men and groups who decide to dedicate themselves to
the completion of such a goal. As increasing sectors of developed and underdeveloped
societies begin to realize the urgent necessity of world order, the viability of its
establishment, and the fact that it can be achieved by adopting measures which are
reasonable in themselves, none of the governments will be able to escape public pressure
for establishing world order ... It is incumbent upon the intellectuals to play the decisive
role in the formation of pressure groups in favor of world order ... the establishment of
world order demands the mobilization of groups dedicated to international pressure for
the gradual implantation of that world order ... the negotiated establishment of world
order is theoretically possible and practically feasible since, in the last analysis, the
probable effects of nuclear conflagration have made way an impractical alternative to the
peaceful solution of contemporary problems.”
On May 18, 1972, Roy Ash of the Office of Management and Budget during the Nixon
Administration, said: “Within two decades the institutional framework for a World Economic