The Department of Truth #24

Minsk, 1960

The issue opens in Minsk with Lee drinking in a factory or industrial room. The setting is rough and intimate rather than ceremonial. Lee is angry, drunk, and visibly uncertain about why he has been brought there. Grigori Vertov’s presence turns the encounter into an interrogation, but the conversation also resembles an argument between two people who have spent years trying to make incompatible systems understand each other.

Vertov asks whether Lee has returned to Moscow and describes a plan more devious than simply shooting him. The threat is to destroy Lee with the truth laid bare, perhaps through one of Vertov’s strange moving pictures. The line makes cinema an instrument of disclosure and attack. A film can reveal a hidden history, but it can also impose an interpretation so persuasive that the viewer cannot tell whether the image is evidence or propaganda.

Lee rejects the language of revolutionary purity. Vertov’s associates say that Americans do not understand the hardness of Soviet dreams, while Lee insists that the revolution does not live in him. Their disagreement is partly political and partly personal. Both sides believe they are defending a future, but neither trusts the other to decide what the future should be.

Two worlds on one planet

Vertov tells Lee that for a few decades there were two wholly different worlds on one planet. People in America lived through the world of an eagle, while Soviet citizens lived through the world of a hammer and sickle. The statement is not a claim that the continents occupied separate physical planets. It describes the social realities produced by rival political systems, media, institutions, and expectations.

The two worlds were caught in a balance that nearly broke. Each side was frightened by what might happen if the other’s story became dominant. Vertov argues that the Soviet system and the American system were playing a game with the whole world as the board. In the comic’s continuity, this ideological competition has material consequences because belief can alter the reality being governed.

Lee remains tied to America even while working inside the Ministry of Lies. Vertov reminds him that he still lived in an American world and saw it through the eye of an eagle. The image identifies Lee’s divided identity. He can learn the Soviet method without becoming Soviet, but he cannot return to an American story without carrying the rival reality inside him.

The McCarthy crisis

The Department’s history describes its first major crisis as the rise of Joe McCarthy. A “shithead from Wisconsin” begins naming supposed communists, and people who had never read a pamphlet start speaking as if they had been infiltrated. The more people believe the claims, the harder it becomes to resist them. The Department is forced to confront a politician who is manufacturing a reality that competes with its own.

The issue presents McCarthyism as a case in which accusation becomes evidence through repetition. The Department’s personnel are alarmed because the public story is moving faster than the institution can contain it. A person can be treated as a communist because enough people believe the accusation, and the consequences can become material even when the evidence is absent.

This fictional framing draws on the documented history of McCarthyism, the Second Red Scare, and the Army–McCarthy hearings. The comic adds the possibility that mass belief could create or strengthen the threat being named. It does not establish that real-world accusations produced supernatural communists. The historical and fictional layers must remain separate.

Television, Disney, and the usable story

The Department’s leaders consider how television can replace older propaganda tools. They believe the medium can provide a cleaner narrative, but they also worry that it is getting out of hand and taking away the tools used to control the story. Television reaches homes directly and allows competing images to appear at the same time. It can stabilize a national myth or expose the cracks beneath it.

Lee is told that he will be taken to an amusement park in California to meet Walt Disney. The Department wants Disney’s help because it believes cartoon fairy tales can make people accept a useful story without understanding the machinery behind it. The request is not simply for entertainment. It is for a national mythology that can be repeated by children, families, and institutions until it feels older than politics.

Lee responds that the Ministry of Lies is not chatting with cartoonists. The contrast is deliberate. Soviet propaganda is presented as severe and ideological, while the American method uses pleasure, nostalgia, and optimism. The issue does not say that one method is less manipulative. It shows two systems choosing different emotional routes to the same goal: make a population believe that its political world is natural.

Kennedy and the glamour of America

The conversation turns to John F. Kennedy. Lee explains why many young people liked him: he represented the person they wanted to be. The world felt old and stiff, Washington felt old and stiff, and Kennedy appeared as a young, attractive couple whose party people wanted to attend. His image gave America glamour at a moment when the country’s underlying story was beginning to crack.

The issue does not deny Kennedy’s political actions or reduce him to a television image. It examines how public presentation can become part of a national reality. A president’s appearance, marriage, voice, and media presence can change what citizens believe the country is. The glamour may cover structural problems, but the cover itself has political force.

The Department’s concern is that the story will not hold. Kennedy is a powerful figure, but he is also a human being capable of breaking the narrative. His humanity becomes a threat to the institution’s preferred version of America because the story needs a symbol while the person may act unpredictably.

The television crisis and the Soviet comparison

The Department’s personnel argue that the narrative is becoming untenable. Television would have made the story easier to control, but it is now exposing more than the organization can manage. The Soviet Ministry of Lies has its own problems, yet it appears more willing to impose a direct line. The American Department wants a dream of a better world that still appears to be reality.

One speaker wonders whether Vertov is right. If the Soviet Union understands that reality can change through belief and America does not, then the Department may be losing a war it does not understand. The fear is not that Soviet ideology will win an ordinary political contest. It is that the Soviet institution will learn how to operate the underlying mechanism while the American institution remains attached to a story that is already breaking.

Lee’s task is to carry knowledge between the two systems. He is asked to help the Department understand the Ministry, but his own observations threaten to become a third reality—one in which neither side’s account is sufficient.

The Walker case and George de Mohrenschildt

Lee later recalls making a friend in Dallas while working the Walker case: a Russian named George de Mohrenschildt. The account connects the friendship to Lee’s developing plan. De Mohrenschildt asks whether Lee was the person who took the shot at Walker, and Lee refuses to answer. The question places Lee inside the chain of political violence before Kennedy’s assassination while preserving uncertainty about the exact relationship between his actions and the later event.

The real George de Mohrenschildt was a historical figure associated with Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Walker shooting is a documented part of the Oswald case. The comic uses those facts as the surface of a fictional intelligence and manifestation story. It does not establish that the real de Mohrenschildt belonged to a Ministry of Lies or that the historical shooting carried the supernatural meaning assigned to it here.

The meeting gives Lee an opportunity to treat history as a tool. He sees the possibility of using a real case, a real friendship, and a real public fear to construct a larger story about America. The personal connection becomes valuable because it can be inserted into the narrative of Kennedy, communism, and national rescue.

Vertov’s refusal to stop Lee

Lee asks what prevents Vertov, one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union, from stopping him from killing the president. Vertov says that Kennedy is flawed but human, and that his humanity helped avert Armageddon by listening to Nikita Khrushchev. The answer separates political judgment from narrative utility. Kennedy may be a flawed leader, but his capacity for human response has consequences that a story about him cannot fully control.

Vertov says that a man can break the story the Ministry wants to tell about Lee and the story Lee tells about himself. The statement explains why Vertov does not simply execute him. Lee is dangerous because he can become a symbol, and killing him may make the symbol stronger. The Ministry must decide whether to suppress a person or preserve the possibility that his story can be used against him.

The confrontation ends without resolving whether Vertov is allowing Lee to proceed as part of a larger plan. The issue leaves open the possibility that Lee’s escape, his contact with de Mohrenschildt, and his later actions are all being watched by competing institutions.

Continuity significance

Issue #24 deepens the Department’s history between its founding and the Kennedy assassination. It shows how the organization responded to McCarthyism, television, consumer mythology, and Kennedy’s public image. It also places Lee’s Walker case and de Mohrenschildt friendship inside a longer plan whose exact purpose is not yet known.

The chapter expands Grigori Dziga Vertov beyond the role of Soviet administrator. He is a theorist of competing realities, a filmmaker who understands the power of images, and an adversary who may believe that stopping Lee would strengthen the story Lee is building. His conflict with Lee is therefore a contest over authorship as much as a spy confrontation.

The issue’s final effect is to make the Kennedy story even less stable. The real-world event remains documented history. In the comic, it is also a pressure point where the Department’s fiction, the Ministry’s counterstory, Lee’s personal ambition, and the public’s desire for a meaningful America all meet.

Real-world references

The issue references Minsk and the Soviet Union in 1960, Joe McCarthy and the Second Red Scare, television, Walt Disney, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, the Walker shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald, and George de Mohrenschildt. The Ministry of Lies, reality-shaping Cold War, Capra’s secret operations, and Vertov’s supernatural authority are fictional.

Historical background should document McCarthyism, Kennedy and Khrushchev, Disney’s public history, the Walker case, and de Mohrenschildt before explaining how the comic uses them. The issue’s competing worlds are an in-universe model for belief and narrative control, not a claim that the historical record was literally split into two realities.