The notoriously paranoid FBI director J Edgar Hoover had plenty on his plate in summer 1962 as he fretted about keeping America safe from its enemies – real and perceived.By Philip Sherwell in New York
Last Updated: 12:57AM GMT 16 Nov 2008
Courtesy Of The Telegraph
The Cuban Missile Crisis was unfurling, civil rights protests were developing and the Mob was in its heyday.
But one morning, as he assidiously scoured the newpapers for signs of dissent and subversion, he noticed a report about the latest article written by Norman Mailer for Esquire magazine.
Mailer, the outspoken author who died last November aged 84, already had a reputation for fiery liberal views. So he might have been disappointed to learn that it took some mocking remarks about Jacqueline Kennedy - including suggesting that she was overly soft-spoken for a First Lady - to earn him a place on Hoover's watch list.
"Let me have memo on Norman Mailer," the FBI chief wrote to a subordinate after reading the comments about President John F Kennedy's glamorous wife. He received much more than a memo, however, as his agents embarked on a 15-year operation that outlived Hoover, who died in 1972 after 47 years at the helm of the bureau.
They monitored his writings, meetings, speeches, movements, acquaintances and even Christmas card list, posing as a friend, calling up his father and knocking on his door in the guise of deliverymen.
Their reports were than stamped "CLASSIFIED", "SECRET" and "SUBV. CONTROL", the latter an apparent reference to suspected subversives.
The fascinating insight into the tactics of Hoover's FBI has been made public in newly-declassified US government files. The documents were released to the Washington Post under a Freedom of Information Act request lodged following the writer's death a year ago.
The FBI's first Mailer memo, dated June 29 1962, contained enough incriminatory material to fuel the investigative instincts of Hoover, a fervent anti-communist and veteran of the post-war "Red Scare" McCarthyite witchhunts.
It noted that the writer "admitted being a 'Leftist'" and called the FBI "a secret police organisation" that should be abolished. One informant said Mailer was "a concealed Communist", although others disputed that assertion.
In 1963, Mailer apparently said the FBI had done more damage to America than the Communist party and was quoted denouncing Hoover as "the worst celebrity" in the country.
But just as interesting as Mailer's musings are the ruses, often most remarkable for their lack of sophistication, adopted by those spying on him. In 1965, agents twice knocked on his door in Brooklyn just to establish his whereabouts - once pretending to be looking for another family at that address, the next time claiming to be deliverymen.
A reported trip by Mailer to Fidel Castro's Cuba in 1967 attracted inevitable interest but the agency was apparently unable to establish whether he had actually secrety visited the communist island or not.
In 1968, at the height of protests about the Vietnam war, Mailer covered the violent demonstrations at the Republican and Democratic party conventions, subsequently writing his book Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
Hoover ordered a review of the contents and in particular its references to the FBI. The agent given this literary task observed: "It is written in his usual obscene and bitter style" and contained "uncomplimentary statements of the type that might be expected from Mailer regarding the FBI and the Director".
Hoover, who became the FBI's first director in 1935, died in 1972 aged 77, but his legacy lived on. A year later, the ever-watchful bureau agonised over how to handle a new book by Mailer about Marilyn Monroe after receiving a tip-off that the writer would allege the FBI was involved in a cover-up over her death.
The bureau feared the book would feature claims that its agents had removed evidence of alleged phone calls by the film star and sex siren to Robert F Kennedy just before she died in 1962. At the time, Kennedy, the president's brother, was Hoover's boss as US attorney general and both Kennedys are said to have had affairs with Monroe.
But in the end, the bureau decided that an intervention to block the claims "would merely serve to feed the fires of publicity, which Mailer is attempting to stoke".
Mailer was finally removed from the watch-list in 1977 but the contents of the files released to the Washington Post provide telling glimpses into the lives of two of the most colourful and towering figures of post-war America.
Hoover developed the FBI into a modern crime-fighting operation deploying innovations such as centralised fingerprint files and forensic laboratories. He made his name fighting organised crime but used the same tactics to spy on tens of thousands of suspected subversives, radicals and civil right activists. He never married and was widely reported to be a closet homosexual with a penchant for cross-dressing.
Mailer shot to fame with his first book The Naked and the Dead, written when he was just 25, co-founded the Village Voice in 1955 and won two Pulitzer Prizes. But he was as famous for his prodigious drinking and womanising - he was married six times and had eight children - as his prolific literary output.
In response to the release of the FBI files, Lawrence Schiller, his long-time friend, a film director and screenwriter and now senior advisor to the Mailer estate, told The Sunday Telegraph: "This was certainly characteristic of the autocratic Hoover years, but anytime someone questions authority and power, they have to understand they may have their motives questioned by those in authority and power."
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