Norman Mailer is one of Brooklyn Heights’ most famous former residents. An icon of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s, Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes and was one third of the team who first published The Village Voice. And according to an article in the Washington Post, he was also the target of a 15 year FBI investigation while the agency was under the auspices of Herbert Hoover. The Post alleges that Hoover became “obsessed” with Mailer after the author “mocked former First Lady,” Jackie Onassis, in an article in Esquire Magazine.
In today’s Washington Post article, Joe Stephens reports:
“In the summer of 1962, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was scanning his morning Washington Post when an item on Page A15 caught his eye. Norman Mailer‘s most recent article in Esquire magazine had mocked Jacqueline Kennedy for, among other things, being excessively soft-spoken for a first lady.
Hoover scribbled a note: “Let me have memo on Norman Mailer.”
Over the next 15 years, FBI agents closely tracked the grand and mundane aspects of the acclaimed novelist’s life, according to previously confidential government files. Agents questioned his friends, scoured his passport file, thumbed through his best-selling books and circulated his photo among informants. They kept records on his appearances at writers conferences, talk shows and peace rallies. They noted the volume of envelopes in his mailbox and jotted down who received his Christmas cards. They posed as his friend, chatted with his father and more than once knocked on his door disguised as deliverymen.”
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