The Washington Post‘s Joe Stephens has a story today about the FBI’s 15 year-long surveillance of Norman Mailer, which began in 1962 after Mr. Mailer wrote an article about Jacqueline Kennedy for Esquire.
According to Mr. Stephens:
What did they learn? Apparently Mr. Mailer was an "admitted leftist" (you don’t say?); he’d "been critical of the FBI in public appearances" (horrors!); and Mr. Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago was "is written in his usual obscene and bitter style" (put that on your book jacket).
While lacking a G-man’s bureaucratic economy, Wilfrid Sheed in The New York Times on December 8, 1968 didn’t love Miami either, writing that Mr. Mailer’s "method is simply to stuff as much of America into his ego as will fit and then to examine the ego closely."
Earlier this week, it was reported that the FBI also kept tabs on David Halberstam.