Mailer's Jackie Remarks

Norman Mailer would have been so proud. According to a Washington Post report, the “Naked and the Dead” author was tracked by FBI agents for 15 years on direct orders from the cross dressing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The Feds were set on Mailer in 1962, after Hoover read an article in which Mailer mocked Jacqueline Kennedy for being soft-spoken. For the next 15 years, FBI agents kept tabs on Mailer, including circulating his photo to informants and, more than once, knocked on his door disguised as deliverymen. Of Mailer's 1968 book, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago," an agent wrote, "It is written in his usual obscene and bitter style. Book contains reference to . . . uncomplimentary statements of the type that might be expected from Mailer regarding the FBI and the Director."