The Mailer-CIA Connection
Bethell, Tom
The Mailer-CIA connection bY Tom Bethell At any given time there aren’t too many writers who can convince editors to publish splashy cover stories on the strength of their name alone. One such...
...Will my agents get the names of people leaving...
...And, oh, the dread insecurities of celebrity...
...His article, like his world, has little grounding in reality, little room for certainty...
...Technofascism Reeling Well...
...The party could be divided into two groups, Judy Bachrach noted in the Post...
...He seems to have missed that link...
...Can one know anything for sure...
...Confusion Triumphant Mailer at some point in recent years took those fatal steps and crossed into the celebrity camp, putting on all the while this great act as Celebrity-Writer-Champ...
...What a brute...
...Mailer is best writing about what he knows, but he doesn’t know anything about the CIA...
...What a crazy country we inhabit,” he ends his article...
...to keep the seepage of information under control...
...The article, which occupies 19 pages of the magazine, starts off with an illustrative device that is quite familiar to students of conspiracythinking: small pictures of a number of prominent people, some of them Tom Bethel1 is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...One is busy with a million things, and cannot find out...
...Confusion confusion...
...he asked...
...Then, after an introduction by Jimmy Breslin, Mailer stood up to the microphone to make his speech...
...In America, the fame and fortune that can come a writer’s way are so potentially great that they can indeed squash him...
...Who knows for sure who killed Kennedy...
...If we have been entertaining ourselves until now with the illusion that we are pursuing a narrative,” he writes, “or hovering over a picture that will soon come to focus, we may as well recognize that we can count, at best, on no more than a glimpse of a narrative-enough perhaps to give us hope this is a narrative which exists and not a chaos...
...Inst...
...Like a good boxer, though, he picked himself up 20 years after The Naked and the Dead and turned out an excellent book, The Armies of the Night, but since then he became one of the People Are Talking About People, and it has been downhill all the way...
...The Washington Post checked out Skolnick’s claim and concluded that it had no substance and that he was nuts...
...The next day Mailer called a press conference and admitted that although the party had been fine, his speech hadn’t been very effective because he had been “a hint too drunk...
...A propos Dallas, Mailer says that there were “a hundred or more murders in Dallas supposedly contion...
...So Crowther sent out 5,000 invitations to the celebrities of politics, media, and lit...
...and his appeal for someone at least to ask a heartfelt ques-tion...
...Aha, one immediately realizes, they’re all linked up...
...It would be a “democratic secret police...
...He started out by explaining that he was not there “to start one more little movement to protect the press...
...In October 1973, Mailer appeared in public once again, this time speaking to the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington, where he attacked the press again, calling himself “the second most outraged man in America by the press,” (Nixon, strangely enough, being number one), even though the press kept on dutifully reporting Mailer’s antics, and kept on being invited to attend further displays...
...Two men may work side by side in the same office for ten years and never learn the other’s real work...
...And this seems to have been Mailer’s problem...
...On hearing this the crowd began to murmur, but Mailer went on talking and above the murmuring you could hear the words “totalitarianism...
...facts are wiped out by artifacts...
...Not one word, as it turns out...
...One such writer today, clearly, is Norman Mailer, who was identified recently in The New York Times Book Review as “our greatest living American-born writer,” but whose recent lengthy article in New York magazine, “A Harlot High and Low: Reconnoitering Through the Secret Government,” marks him down rather as our greatest pen-wielding celebrity, the balance of whose mind is beginning to show signs of being disturbed...
...Many of the guests, mostly elegantly dressed, articulate antiwar activists, had come not knowing quite what to expect, but with the thought that, as one woman put it, ‘wine, cheese and Norman Mailer were probably worth $10 a head.’ ” Mailer spoke once again, now claiming that his organization was designed to check “technofascism” and the “Big Brother state...
...But then he changed his mind...
...And he reminded all concerned: “Remember how everyone said Norman was paranoid about the government...
...Another ego 56 trip...
...Of course, it’s also possible that the assassins learned about Welch from the State Department’s own publications...
...We do not know that they did not have a subscription to Counter-Spy, or that,someone was not mailing a copy or two to Athens...
...The possibility is now open that the CIA was using the break-in to the Democratic National Committee as its elegant cover to the real operation, which was to tap privileged Federal Reserve Board information...
...Funny that only Mailer seems to know about those hundred murders...
...to keep tabs on the Washington secret police, which is not democratic but bureaucratic...
...And what do we find when we look at the list...
...In one corner of the room civil rights leader Bayard Rustin was telling philanthropist Stewart Mott that he liked him even though he was rich...
...MAILER on the CIA” it is grandly titled on the cover, in letters nearly two inches high...
...So over 500 came-not bad considering it was $50 a couple, or $30 a head, and, as Sally Quinn would say the next day in The Washington Post, “Nobody who’s anybody in New York ever pays to go to a party . . . . Monday night everybody paid...
...and he suggests, using a mode of thought that is pure, undiluted Jim Garrison, that we “take the pleasure of wondering how many of those names and corporations have no relation to intelligence...
...He added: “One night, the vision of an angel came to me .in my sleep and said, ‘You are the dolphin, you must ride forth and save France (the angel, being drunk, then said, I mean America).’ I said, ‘Anything to relieve me of my inimitable boredom,’ ” The fun and games went on in this vein for another year or so, but then, late in 1975, there was an unexpected development, and thereafter antiAmericanism became noticeably less fashionable at the trendy watering holes and the smart dinner parties: Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was murdered by gunmen as he left his house...
...But stardom he has actively sought, no doubt with disastrous results...
...One thing is crucial,” Mailer told the Women’s Club, “I must get the American people to love me...
...She squashes sausage out of the minds of novelists on their hotfooted way to a real good plot...
...Mailer is telling us that what we had not hitherto seen was that these people, diverse and separate though they may have seemed, had been all along burrowing like moles underground, hidden from view, working silently and secretly together toward the achievement of some common, nefarious goal, one that was inevitably contrary to the interests of the nation as a whole...
...A hostile question...
...Won’t somebody ask a heartfelt question...
...The invitation card promised that Mailer would make an announcement of “national importance (major...
...these secret investments could total by now anywhere from $25 billion to $100 billion . . . . ” (My emphasis...
...And one immediately begins to wonder, what are Mailer’s connections in all of this...
...More Celebs Five months later the celebs were back again, this time in Jimmy’s Restaurant in New York, and by this time there had been a wonderful development...
...He was astute enough to keep the secret to himself until the last minute...
...The real enemies who appeared formed an elite corps,” Bachrach wrote, “and tended to associate mostly with each other...
...His third wife, Lady Jean Simpson, and a publicity agent named Frank Crowther had suggested to Mailer when they were at the literary watering-hole Elaine’s one day that he give a big public party...
...And he apologized for using the phrase “secret police...
...And yet, wasn’t there something one had read in the papers a few years ago...
...But you’re probably right that it could only happen in America...
...a man’s wife may only guess at his real activities...
...54 alive (Chuck Colson, E. Howard Hunt, Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger), some of them dead (John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes), and they are all connected up by a crazy cobweb of lines with arrows on them...
...Those who weren’t on the Enemies List, and those who were...
...Funny then, that he has not noticed what I believe to be the case, that the CIA has now become a metaphor for his own peculiar befuddlement...
...for Psychiatry & Foreign Affairs . . . . R. F. Communications, Inc...
...It has frequently been said that one of Mailer’s great strengths as a writer was his way with a metaphor...
...There are no longer, in this diaphanous world, any certainties-about oneself, obviously, but really about anything else either...
...After all, the gunmen have not been caught...
...We must see how far our paranoia is justified...
...Crisis Chic continued apace...
...Big Brother, at least symbolically, had beenl repudiated...
...Defense and Aerospace Center of Sterling Inst it u t e, Inc...
...asked Frank Crowther...
...What I’m proposing literally is that we face up to the possibility that this country may be sliding toward totalitarianism...
...One can hardly be certain...
...Even Mailer himself, dedicated discoverer of links and connections that he is, might have realized that the link between himself and Richard Welch was at least as plausible as the link-ups he tried to make in his New York article...
...Mailer replied...
...Is there anybody here who has not been hurt by the press, except the press...
...Wasn’t there some way he could have linked himself into the pattern, too...
...It has happened time and time again...
...Am I really good...
...The peculiarly Amc 8 can problem is that the first work rl so often the best (unless it went unw:.ognized...
...Have another drink...
...It was a class B list anyway,” said Dick Aurelio, a former aide to John Lindsay, who had also been left off...
...After years of such work, one may no longer be certain of one’s own function, loyalty or sanityone can hardly be certain of the identity of one’s friends, and one can never be sure the CIA has or has not made a new piece of history...
...One thing New Yorkers can’t bear is a secret they can’t fathom,” he said...
...Oh-ho...
...Frank Crowther organized once again...
...We live in a land riddled with moral absurdity...
...So it wasn’t the CIA, Norman, you did it to yourself...
...Hi, Norman, Hi, Elaine...
...It gets pretty chaotic soon enough, however...
...More Connections Mailer seems to have become rather nutty, too, just like most of the other conspiratorialists on whose work he relies heavily in this piece...
...Especially in those arts that are performed with a high degree of spontaneity, such as music, wide popular acclaim has in almost every single recorded case resulted in the artist being frozen in his state of development at the moment of exposure, and then going into a rwift decline...
...They did, of course...
...So one read on with curiosity: what was Mailer going to have to say 58 about the Fifth Estate...
...The Nixon “Enemies List” had been made public, and so the occasion was “An Evening With the Enemies”- $30 admission this time, proceeds to go to the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press...
...There are no answers, only questions...
...The aforementioned Fensterwald has said of him: “Skolnick is just a plain wrecker...
...For instance, Mailer suggests that the real purpose of the Watergate break-in was to drive a nail into the ceiling of the Democratic National Committee’s office: “A listening device is then attached to the nail...
...Norman was on hand for the party, even though by some strange oversight he had been left off the Enemies List...
...It is so much easier, after all, to do this than to go through the hard work of writing something worthwhile...
...Do they really love me, like me, even...
...A people’s FBI and a people’s CIA to investigate those two...
...which soon brought huge profits...
...Mailer merely proclaims that we do not really know anything about the CIA, and through some strange mental contortion he is able to believe that this lack of knowledge constitutes positive evidence on behalf of whatever malign speculation happens to cross his mind on the subject...
...proof enters the logic of counterproof and we are in a dream...
...And there’s some truth here, of course...
...and one thinks of him at the women’s club: “One thing is crucial, I must get the American people to love me...
...Mailer responded anxiously...
...Yes, that was it, the Four Seasons in New York, in 1973, when Mailer had celebrated his 50th birthday...
...Some people started to leave...
...When Mailer was asked how he felt about the Enemies List he could only reply: “The only thing that Nixon and I agree upon is that Max Lerner should be on the Enemies List...
...Things are not as they seem, that much one knows for sure...
...What a harlot...
...And he is in a way right-it is the American problem as regards the arts...
...Meanwhile, despite the ridicule it had received after Mailer’s speech, the Fifth Estate nonprofit corporation got off the ground, and under its auspices a quarterly magazine began to appear-called Counter-Spy...
...Which enclave...
...The world works in mysterious ways...
...And Jesus, where’s Carter Burden...
...When Mailer says that a CIA man may not be certain of the identity of his friends, one thinks, especially, of Mailer at the Four Seasons, with his invited guests jeering and drifting out (his friends...
...The CIA occupies that region in the modern mind where every truth is obliged to live in its denial...
...Next, Mailer suggests that because James McCord’s lawyer, Bernard Fensterwald, had been chairman of something called the Committee to Investigate Assassinations (get the acronym...
...in fact, since his best writing is grounded in experience and familiarity, going the celebrity route makes it very hard indeed for him to write about anything ,at all besides celebrities...
...Mailer has at least insulated himself against the “fortune” side of the pro b lem-large alimony payments having at least kept him writing, as he has conceded...
...The CIA is involved somehow,l but which wing...
...Hi, Norman, Hi, Andy...
...This was during the Watergate “crisis”-remember...
...Mailer suggests that this “inside information” was then being used to make “secret investments for the agency...
...Welch had already been identified twice in Counter-Spy as a CIA agent...
...And the office above...
...That was a fine idea...
...Saturday night Mailer spoke to about 100 guests at a Cleveland Park fundraiser for the Fifth Estate,” the Post reported in March 1974, “which has four full-time employees-three of them former government agents...
...And so they came: Shirley MacLaine, Andy Warhol, Jules Feiffer, Jose Torres, Jacob Javits, Marion Javits, Murray Kempton, Paul O’Dwyer, Bemardo Bertolucci, Lily Tomlin, Larry King, Larry McMurtry, Diane von Furstenburg, Dorothy Schiff, Ethel Scull, Eugene McCarthy, Elaine Kauffman, Huntington Hartford, George Plimpton, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Jack Newfield, Earl Wilson, Leonard Lyons...
...or they might have known, as many people in Athens did, that the house Welch lived in had long been the residence of the CIA station chief-but no matter...
...Is it me they like, or my fame...
...He had had this great new idea, the best of his life, which was to start a tax-free foundation called the Fifth Estate...
...Can one ever know for sure...
...Who needs it...
...I propose we start something equivalent to Nader’s Raiders or the American Civil Liberties Union...
...bugging...
...One does not know...
...Mailer could perhaps justifiably feel that his organization was beginning to achieve results...
...Then there was the United Airlines crash, of course, the one that killed Dorothy Hunt and others: Mailer says: “An investigator, Sherman Skolnick, in Chicago, would lay the claim that twelve people in one way or another connected with Watergate were on the plane . . . . ” What Mailer does not tell us, although by now we would certainly expect it, is that Skolnick himself is an arch-conspiratorialist whose credo is: “If we don’t act weird, nobody will pay attention...
...The Washington Monthly/October 1976 Then something else catches Norman Mailer’s eye-“a list of the offices in July 1973, on the seventh and eighth floors of the Watergate building...
...In the end, Mailer sees, it is all America’s fault...
...an “enclave” within the CIA was trying to drop the hint that “Watergate is related to Dallas,” which would be “the scoop of the century...
...We do not know if the people who make our history are more intelligent than we think, or whether stupidity rules the processes of thought at its highest level...
...Consider the following quotations, excerpted from his article, and let the idea float across one’s mind that when Mailer says CIA, maybe he means himself: “We have come to a circular place...
...He concludes, “It is just that like Agatha Christie’s characters, we all seem to end up knowing one another...
...Edgar Hoover . . . the Eagleton thing...
...A blow had been struck against technofascism, perhaps...
...Very suspicious, don’t you see...
...The Welch-Counter-Spy link makes for better speculation...
...It was occupied by “no less than the office of the secretary of the Federal Reserve Board...
...Well, Norman wasn’t paranoid...
...Even his ex-wives paid...
...But to liven things up Nixon made a TV speech that very night, and of course they brought a TV into the restaurant and had it on during the party, to the accompaniment of hooting, cheering, and derisive laughter...
...A man may work in the CIA for 20 years and never perform the role his title suggests he is performing...
...How strange, that of all his writings in recent years, in which he invariably and portentously introduces himself as a characterAquarius, Mailer, the Prisoner, Norman-there is this time no narrator in the foreground...
...He’s usually an automatic...
...Perhaps he could use the party as a launching pad for this new idea he had been cooking up...
...About a third of the way into the article Mailer gives us fair warning, in what seems to have been a moment of uncharacteristic lucidity...
...Washington’s Cleveland Park was the next crisis venue...
Vol. 8 • October 1976 • No. 8
