The Fifth Estate
The Fifth Estate was Mailer’s proposal for a citizen watchdog organization — a “democratic secret police,” he called it, or “a people’s FBI and a people’s CIA to investigate those two” — which he announced at his fiftieth-birthday party at the Four Seasons on 5 February 1973. The next day, at a news conference, he walked back the “people’s police” framing, comparing the body instead to the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, and Nader’s Raiders — “a kind of ombudsman” doing “objective, scholarly work” (73.4).
The proposal was widely received as a drunken misfire, but the Watergate break-in that June lent it a retrospective prescience that several reporters conceded (73.18). The idea never became a functioning institution, though it left a concrete trace: in March 1974 it merged with the Committee for Action/Research on the Intelligence Community (CAR-IC) (see 74.6), and the combined body published the CIA-watchdog magazine Counter-Spy (75.4), to which Mailer contributed. Mailer’s own verdict on the launch: “I knew the height of the hurdle, and I missed. I gave them a free ride.”