A major sports figure and gorgeous entertainer are romantically involved. The American public is enthralled wanting to know every juicy detail. At times it seems to eclipse the big presidential election happening here, even creating more interest than the new royal that has succeeded to the throne in England.
Their dating distracts us from the ugly clashes erupting in the Middle East but not enough to quiet the public outrage about a sex reassignment surgery, and subversives being kicked out of teaching in American schools.
Sound familiar?
Except this was 1952 and the A list couple dating are not Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift but New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. A former war hero was the Republican candidate for president, not a convicted rapist, and a young princess named Elizabeth had prematurely inherited the crown.
More noteworthy, in 1952 a portion of the population didn’t have a meltdown over the celebrity couple’s relationship claiming it was a deep state plot.
A MAGA meltdown is what happens when a vaxxer and Biden supporter get together and smooch on that most American spaces a football field. Is it a deep state plot to fix a presidential election?
Only in 2024 in the cray cray MAGA world could a chart-topping singer’s relationship with a star football player be viewed by major news outlets as a mission to control America creating a right-wing media frenzy. Once Taylor began dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and became a fixture at games, some wingnuts claim that her movement into the football world was proof positive of a political conspiracy theory connected to the government.
There were no cries suggesting the romance between Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio was a ploy to get democrat Adalia Stevenson elected president in 1952.
Once upon a time, two high profile celebrity’s from different segments of the entertainment spectrum could date without a sizeable segment of the population going berserk.
Even in the Cold War climate of deep paranoia, no one assumed Marilyn Monroe was a government asset, part of a Pentagon psych op staged by both baseball’s American League and the Truman Democrats to defeat Ike and elect Adalia Stevenson president in ’52.
Was Marilyn Monroe a little too red for Americans? J. Edgar Hoover opened an FBI file on Monroe’s activities.
However, she piqued the interest of J. Edgar Hoover, though you can be certain it wasn’t the blond bombshell’s bodacious body that intrigued the closeted director of the FBI. It was her left-leaning views and possible ties to Communists that raised a “red flag.”
Was Marilyn Monroe a red menace?
The FBI kept a file on Marilyn Monroe
For years, the actress was a target for surveillance watched by the FBI whose agents monitored her life with the help of secret informants and anonymous letters sent to agents.
They kept tabs on who she was associated with and where she traveled documenting any activity that could be construed as anti-American, ie Communist.
Cold War McCarthy-era paranoia meant anyone suspected of harboring communist sympathies was vulnerable to falling under the watchful eye of the FBI and HCUAA charged with rooting out Soviet Spies.
Was Comrade Marilyn caught reading a book espousing pro-Soviet Union propaganda?
On the set of All About Eve in 1950 she was warned not to be seen by studio heads reading radical books ( the book that prompted the warning: The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, renowned muckraker of the Progressive era who along with other intellectuals at the time fell head over heels with the Soviet Union. )
Begun in 1955, the FBI kept 85 pages of surveillance of America’s biggest star detailing her association with fellow travelers and was released to the public in 2012.
At the height of McCarthyism, Marilyn was also a possible subversive person with Communist ties due in part to her relationship with Arthur Miller. Top: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Bottom: Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohen
The documents start around the year she began dating suspected communist and playwright Arthur Miller.
The tyrannical period of McCarthyism was the context that birthed Miller’s famous 1953 play The Crucible. Monroe’s involvement with Miller became a media spectacle. As a progressive, he was politically involved with many communist cultural and social front groups. Suspicions were aroused that Marilyn too might be a communist causing the FBI to keep track of her.
In 1956 he was brought up against the House Un-American Activities Committee. During Miller’s interrogation by HUAC in 1956 he announced his intent to marry Monroe at the peak of her career.
In 1960 she became a founding member of the Hollywood branch of The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. That same year she was elected as an alternative delegate to the state Democratic caucus in Connecticut where she kept a home. She did not hide her pro-Castro views on Cuba or her support of the burgeoning civil rights movement.
The bureaus never found any proof she was a member of the party: “Subject views are very positively and concisely leftist; however if she is being actively used by the communist party it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in LA” a July 1962 entry in Monroe’s file states.