Blog Mirror: January 14, 1954: Joe DiMaggio Marries Marilyn Monroe

An interesting and sympathetic, while honest, treatment of a story we first looked at here in the context of her marriage during the Second World War.

January 14, 1954: Joe DiMaggio Marries Marilyn Monroe

DiMaggio, who we would have to assume had a thing for blond starlets, as this notes, would cap his marital attempts at two.  Monroe attempted three times.  So did Dorothy Arnold, who we would have to characterize as a minor actress.  She died in 1970, leaving behind her third spouse.

Arnold and DiMaggio's union resulted in the only child either of them had, the troubled Joseph Paul DiMaggio III.  He lived a troubled life, there being a lesson in here, but interestingly remained close to Monroe after his father and the actress divorced. He was one of the last people she called.  He died at age 57.

Tuesday, November 3, 1942. The 1942 Election.

Today was election day in 1942.  Overall, the nationwide election saw an increase in Republican office holders.

In Wyoming, the following occurred:

1942.  Lester Hunt, DDS, the sitting Wyoming Secretary of State and a Democrat narrowly defeated Governor Nels H. Smith.

Lester C. Hunt.

Hunt would serve as Governor for two terms before going on to becoming Wyoming's Senator.  He killed himself in 1954 after Washington D. C. policy picked up his son in 1953 for soliciting a male prostitute.  The scandal was kept quiet for awhile, but political opponents threatened to use it against him as a threat to keep him from engaging in a 1954 bid for office.

In the Senate Hunt had been an opponent of Joe McCarthy.

In the same year that Wyoming went from Republican to Democrat for the Governor's mansion, the state went in the opposite direction for the Senate.  Edward V. Robinson defeated incumbant Harry Schwartz.

Robinson.

Robinson's election was part of a nationwide treand that year that saw a Republican increase.  He's serve only one term and lose a bid for reelection.  He was Welsh and had served in the British Army in the Boer War, and is little remembered as a Wyoming politician.

Hunt's death, it should be noted, remains an enduring tragedy of the McCarthy Era, and one which, at least in some Wyoming circles, came to define McCarthyism and certain right wing elements of the press.

More on Hunt:

Baseball, Politics, Triumph and Tragedy: The Career of Lester Hunt

Robinson, on the other hand, gives us a rare example of a nearly completely forgotten Wyoming politician.  In some ways, that's a shame, as his life story was one that was somewhat typical of the era in that he was an early, post Frontier Era, immigrant to the state when a person could still enter ranching, which he did, in spite of having an engineering background.  Following his defeat for reelection he ultimately retired to Pendleton Oregon in 1958, where he died in 1963. 

 The Marines and Army begin an offensive on Guadalcanal at Koli Point.

Marine Corps pack artillery in action at Koli Point

March 29, 1942. The Hukbalahap Rebellion begins.

On this day in 1942 the Hukbalahap Rebellion, a Communist peasant rebellion, commenced in the Philippines.  The Huks, as they were called, conducted a guerilla war against the Japanese which lasted through the war and turned into a rebellion against the Philippine government which lasted until 1954.

The movement was supported by the US during the war, and opposed by it after the war.

It was interestingly put down after the war not only by military means, but by political reforms that co-opted the most pressing grievances of the Huks, leaving them essentially without a political base.

Stafford Cripps.

Stafford Cripps met with Mahatma Gandhi and presented British plans for a semi-independent India after World War Two.

Cripps was a left wing lawyer and a member of the Labour Party.  He'd been ambassador to the Soviet Union before it was attacked, during which time Cripps had warned Stalin that a German attack was inevitable.  Churchill had appointed him to the position due to Cripp's Marxist sympathies.  He became a member of the war cabinet during the war and his mission to India presented a plan of his own devising which met with support from nobody on either side of the issue.  After the war he was a figure in the Labour government and was one of those who approved of the sending of jet engines to the Soviet Union, something Stalin had dismissed as impossible due to being "foolish", which resulted in the design going into the early Mig 15s.

The Japanese won at Toungoo.

In a bizarre event, German internees managed to convince their native Indonesian guards to rise up in a rebellion against the Dutch on the island of Nias, and declared it to be an independent state.  This followed Japanese landings on other Indonesian islands. The Japanese would land on Nias in April and they removed all of the Europeans, save for a physician, from the island.

Sunday, November 4, 1941. Expanding operations.

Catalina's from Patrol Squadron 14 in November 1941.

U.S. Navy Patrol Squadron 14 arrived in Oahu.

The United States Army occupied Dutch Guiana (Surinam), which is now Suriname.

Today the country is a South American republic we frankly hardly ever think of, which all in all may generally be a good thing.  At this point in history, however, it was a Dutch colony, which it had been since the 1600s.  During the war, the Dutch government reconsidered its status, and it obtained a type of dominion status in 1954, and full independence in 1975.

The US had been concerned about its bauxite deposits prior to this date, not wanting them to fall to the Axis, although exporting bauxite from northern South America to Germany would have been impossible. The occupation did secure them for the Allies, however.

This time is noted here:

Today in World War II History—November 23, 1941

Also noted there, trucks were now crossing Lake Lagoda, having followed a  horse-drawn mission of the day prior.

The British were thrown back at Sidi Rezegh in the desert.

A bomb went off outside the U.S. Consulate in occupied Saigon, although there were no injuries. Shades of things to come.

A large fire damaged parts of Seward Alaska.

The lesson of past hearings. . .

Joseph Welch, hand in head, being questioned by Joseph McCarthy

Joseph Welch was the chief legal counsel for the U.S. Army when it fell under the gaze of Joseph McCarthy.  McCarthy asserted that there were Communist that had not been brought to light by the Army in the Army, in defense plants, or in institutions associated with national defense.  The claim wasn't actually wholly without merit, actually as at least a few Communists, in 1954, were in the service and more in industry, which was not surprising if we consider that the 1930s had been the high water mark of American Communism and there were more at that time, the 30s, than there ever would be again. Some would end up in the service by default, and indeed at least one openly Communist American officer, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, received the Silver Cross for heroism in the Pacific before later being killed in action. The Army certainly wasn't a hotbed of Communism, however, and the claims were seen as extreme at the time.

On June 9, 1954, Welch, now in day 30 of the hearings, challenged McCarthy confederate Roy Cohn to provide the Attorney General with the names of the 130 subversives that McCarthy claimed were working in American defense plants "before sundown" that day.  That wasn't done, but McCarthy called out the name of a lawyer who worked in Welch's Boston law office as a member of a Communist front organization.  The lawyer had indeed been a member of it in his youth (recall the comment about the 30s again).

When this occurred, the famous exchange resulted.  Welch at first commented:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us....Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

McCarthy should have known better than to attempt to joust with a figure like Welch, but he kept on and didn't yield, resulting in:

Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

McCarthy still wouldn't yield. Welch rebuked him and informed him he wouldn't answer any more questions. The audience broke into applause.

McCarthy was wrecked forever.

Yesterday Republicans in the Impeachment hearings suggested that Lt.Col. Vindman, the child of Ukrainian immigrants, might not be fully loyal to the United States as the Ukrainian administration offered him a position as their defense chief several times.  He declined every time.  There's no suggestion that he ever entertained the offer, and to entertain it would not be a sign of anything in particular.  After all, Douglas McArthur was head of the Philippine's army after retiring, the first time, from the U.S. Army. That didn't make him disloyal.  And apparently at least one senior American Air Force officer with Eastern European ties has taken up such a position.  Claire Chenault spent years in the service of the Nationalist Chinese, but he's never been considered to have been disloyal.

The real question should have been what did Lt. Col. Vindman hear, and what did it mean.  Both Vindman and another witness said that they were distressed by what they heard, Vindman very much so, but that they didn't hear the word "bribe" and neither came so far as to claim what they heard was regarded as a bribe. Vindman did go further than the other witness in his opening remarks in upholding the reputation of the removed ambassador, a noble thing to do, but perhaps straying outsides of the confines of what he should have done.

Still, for the second time in two weeks the House Republicans have managed to attack a witness and have the attack fall back on themselves.  

Joseph McCarthy attacked a lot of witnesses in his hearings in the early 1950s.  Now forgotten, McCarthy's claims were a lot more accurate, indeed highly accurate, than recalled.  He benefited from the work of a prior committee from the 1930s and he was also almost certainly getting information secretly and without Administration knowledge from the FBI.  But his behavior just went to far.  Attacking the Army itself went too far, and then attacking Fred Fischer in a collateral attack went way too far.  It was so devastating, in fact, that McCarthy's apologist have accused Welch of cleverly setting  it up.  But McCarthy' set himself up.

Americans don't like politicians attacking servicemen, and the GOP, which has been closest to the service since World War Two, has members who dislike it most of all.  McCarthy didn't survive attacking the Army.  Today's House Republicans would have done well to remember that.

The results of these hearings, as already noted, are foreordained.  But the election isn't.  For undecided voters seeing a soldier like Vindman impugned may be hard to forget. 

McCarthy ended up censured later that year.  His career declined.  He died in 1957 with the cause officially being hepatitis, but which is widely believed to have been due to alcoholism or contributed to by alcoholism.  He was 48 years old.  He left behind a wife of for years, Jean, whom was 33 years old at the time of his death.

Joseph Welch would die three years after that, at age 69.  He's often best remembered today for his role as the judge in Anatomy of a Murder, which he played after his role in the Army McCarthy hearings.