FBI Alert: Marilyn Monroe Visits Mexico!
An FBI memo on this day alerted J. Edgar Hoover and others in the Bureau that the actress Marilyn Monroe had visited Mexico.
Her trip obviously involved no violations of federal law, and the only reason for the surveillance was that Hoover was following Monroe because of her alleged relationships with President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Following the activities of Marilyn Monroe was a great waste of time and an abuse of her privacy rights.
Hoover created the FBI “Obscene File,” parts of which he kept in his office rather than in regular FBI files, September 30, 1942.
The more serious abuses of Americans’ rights by the FBI involved spying on political activists, leaking damaging information to Congress and the press, burglaries of the offices of political groups, and forging documents to discredit people. See, for example, the FBI’s campaign to “neutralize” Dr. Martin Luther King, on December 23, 1963. See also the notorious COINTELPRO program, which was the most secret FBI effort and which engaged in a wide range of illegal activities COINTELPRO was authorized on March 8, 1956. It exposed as a result of a burglary of the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1971.
Examine the FBI Files on Marilyn Monroe: http://vault.fbi.gov/Marilyn%20Monroe
Learn more: Athan Theoharis, J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (1995)
Learn more: Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (1991)
Read the Church Committee report on abuses by the FBI: http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports_book3.htm
See the FBI files on other actors, musicians, activists and politicians: http://vault.fbi.gov/