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| Photo by HeadShots Photography |
Adam Lazarus is the author of the new book The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams. His other books include Best of Rivals. He lives in Atlanta.
Q: What inspired you to write The Wingmen?
A: Anyone who looks at some of my previous book titles will probably assume that I am a huge “sports guy.” And they’d be correct.
Sports have always been a massive part of my life and as early as I can remember I was a baseball history fanatic. I read trivia books, kid’s books, even some full-length biographies on baseball players, probably beginning at the age of 5. And every summer my family visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
So, even though I am not from New England and am not a Boston Red Sox fan, I learned about Ted Williams before I learned about George Washington, Thomas Edison, or Elvis Pressley.
Similarly, I am from Ohio and you don’t grow up in Ohio without knowing who John Glenn is. From the time I was born until about the time I graduated high school he was my state’s senator. And because I had seen the film The Right Stuff several times, I knew about his vital role in space exploration.
But despite all I had read and heard about both Ted Williams and John Glenn, I never once read or heard that they served together, side by side in the air, during a war.
I discovered this fact a few years ago and once I explored the story a bit more, and learned that their friendship spanned five decades, I knew there was a book to be written.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between John Glenn and Ted Williams?
A: I interviewed John Glenn’s son, David, for this book and he said something in passing about his understanding of his father’s friendship with Ted Williams, something akin to “Dad just thought he was a real character.”
Ironically enough, a few months later I received a few dozen letters from John Glenn’s archives at The Ohio State University which included a 1953 letter he had written home to his family during the Korean War.
In it, Glenn wrote about a mission he and Ted Williams served together and part of his description of Williams was, “What a character!” In a lot of ways, I think this sums up their relationship.
Ted Williams and John Glenn were polar opposites in probably every way imaginable.
Ted Williams was married and divorced three times. He had difficult, troubled relationships with all three of his children. He was a staunch conservative Republican, good friends with Richard Nixon. He was either an atheist or an agnostic. He was tall and handsome with wavy dark hair and used a booming voice to spit out curse words seemingly as often as it spit out verbs.
John Glenn was pretty much the opposite of everything I just said. He was married to the same woman for 73 years, a woman he knew since they were toddlers playing together in the same playpen. He adored his children, who adored him right back. He was a Democrat—maybe not the most liberal Democrat—but still a Democrat. He was a devout Presbyterian.
And he was short with very early-thinning red hair and was almost always understated and softspoken, rarely ever uttering a negative or curse word about anyone.
To the celebrity ballplayer who quarreled with fans and reporters, the “Clean Marine” was unlike most people he encountered. And vice-versa.
In the early parts of their relationship, I think each man was something of a novelty to the other. But once they began serving together in combat, especially during some remarkably dangerous or harrowing missions, they formed a bond.
And in the years that followed, despite all their differences, they genuinely liked one another. They also shared much more in common than either probably realized.
That was one of my goals with this book, to showcase their subtle, perhaps overlooked similarities, and how that may well have been a reason that the two men “clicked.”
Q: The writer Larry Tye said of the book, “I thought I knew the story of the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams, on the baseball diamond and battlefields. Just like I thought I knew all there was about Old Magnet Tail, John Glenn. Wrong on both counts. But thankfully Adam Lazarus saved my tail with his splendid narrative on these two American icons and their extraordinary friendship.” What do you think of that description, and how did you research the book?
A: Larry’s description pretty much sums up why this book “works” in my opinion. Most people know who Ted Williams and John Glenn were. Now the reasons they know who they were run the gambit. But they are pretty much household names.
Yet this book tells about an important part of their lives, a part unknown to most people who of remember Ted Williams and John Glenn. I didn’t know about it before I started writing this book and I knew a great deal about both men previously. So shedding new light on the lives of these iconic figures is often appealing to readers.
As for the research I conducted, there were the usual channels: other biographies, magazine profiles, newspaper articles. But, as I find with most nonfiction books, interviews were the most essential.
I was extremely fortunate to interview both of John Glenn’s children and Ted Williams sole-surviving child as well as three pilots who flew combat missions with Williams and Glenn in 1953 during the Korean War. Those were so special, to talk with the men—all in their late 90s—who served with the two centerpieces of this book.
But probably the best piece of research that I conducted came from collecting (either copies or the originals) hundreds of letters written home by pilots to their families during the Korean War.
Most were letters written by pilots who served with Glenn and Williams in their same, small Marine Corps fighter squadron. But about 50 were letters written by Glenn home to his wife and kids, and Williams home to his mistress back in the United States. These were invaluable to telling the story about their service together.
Q: What do you see as each man's legacy today?
A: I’ll start with Glenn because I think his legacy is much simpler to define: John Glenn is one of the finest public servants this country has ever produced. I try not to lionize or romanticize figures in my books. I consider myself a journalist and I have to maintain some level of objectivity.
But I don’t think it is at all breaking my objectivity vow to say that John Glenn was an American hero. The man flew 157 combat missions during two wars, served an essential role in the advancement of military aviation during his two stints as a Navy test pilot, carried out the NASA mission that put America back into contention during the “Space Race” with the Soviets, and was a four-term United States senator.
The note that I would add to the last part is that, while he was a loyal Democrat, I think one of the things that often cost him in his political career was that he seemingly always put “country” over “party.” He wanted Americans to excel, not one specific faction of Americans.
Again, I don’t want to suggest that John Glenn was some sort of saint or perfect person. He had his flaws, and I think The Wingmen points that out. But, at least to me, he defined self-sacrifice for a greater cause.”
When his friend, President John F. Kennedy, the man who guided him towards politics, uttered his famous line “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” I think he was urging people to be more like John Glenn.
Ted Williams’ legacy is not nearly as easy to peg and for two reasons.
First, Williams was without question the most complex individual that I’ve ever written about at length. He was a patriot and war hero who tried to wiggle his way out of serving in two wars.
He was a rude, ill-tempered jerk who (allegedly) did not treat his three wives very kindly, yet also cared deeply for both his closest friends and perfect strangers. He was a selfish recluse who spent more than half his life raising millions of dollars for and raising the spirits of thousands of sick or dying cancer patients.
One pilot who served with Williams in Korea essentially said that he was a coward who was the biggest “a-hole who ever lived.” Yet John Glenn, who served in the same squadron, found him to be a brave and thoughtful friend.
Often during the course of my book tour readers have shared with me examples of how nice Williams was to them during chance meetings, while history remembers him as nasty and dismissive to fans and the general public.
Many of those same people who I meet on the book tour ask me point-blank, “Was Williams as big a jerk as people say?” My own assessment of Williams is that one’s impression of him was shaped by the randomness of what day they met him: if he was in a good mood, you probably had a great experience, if not, then you probably think he lived up to his sour reputation.
And I don’t think this just applied to strangers who had a one-off encounter. He was moody and impatient and absolutely intolerant of carelessness. If you crossed him or mis-stepped, he would let you know: he had no filter and no interest in niceties.
But I personally don’t think someone who went out of his way to advocate for Negro League players in his Baseball Hall of Fame speech in 1966 or someone who spent thousands of hours visiting sick children in hospitals (while insisting no reporters or photographers discover that he would be there) could be “the biggest a-hole who ever lived.”
The white elephant in this answer has to do with the final “legacy” of Ted Williams: his frozen head. Many of your readers probably know about the controversy following his death, in which his body was frozen, sent to cryogenics storage, then ultimately his head was cut off (the body discarded) and, presumably, remains in storage today.
And for the record, I had no intention of covering this part of Ted Williams’ life/death in my book The Wingmen, because I didn’t think it had anything to do with John Glenn, other than for purposes of further contrasting the two men: Glenn had a solemn, even optimistic memorial and burial at Arlington National Cemetery upon his death, while Williams’ death was truly sad and macabre due to the national controversy and scandal that followed public reports of the freezing of his body and eventual dismembering of his head.
But during the course of my research, I discovered that the ugly events that took place in the days, weeks, and months following Williams’ death were connected in a way to his friendship with John Glenn. If you pick up the book, you’ll see how.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on a new idea for a book, one that is not set in stone or even completely fleshed out. I would rather keep that under wraps for now, but what I will say is that I think The Wingmen reveals a certain niche that my books have come to represent, and I don’t mean sports.
Each of my books are about iconic figures who a large percentage of Americans know. Here it is Ted Williams and John Glenn. But other books I’ve written feature names like Arnold Palmer, Bill Parcells, Joe Montana, and Joe Gibbs.
Most people know these names. But my books shine a very bright, focused light on a particular chapter in their action-packed lives, just like The Wingmen does for Glenn and Williams. I think this magnified look at a particular portion of a “superstar’s” life, is something that readers can really grab onto.
My “elevator pitch” to readers might as well be “you know of the main character, you know the top few lines on their résumé, now let me tell you something you probably don’t know about their legacy.”
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Go to AdamLazarusBooks.com to check out more and if you purchase any of my books feel free to reach out to me there. I’d be happy to send a signed and personalized bookplate for your copy.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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