The first American to orbit the earth, John Glenn later served as a Democratic senator from Ohio. Ted Williams was the notoriously truculent baseball star from the Boston Red Sox and a staunch conservative. What bound these two starkly different personalities together was their shared experiences in the skies over Korea, as Adam Lazarus details in The Wingmen, an entertaining account of an interesting relationship.
Williams had been pulled out of baseball during World War II to become a Marine flying instructor. He was incensed to be reactivated in 1952 for the Korean conflict and believed he had been singled out because of his fame. (That wasn’t the case.) At 33, he was convinced he wouldn’t return to baseball. “I expect to be killed, of course,” he told a reporter on the
