Whenever the Yankees played the Red Sox at Fenway Park, Joe wanted to be sure to perform especially well, because he was not only going up against Ted but against Dominic as well. The Clipper was irritated by a ditty that Boston fans would serenade him with whenever he came to town. Sung to the tune of “O Tannenbaum,” it went: “He’s better than his brother Joe, Dominic DiMaggio!” Joe knew that wasn’t true, of course, but he thought Dom never gave him enough respect, and he didn’t like that Ted and Dom were friends.
“Joe felt his brother was too close to Ted,” Positano said. “He felt Ted had his attention. Joe always said that bothered him a little. He never asked Dom to pull away, but he’d say, ‘He may be your teammate, but I’m your brother.’ ”
Once, two of Ted’s friends were spending the night at his house in the Florida Keys. In the drawer of a bedside table was a small notebook of Williams’s, and inside was written: “Ways I’m better than DiMaggio.”25 The note probably revealed more about Ted’s insecurity than it did about his rivalry with the Clipper, which never reached the level of nastiness DiMaggio seemed to give it. In the end, Williams maintained his grace.
13
Korea
After the 1951 season, Ted added a new wrinkle to his winter routine by taking up golf, inspired by a tip from Ty Cobb, who’d confided that the game had been good for his conditioning and had helped him stay in the big leagues into his forties. After two weeks of lessons, Williams made his debut on the Florida links in December, losing fifteen balls on the first nine holes.1
Mostly, he remained in his preferred fishing-dominated seclusion, tuning out baseball, though when he heard that one of his favorite umpires, Cal Hubbard, had injured an eye in a hunting accident, Ted immediately sent flowers and a droll telegram that stood the traditionally deferential player-umpire relationship on its ear: “Get that peeper in shape for April,” Williams wrote.2 “You’re my boy—Ted.”
Williams was indifferent to rumblings out of Boston that he would be traded, rumors that had spiked in October after Lou Boudreau was hired to take over as Red Sox manager for Steve O’Neill. On being introduced, Boudreau had said: “There are no untouchables on my team. I’ll trade anyone on the club, including Ted Williams, if we can get what we want.”3 Ted had a cool relationship with Boudreau, who’d joined the Red Sox as a free agent for a final, lackluster season as a player in 1951. (“Well, if it isn’t a Boudreau shift!” Williams had said to his former nemesis when they met that spring.)
Shortly after the turn of the New Year in 1952, the idle rhythms and concerns of Williams’s off-season ended abruptly. On January 9, while fishing in the Keys, Ted received a phone call from his agent, Fred Corcoran, informing him that he had officially been recalled for service in Korea by the Marine Corps. News reports from Washington had it that Ted was one of several hundred Marine fliers being summoned to replace pilots being discharged from Korea. Assuming he passed a physical on April 2, he would begin eight weeks of training on May 2 and then serve seventeen months in Korea.
Williams was incredulous. Despite the ominous notices of the previous year that he was eligible to be recalled, Ted never thought it would actually happen. After all, he had already served in World War II and missed three full seasons of his baseball prime as a result. He’d done his duty. Now, at thirty-three, he would have to miss two more seasons of a career that only had limited time left. That seemed punitive. Weren’t there others available who had not already served? Did they really need him? Williams was not alone in suspecting a Marine ploy to use his star power as a recruiting tool.
Details of precisely how Williams came to be recalled remain murky to this day. A captain directly involved in the selection process later told friends that when officials chose Ted, they didn’t realize it was the Ted Williams. Another Marine, Williams’s squadron commander in Korea, said that was initially true, but before orders were issued, officials did know they were dealing with the ballplayer. The commander also asserted that the Marines reneged on an informal agreement that then-Commandant Alexander Vandegrift had reached with Ted at the end of World War II, which provided for Williams to remain in the Reserves and help with recruiting with the understanding he would not be recalled to active duty.
Ted was furious, but Corcoran counseled calm. The agent, mindful of his client’s image, issued a conciliatory, gung-ho statement on Williams’s behalf that was totally inconsistent with what he was actually thinking and feeling at that moment. The statement said: “If Uncle Sam wants me, I’m ready. I’m no different than the next fellow.” But on a parallel track, Ted decided to privately explore all his options to contest the order.
Williams called Joe Cronin with the bad news. They determined he should go to spring training as usual and participate until he was actually called up for duty. It was a long shot, but there was a slim chance he could fail his physical because of his bum elbow.
Man-on-the-street reaction in the papers mostly mourned the loss of a great star. The writers thought the call-up likely spelled the end of Ted’s career, while his teammates said they thought he was getting a raw deal. “We all thought that was unfair,” remembered Dom DiMaggio. “We thought they were making an example of him. Using him for public relations. Baseball years are so short, and he had already served.”4
The raw deal view was taken up and flogged for all it was worth by columnist Dave Egan, usually Williams’s archenemy. But the libertarian Egan, who had also supported Ted’s right to a deferment in World War II as sole supporter of his mother, again thought Williams was being treated unfairly.
Egan wrote, “I cannot rid myself of the feeling that he has been called back to the Marines, not because he is a reserve officer, but because he is Ted Williams… and because he can guarantee the press agents—pardon me, the public relations experts of the Marine Corps—plenty of front page publicity, and because he will stimulate recruiting.”5
But the Marines strongly denied they had singled out Williams.6 A spokesman revealed that Ted had been notified on June 30, 1951, that he had been promoted from first lieutenant to captain and that while he could have declined the promotion he did not. Instead, he submitted to a physical exam, which the boost in rank required, then accepted the promotion in writing. The spokesman noted that Ted had long been involved in recruiting—posing for photographs, recording radio promotional spots, and giving interviews designed to spur enrollment. A Marine recruiting poster in the late ’40s featured a photo of Ted in his Red Sox uniform and the message: “Ask the man who was one!”
Colonel Egan retorted the following day that any suggestion that Williams, by accepting a promotion, somehow was signaling that he wanted to be restored to active duty was a “Stalinesque fabrication” on the part of the Marine Corps. In this provocative analogy, Egan invoked none other than President Harry Truman, who in 1950 had famously dismissed a congressman who demanded that the Marines be given their own general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff by observing that the Corps already had “a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.”7 After an uproar ensued, Truman apologized for the remark, but Egan clearly believed the president was right the first time.
When the Korean War broke out, the regular Marine forces, and the crews of aviators needed to support them, were manned at levels far below what was needed to wage a battle halfway around the world. The Reserves were quickly called up, and they played a key role in early campaigns, such as the Inchon Landing. In November of 1950, as the American-dominated United Nations forces met with increasing success, China entered the war to bolster North Korea. Soon some sixty thousand Chinese troops had thirty thousand UN forces encircled at the frozen Chosin Reservoir. Still, during fierce fighting from December 5 through December 10, the UN troops managed to escape the trap and inflict crippling losses on the Chinese in a battle that remains etched in Marine lore as one of the Corps’ finest hours.
After being released from active duty at the end of World War II, reserve officers such as Williams ha
d automatically been assigned to the Voluntary Reserve unless they specifically requested otherwise, which Ted did not. The goal was to build up an experienced standby force. Congress tried to make service in the Reserves more attractive by increasing benefits and adding new ones. By 1950, the Marine Corps was offering its active, or organized, Reserves longevity pay tied to their rank and increased pay for the required two-hour weekly drill, as well as for the two-week active-duty summer program. Promotions were generally easy to come by, and retirement benefits were enhanced.8
The volunteer, or inactive, Reserves to which Ted belonged were required to do no weekly or annual drills and were essentially a group that could be recalled in the event of a war or national emergency. Williams had not participated in any such drills as a member of the Reserves, and had only flown once since the end of World War II. Enrollment in the inactive Reserves was high because servicemen had assurances that they could quit when they wanted to and that they could only be recalled under certain parameters. Specifically, prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, the Marine Corps was guided by the Naval Reserve Act of 1938, which provided that a member of the Reserves “may be ordered to active duty by the Secretary of the Navy in time of war or when in the opinion of the president a national emergency exists… but in time of peace, a reservist may be ordered to or continued on active duty with his consent only.”9
But that policy changed after the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950. President Truman’s decision to commit US forces the very next day prompted Congress to approve the Selective Service Extension Act. Now Truman was authorized to “order into the active military or Naval service of the United States for a period not to exceed 21 consecutive months, with or without their consent, any or all members and units of any or all Reserve components of the Armed Forces of the United States.”
Under draft rules then in effect, college students could avoid being called up as long as they were enrolled, a policy that eliminated an entire class of able-bodied men. Furthermore, it soon became apparent that, at least among fighter pilots, a high percentage of career enlisted fliers were being assigned not to combat duty but to positions as instructors, in which they could train others to operate a new generation of jet aircraft. That meant that a disproportionate share of the combat duty was falling to older reservists who were veterans of World War II (many of whom were immediately resentful).
Williams secretly retained a lawyer and instructed him to pursue any legal recourse he might have against the recall order, though there seemed none, since Congress had eliminated voluntary reservists’ ability to resign in 1950, following the start of the Korean War. There was a personal hardship exemption, but that was defined as having four or more dependents. Ted only had two—his wife and daughter—or three, if you still counted his mother.
The other avenues of pursuit were medical and political. Ted’s elbow still hurt him, especially in cold, damp weather, which Korea had in abundance, but he recognized that if he could play baseball with it, using the elbow as an excuse to get sprung from the military would seem both far-fetched and crass. Still, Williams was certainly open to a discreet inquiry from someone of influence who might make the case to a correctly situated official in the military hierarchy that Ted had already served his country and that asking him to do so again was asking too much.
Joe Cronin tried first. Cronin would tell his daughter, Maureen, a lifelong admirer of Williams, that he had called a friend who was an admiral to arrange a meeting at which Ted could go and make his case. “Ted went to visit this guy, to argue he had already served his time,” Maureen Cronin said. “I assume the meeting did not go well.”10
Ted wrote in his book that at spring training that April in Sarasota, a fan he described as “a big cheese man from Ohio” who thought the recall to Korea was unfair approached him and offered to ask his senator, Republican Robert A. Taft, to help. But after looking into his case Taft declined to intervene, telling the intermediary: “I have some reservations as to the fairness of it, whether these fellows should be going back, but I don’t interfere with a thing like that.” Taft, son of William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States, was then mounting an unsuccessful bid for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination himself. Ted said the senator wrote him a letter about the issue, which he did not keep. Another prominent politician, John F. Kennedy, then a third-term Massachusetts congressman running for the Senate, “tried to do something” for Williams but was unable to, Ted later claimed.
Concluded Ted, “I didn’t say anything, but I was bitter because it wasn’t fair. I think if it’s an emergency everybody goes. But Korea wasn’t a declared war, it wasn’t an all-out war. They should have let the professionals handle it. A lot of the professionals on duty for Reserves didn’t go.… The unfairness of the Selective Service is obvious when you know how the draft laws and the exemptions work. There’s only one way to do it, of course, if you’re going to have a draft, and that’s to draft everybody.”11
The Marine Corps still insists that Williams’s selection was fair and square, as was that of other major leaguers summoned to Korea, including Jerry Coleman of the Yankees, Lloyd Merriman of the Reds, and Bob Kennedy, then of the Indians. (Kennedy was later granted a hardship discharge for having at least four dependents.) In any case, even if Williams did have an informal deal with Vandegrift at the end of World War II, he had no one to blame but himself for not having gotten out of the Reserves before the 1950 act of Congress froze him in place. He knew, or should have known, that he could have resigned any time before that. In 1948, the Marines had even given him a reminder in writing. In an October 29 letter that year informing him that he had been given a “permanent commission” as a first lieutenant, Ted was told: “Should you decide, subsequent to the acceptance of this appointment, that you are unable to continue the obligations your commission entails, you should submit your resignation to the Secretary of the Navy… and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.”
But the fact remained that he had served in World War II, and his peers felt he was getting a raw deal. “He was pissed off to no end that he had to go back the second time,” said Ted Lepcio, a Red Sox infielder from 1952 to 1959. “He was very resentful. Breaking records kind of gnawed at him. He was always indicating to me, ‘Do you know what I could have done with those numbers?’ Then it would have been everyone chasing him.”12 Bob Feller sent Ted a sympathetic letter: “Personally, I cannot get too much enthused about the way they handled your particular case,” Feller wrote. “In fact, I do not like it.”13
Williams seethed at what he considered the injustice of it all, but he kept his rage bottled up. It wasn’t until four years later, when he lashed out at the induction of Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Johnny Podres, and the year after that, when he popped off about his own case, that the depth of Ted’s resentment at being recalled for Korea became publicly known.
Podres had been the star of the 1955 World Series, winning twice to lead the Dodgers over the Yankees in seven games. Though before his Series heroics he had twice been rejected for the service because of a bad back, Podres was inducted into the Army in early 1956. When Williams was asked innocently that March if the Dodgers would miss Podres, he was off to the races: “Gutless draft boards, gutless politicians and gutless baseball writers—that’s what we’ve got,” said Ted. “Here’s this kid who was deferred three years ago for a bad back and then what happens? He wins a couple of games, gets famous and some two-bit draft board puts the arm on him. It’s a damn shame and something should be done.… They’ve taken 20 percent of his baseball life, his earning life, away from him, and for no other reason than he gets famous by beating the Yankees in the World Series.”14
Then during spring training of 1957, Williams went nuclear about his own case, revealing for the first time that he had sought outside intervention to keep from being called up to Korea. Following an exhibition game in New Orleans on March 31, as the Red Sox were at the airport preparing
to return to Florida, Crozet Duplantier, executive sports editor of the New Orleans States newspaper, approached the Globe’s Hy Hurwitz and asked to be introduced to Williams. Like Hurwitz, Duplantier had been a Marine. He was still in the Reserves and told Hurwitz he hoped he could get Ted to say something that might give the Reserves a boost.15 After Hurwitz made the introduction in the airport restaurant, Duplantier asked Williams if he harbored any resentment against the Marine Corps for having twice interrupted his baseball career. Ted ignited. “You’re damned right I do,” he said. “Resentment against the Marine Corps and the whole damned government.” At that point he got up, left the restaurant, and stalked out into the terminal. Duplantier followed. “You think Senator Taft was a great man?” Williams continued. “Well, here’s what I think of him.” Then he turned to spit on the floor. “He was afraid to even try to do anything for me. He said he wouldn’t mind going to bat for some other guy. But not me. I was too important.
“And the same goes for Harry Truman!” Ted added, whereupon he spat on the floor again. “And the whole damn government is phony.” Asked if he was still in the Reserves, Williams replied: “Boy, you know, I’m not. When I got out this last time and they gave me a chance to pick up that [discharge] paper, I grabbed it.”
Ted’s blast ricocheted across the front pages of the country. The next day, Ted confirmed to the Associated Press that his remarks to Duplantier about the Marines and Taft were accurate, but he denied bashing Truman and the government. Then he took another swipe at the Corps. “I’ll tell you about the Marines,” he said. “They got the government to appropriate a lot of money. They said they had the pilots but they needed planes for them. Actually, they had no pilots, so they called 1,100 guys like me back. Most of us hadn’t flown a plane for 11 years, but the Marines wanted to make a good show. That’s why they grabbed a big name like me.”16 A spokesman for the Marine Corps said it would have no comment because “we take the position that Williams is a private citizen and can say what he wants to.”
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 44