June 2003
James N. Giglio
Springfield, Missouri

Dr. James N. Giglio is a Distinguished Professor of History at Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU) in Springfield. He joined the history faculty at SMSU shortly after earning a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1968. An American historian with an emphasis on 20th century presidential and political history, Giglio is highly respected for his dedication to both research and teaching. In addition to serving on a number of professional committees, Giglio is the author of six books, numerous articles and reviews, and is a past editorial board member of Presidential Studies Quarterly.

Explain why you often choose biography as a medium for writing history.
By focusing on one individual life, you can better see how one person can make a difference. All of the human elements can be portrayed: ambition, courage, fear, greed, compassion, illnesses, etc. One can better understand how the environment, parents, mentors, and others can play a significant role in the way in which an individual develops. In short, one can learn much about human nature and more about ourselves from writing and reading biography.

In your opinion, what makes a life worthy of a biography?
Any life that has had a significant impact on the times is worthy of a biography. That impact may be largely positive or negative, and it may be narrowly focused (in shaping music, art, or baseball, for example) or more broadly concentrated (as it would be if you were writing about a U.S. president, for example).

You often refer to the importance of “capturing the warmth of a life being lived” when writing biography, and you spend a great deal of time researching background settings to achieve that goal. What kind of time and financial commitment does it take to add this dimension to your books?
The time it takes is considerable. For example, in my biography of baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial, I made three separate trips to his hometown of Donora, Pennsylvania, a community some 29 miles south of Pittsburgh. I went to the house where he lived as a child, I walked up and down the streets of that hilly community along the Monongahela River. Moreover, to learn even more about Donora, I not only interviewed old timers there, but I read the local newspaper for the entire decade of the 1930s to understand better the environment from which Musial emerged. For physical descriptions of Musial, Kennedy, or anyone I have written about, I have relied on the study of photographs and what contemporaries have said about them. Travel to various sites or repositories, of course, is at times problematic in terms of costs. Sometimes external or internal grants are available to fund the research. Even so, they never cover the complete costs of research trips.

Has the Freedom of Information Act affected your research?
Absolutely, in both a positive and negative way. It enabled me to force the Kennedy Library to open the White House Gate Logs, which contained daily logs of persons who visited Kennedy anywhere in the White House and the name of the individual who authorized the visit. It also gave me access to other previously classified material at the Kennedy Library or at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Recently, however, it takes longer and longer for the Freedom of Information Act Unit to respond to requests. Moreover, restrictions on federal documents have tightened considerably in recent years.

What role do libraries and librarians play in your research?
The librarians’ role is enormous. I have relied on the Meyer Library at Southwest Missouri State University for interlibrary loan requests and for advice when seeking to locate particular sources. Librarians at manuscript repositories either at the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Library, the Truman Library, and elsewhere were crucial because they were familiar enough with various manuscript collections that they could give advice that could not be found in the various guides to collections. That is the reason I always acknowledge that support in the acknowledgment section of my books.

How does researching and writing a sports biography, such as the Stan Musial book, differ from researching and writing a political biography?
The main difference in writing sports biography is in the nature of available sources. Political biographies are generally based on manuscript materials, i.e., personal correspondence, public letters and reports, memoranda. Sports figures like Musial don’t write many letters; those letters they receive they usually don’t save. Consequently, you have to find sources elsewhere. I interviewed hundreds of people who knew Musial in one way or another. I also relied on a questionnaire that I sent out to some 1,300 ballplayers who competed with or against him from 1941 through 1963. I used contemporary newspapers and magazines much more as well.

How do you decide when to stop researching and begin writing?
Anyone writing a book knows once the research begins what materials need to be investigated, which involves a long list of books, manuscript collections, and other sources. That list will get even longer as the research progresses. Even afterward, as the writing begins, one finds the need for additional research. So, it goes on until the project is completed.

Have there been times when your research turned up something your subject
did that was totally out of character?
You never completely know the subject of your biography. There are going to be aspects of his/her personality that are inconsistent and even unexplainable. There was one revealing anecdote regarding Musial, for example, from an eyewitness that was inexplicable because it seemed totally out of character. Consequently, I sought corroboration, which I could not obtain. The end result was that I didn’t use it.

What disciplines do you tend to apply when writing biographies—psychology, medicine, demographics, etc.?
A biographer needs to know psychology. Any time you ask why a person acted in a certain way, you get into motivation and hence psychology. I usually consult a clinical psychologist, which often means that person ends up reading the entire manuscript. We then end up talking about it at great length. Social psychology is also important as is statistical analysis. A biographer must also learn some of the techniques of the novelist particularly in describing persons and landscapes.

What difficulties face a researcher when the subject is still alive, as was the case with Stan Musial?
The difficulties depend upon the person being written about. Before deciding to do Musial, I reviewed a biography of Walter Mondale by Steven Gillon. Mondale was fully cooperative with Gillon by opening his political correspondence and inviting colleagues to do the same. This continued even after Mondale had disagreed with some of Gillon’s interpretations. I expected Musial to be as cooperative with me, given his reputation with the press during his baseball-playing days. I could not have been more wrong! I never realized he was as sensitive and private as he turned out to be. (This is true of many sports figures.) He not only refused to cooperate with me, but he also asked others not to do so, too. Fortunately, many of them talked with me anyway. Writing about a living person can be a difficult proposition.

If you could go back to one event you describe in the Stan Musial book to see for yourself what really happened, or what it was really like, what would you choose?
I imagine it would be Musial’s relationship with his father, which is shrouded in some mystery and controversy. His father had a drinking problem, which made life even tougher for a family struggling with the Great Depression.

Explain the differences between popular biographies and academic biographies. Do the lines between the two sometimes become blurred?
Even though the lines between the two are sometimes blurred, a popular biography caters to the general audience. It focuses much more on personality than on career, usually in a titillating way. This might include the use of unconfirmed sources that border on gossip. Usually the quality of scholarship leaves much to be desired. Even if primary sources are used, they are inadequately cited, which makes it extremely difficult to check on sources. I have noticed as well that the lengthy quotations that are frequently employed are all in the same style, which means the author took great liberty in the way that one’s testimony was used. More often than not, popular biographies also fail to provide sufficient empathy and end up being muckraking pieces such as Kitty Kelley’s biographies.

Did the fact that Musial played minor league baseball in Springfield, Missouri, have anything to do with your choice to write about him?
Not really. What was of more consequence was my interest in baseball history and the fact that Musial was a Missouri figure. The Musial biography is a volume in the Missouri Biography series, edited by William Foley. Foley, who knew of my interest in baseball, invited me to write the Musial volume.

How has historical research been affected by the “electronic age”?
This general question requires a multifarious response that ordinarily would require several pages of comment. So, I’ll just focus on a couple of examples:
For political historians, it has had a major impact. First of all, public figures don’t write as many letters anymore. They are more apt to use the telephone. Consequently, presidential libraries and other research libraries have extensive oral history programs devoted to the interviewing of various public figures who have had contact with a particular president or senator, etc. These oral histories have been transcribed and are available to researchers often on interlibrary loan. For example, the Kennedy Library has conducted more than 1,500 oral history interviews, all of which have some connection to Kennedy. Presidential libraries such as the Harry S. Truman Library have many of these oral histories available on the Internet. Fortunately, for the historian, presidents such as Kennedy and Johnson have also taped meetings and telephone calls, which have also been transcribed for scholars. Many of these transcribed tapes have been published in book form.
In another way, the Internet has assisted researchers by giving them access to the holdings of research libraries nationwide. The Internet has also made it easier to locate various individuals who have bearing on their research.
Most importantly to me personally, the greatest change has occurred in the writing phase of a research project. No longer do I have to write out that first draft on yellow legal paper. I begin the writing on the computer and edit it there as well. It is in the editing process that so much time is saved for the obvious reason that the entire manuscript does not have to be retyped. It was often in that retyping phase that other errors would occur.

Professionally, who or what has provided inspiration for your published work?
The persons who provided the greatest inspiration were the late Donald McCoy, Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas and Dominic Capeci, Distinguished Professor at Southwest Missouri State University. McCoy was a mentor who encouraged me during a difficult time professionally. He was an immense help particularly in the first Kennedy book. A distinguished biographer himself, he helped me understand what constituted the ingredients of good biography. My colleague Capeci has read drafts of virtually everything that I have ever written and has offered worthy suggestions. In some ways, he has been my severest critic, but one whom I trust and respect. I have sought to provide the same sort of critique of his writings. In short, we have had a symbiotic relationship for some 25 years. I think any writer needs to have a knowledgeable friend who can wear the hat of editor. Finally, I should mention my wife, Fran Giglio, who has always encouraged me by making me believe that what I did was important.

Interview conducted by Debbie Pitts, coordinator of the Missouri Census Data Center in Jefferson City. Pitts holds an M.A. in history from Southwest Missouri State University and was a student of James N. Giglio.

Books by James N. Giglio
Debating the Kennedy Presidency [with Stephen Rabe]. Rowman and Littlefield, 2003
Musial: From Stash to Stan the Man. University of Missouri Press, 2001
John F. Kennedy: A Bibliography, Greenwood Press, 1995
The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. University Press of Kansas, 1991
Truman in Cartoon and Caricature [with Greg Thielen] Iowa State University Press,
1983, reissued by Truman State University Press, 2001
H.M. Daugherty and the Politics of Expediency, Kent State University Press, 1978