PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Since Berg himself rarely had any idea where he’d be from one day to the next, other people could hardly be expected to keep up with him. After Berg returned home from Europe in 1946, Howard Dix tried, but almost immediately found that it was a hopeless pursuit, as he told Earl Brodie. “I do not know where your black-haired boy friend is … I do not know whether he may be on a trip or not.” One good place to check was Princeton. Berg passed through frequently, and never more so than during home football Saturdays in the autumn of 1946.
Each time he went to Princeton that year, Berg liked to stay over for a night or two at H. P. Robertson’s house. His pattern of arrival never varied, and eventually took on the ritual qualities of a ceremony—a faintly absurd ceremony. Berg would telephone the Robertsons on a Friday from somewhere in town—Firestone Library, perhaps, where he liked to read the newspapers—and announce, “I just came in for the game.” This was a cue that the entire Robertson family learned to heed. “But you must stay the night with us” was the practiced rejoinder. Berg would refuse. He just couldn’t. The Robertson family member would insist. An instant later Berg had capitulated. Someone hurried over to the library to pick him up, swung by the train station so he could collect his ditty bag, which was conveniently, yet not presumptuously, stowed in a public locker, and then brought him to the house, honor intact, ready for a rousing weekend.
On Saturday, Berg and Robertson would go to the football game at Princeton’s Palmer Stadium and cheer for Robertson’s son, Duncan, a right tackle on the team. Afterward, back at the house, Berg and Robertson, born talkers, told stories. Neither would discuss the war, Robertson refusing to broach the subject even with his family. Berg, however, liked to drop small hints about what he’d done in Europe. “He was evasive,” Duncan Robertson remembers. “You pieced together little things.” When it came to baseball, Berg was more forthcoming. As with everyone, he liked to tell the Robertsons stories of his trips to Japan. He told the family that when he was in Japan, nobody could tell him apart from the Japanese. The Robertsons were skeptical. “I don’t know, he didn’t look Japanese,” says Robertson’s daughter, Mariette. “He was twice as tall as they were.” A man from Life magazine was once in the family living room, discussing with Robertson whether the curve ball curves. Berg became infuriated that someone was trying to dupe his friend. “Professor,” he cried, “I don’t want you to be taken in by this. I know a curve ball curves.” And then to the room, “I’m not gonna let them them make a fool out of the professor.”
On Saturday evenings, Berg tagged along with the Robertsons to cocktail parties hosted by the Institute of Advanced Study scholars. These were hard-drinking affairs, where the physicists gulped down martinis and wondered what would happen to the bomb they’d just made, now that the politicians had their hands on it. Berg met all sorts of people—anyone from Johnny von Neumann to Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer might show up—and many of them were delighted to talk with “the smart baseball player.” They were even more pleased when they found he could discuss their work with them. For many years after Robertson left to teach at Cal Tech in 1947, Berg would be asked to Princeton parties on his own.
Berg was also invited to spend two afternoons at the Princeton home of Albert Einstein. In December 1946, Pocket Books published an anthology of articles culled from the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. Included were Berg’s piece on pitchers and catchers and an essay by Einstein on the atomic bomb. Sometime after this, Berg and John Kieran paid a call on Einstein. Einstein asked the two men to explain the “theory of baseball” to him, and with the help of a pencil and paper, they tried. Einstein quickly lost his patience and vowed that he could not understand baseball now, and would never try again. That was Kieran’s version. Berg described the afternoon differently. According to Berg, “the Professor” made him a glass of tea, played his violin for him, and then announced, “Mr. Berg, you teach me baseball and I will teach you the theory of relativity.” Then, after a pause, he said, “No, we must not. You will learn relativity faster than I will learn baseball.”
After the Robertsons moved to California, Berg stayed at the Trenton Inn, which was partially owned by his Princeton friend and classmate S. Lang Makrauer. Makrauer never charged him, and sometimes Berg installed himself there for weeks. In the spring, Berg liked to go to Princeton baseball games and even to practices. While he was sitting in the stands in 1957, his eye fastened upon Dick Edie. “For some reason he showed up at a lot of baseball games I played in,” says Edie. “You’d look in the stands and there’d be a guy in a black suit with a New York Times and an umbrella under his arm. Then he’d disappear.” Eventually Berg introduced himself, and after that, sometimes he would be invited to Edie’s eating club for dinner. Edie wrote his undergraduate thesis on the history of Princeton baseball, and while he was aware that Berg had been a star player in his day, what Edie didn’t know was that Berg would sometimes sit in Firestone Library, copying out page after page of the thesis verbatim into his notebooks. One day, he transcribed twenty-seven pages.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, Berg returned again and again to Princeton, though changes at the University troubled him. Princeton decided to begin admitting women in 1968, which Berg thought was a mistake. “My God, Sam,” he once exclaimed to his brother. “This is not the college I once knew.” He always remained a habitué of Princeton football games. At one of them he met a Lawrenceville School mathematics teacher named Robert Wallace. When Berg came to Princeton on a weekday, he might spend the morning at the library, join Wallace for lunch, and then Wallace would give him a ride to the train station. Once Wallace’s mother ate lunch with them at the Nassau Inn. Berg made a fuss over her, and Wallace never forgot it. Berg told Wallace just enough about his role in the war so that, without knowing any of the details, Wallace came away convinced that Berg was a hero who had risked his life many times. Wallace had one more impression of Berg. He sensed that he was lonely.
On Saturdays, Berg liked to pass the time with sportswriters like Harvey Yavener of the Trenton Times, who were assigned to cover the football games at Palmer Stadium. Yavener and another Trenton newspaper writer, Bus Saidt, got to doing things with Berg outside Princeton. They’d pick him up from his brother’s house in Newark and take him places. At toll booths on the New Jersey Turnpike, Berg would read the toll taker’s name plate and work his trick of identifying what country the person’s ancestors came from and where in that country they’d lived. Yavener and Saidt, who paid for the tolls as they paid for all expenses when Berg was along, were amazed. When Saidt celebrated his fiftieth birthday, Berg insisted they go out to dinner to celebrate. Berg brought a date, and Saidt paid the check. Saidt didn’t mind. He enjoyed Berg’s company, and so did Yavener, who thought Berg was the “most charming person I’ve ever known. He was warm and made people feel good about themselves. You were flattered that he spent time with you.” Berg paid his way with stories. He’d tell the sportswriters about his war exploits and about exotic women, but if they ever asked what he was doing at the moment, he held his finger to his lips. Yavener and Saidt assumed he was working for “the government.” Berg’s form of departure encouraged that impression. “He was like a ghost,” says Yavener. “He’d appear and disappear.” They weren’t the only ones in the Princeton press box wondering about Berg. Sooner or later, everyone did. Morrie Siegel of the Washington Post once asked Bill Wallace of the New York Times, “What does he do?”
“Nobody knows,” said Wallace.
CLEVELAND, OHIO
In the late 1940s, Ted Berg was a young boy growing up in Elyria, an Ohio town twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, when his first cousin once removed Moe Berg came for a visit. Berg stayed for a few days and then, on a snowy night, he asked to be driven to the airport. Ted and his father took the front seat, Berg sat in back, and off they went. They neared the airport, and were traveling on an access road separated by a chain-link fence from the end of a runway, when B
erg said he wanted to get out. The terminal was not yet in view, and all Ted could see was snow-blanketed fields. It was a dark night, cold and still. Fresh snow was falling. Ted had noticed that Berg wore leather shoes, and no galoshes. Berg asked the man and the boy in the front seat to drive away without looking back. Ted peeked anyway, but Berg had already disappeared.
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
When Berg telephoned to say he was in Philadelphia, his friend I. M. Levitt from the Franklin Institute was always glad to host him. Berg would arrive at the house, the pockets of his overcoat stuffed with newspapers. After the catching up was done, the two men liked to play a game, using Levitt’s giant, two-volume unabridged dictionary. Levitt would open the book and pick out a word at random, and it would be up to Berg to give its derivation, root, and meaning. Levitt says Berg was never stumped. They stayed up half the night talking, playing, and nibbling cookies, until Levitt’s wife, Alice, finally dragged her husband off to bed. Berg would wave good night, saying he intended to do a little reading before he went to sleep. That wasn’t all he did. One night Levitt awakened in the middle of the night and went into the bathroom, where he discovered Berg’s freshly washed underwear and socks drying over the bathtub, as they always were when he traveled. When the Levitts got up at seven, Berg, as always, was dressed and waiting for them. The clothes were gone from the bathroom. But if you brushed Berg’s arm in the first part of the day, you’d notice that it was damp.
Berg never looked exactly shabby to Levitt, but he sensed that Berg was enduring hard times, and it baffled him. “I can’t understand, with his abilities, why he could possibly be impoverished,” he says. Levitt surmised that Berg’s life “was spent keeping current, reading every paper he could get his hands on.” Berg never asked Levitt for money, but Levitt occasionally gave him some, and Berg never refused it.
OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA
Berg was Tony Calvert’s surprise guest in early 1954. He seemed to Calvert “to be at loose ends. He put up a good front but you could see from his dress and his conversation that things weren’t the best.” Calvert was in the oil business, and Berg had oil on his mind. He’d just been to Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, looking over Canadian oil fields, visiting the Icelandic collection at the University of Manitoba library, and sending out postcards on which he scrawled “X marks my room” and neglected to sign his name. On December 31, in the University of Alberta campus bookstore, he copied down into a notebook the complete titles of twenty-four books that interested him, from Man the Tool Maker and Ukrainian Grammar to Latin for Pharmacy Students and Introduction to English Law. What he was doing in Canada his notebooks make less clear, but during this period in his life, it appears that Berg attempted to form several different investment consortiums. In 1953 it was to be an oil deal. Two years later it was stainless steel.
People who knew him were always hearing rumors that Berg had his money in a Minnesota mining company or in Louisiana natural gas. But what money? As he had confessed to the government collectors, and which they verified, there was none. He made copious lists of potential investors and customers, but there is no evidence that he made any money for himself, and according to his brother, Berg squandered plenty from other people. Calvert was not one of them. Berg called him another time, to propose that Calvert back him in a deal that involved Israeli drilling rights. Calvert told Berg that Calvert Oil was too small an outfit to handle something like that.
CALIFORNIA
A few months after leaving Calvert, in the spring of 1954, Berg turned up in Oakland, California. Early one evening, Earl Brodie came home after work, opened the front door, and there was Berg seated in his living room, one leg crossed over the other, giving Brodie’s two-year-old daughter, Andrea, endless up-and-down rides on his shoe. Berg had arrived by foot, he stayed for dinner, charming everyone with his thoughts on ballet, opera, and literature, and then late in the evening he announced that he was leaving. Brodie offered to give him a lift to the airport or to call a cab, but Berg declined and walked out into the night. “I think there was a flying saucer out there waiting for him,” says Brodie.
H. P. Robertson was now teaching at Cal Tech, and Berg headed south to see him. Robertson would go to his office during the day, leaving Berg to amuse himself. One morning he rode into Los Angeles with Robertson’s daughter, Mariette, a UCLA junior. When Mariette picked him up after classes to bring him home, Berg asked her to stop by Los Angeles City Hall for a few minutes. He said he had to meet someone in the men’s room. She agreed, waited outside for him, and then drove him home. She knew Berg pretty well, knew that he was “entertaining” and “told lots of lies,” but what happened in the men’s room she never found out.
The Robertsons were plotting to fix Berg up with another house guest, Johnny von Neumann’s sister-in-law, Bushka, who was visiting from her home in England. One afternoon it was arranged that the two were left alone at the house, where very quickly the proposed match became a perfect mess. Bushka had two sons at home in England, and Berg asked her what sort of gift she was going to take them from her American visit. She said she didn’t know. Berg had a suggestion. “Why don’t you take them a nylon shirt?” he said. And then, “You can wash mine now, so you know how to wash them.” That was about as romantic as it got.
Robertson introduced Berg also to William Fowler, the Cal Tech physics professor and future Nobel laureate. Fowler, like I. M. Levitt and so many of the men who admired Berg, was a baseball fan. Robertson had told Fowler that Berg was “a very smart man,” and Fowler, a lifelong Pittsburgh Pirates supporter, was easily persuaded. “He was magical,” says Fowler. “I was always surprised at the depth of his knowledge. No subject could come up on which Moe didn’t have comments that were quite intelligent and apropos.” They talked mainly about baseball, but in this and subsequent meetings, Berg was always eager to know about new developments in physics, and Fowler was soon telling Berg what he was doing in the lab. “A lot of that stuff was classified,” he says. “I knew with Moe it would stay classified.”
Fowler never knew how to contact Berg, but he didn’t need to. Berg found him. At Physical Society meetings in Washington and New York, Fowler would be standing with a clutch of physicists between sessions, discussing the presentation they had just heard, when there would be Berg, listening right along, taking it all in. He and Fowler always exchanged a big hug and made plans to have supper together. “I kind of felt that Moe didn’t have much money,” says Fowler. “I always put his dinner on my hotel bill. I’d invite him to dinner, and afterward, he’d just vanish.”
ITHACA, NEW YORK, AND PARIS, FRANCE
It was through Antonio Ferri that Berg met Theodore Von Karman. Berg stayed in loose touch with Ferri, now a professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and his wife, occasionally meeting them for dinner. Ferri liked to include scientific friends and colleagues in these outings, and once, when Von Karman was in New York, he came along.
The Budapest-born Von Karman had revolutionized the American aviation industry with his ideas on supersonics, rockets, and airborne weaponry. Despite his mother’s warnings that the U.S. was full of gangsters, Von Karman had come to Cal Tech in 1930, and by the time Berg met him in the mid-1950s, he had founded or had a part in founding some of the United States’ most powerful military research and development organizations, among them the Aerojet Corporation, the Rand Corporation, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the NATO Advisory Group for Aeronautic Research and Development (AGARD). He was a fun-loving Jewish bachelor with an earthy sense of humor and great personal warmth, and he and Berg liked each other from the start.
Von Karman moved from place to place almost as much as Berg did, and so they met up in New York, Washington, and a few times in Ithaca, during Von Karman’s terms as a visiting professor at Cornell. One year, a Japanese scientist, Yasujiro Kobashi, was also at Cornell. Von Karman was not a baseball fan, but Kobashi was, and with that in mind, Berg wrote a name in Japanese characters on
a blackboard. With a wink at Professor W. R. Sears, who was also in the room, he asked Kobashi who that was. “Cone-ee Mock—great manager of Philadelphia Athletics” was the response. Berg picked up the chalk and wrote out another name. Kobashi was baffled. “Connie Mack,” he read aloud. “Who is that?” That was, of course, the correct pronunciation of Mack’s name, proving Berg’s point that many Japanese mispronunciations of English words are due to faulty transliteration. There was more to Berg’s friendship with Von Karman than displays of erudition. In 1956, when Berg flew out to Pasadena to see Von Karman, it was to discuss the legal issues involved in helping Von Karman’s brother to leave Hungary, in the wake of the Soviet crackdown.
Ferri owed his job in the U.S. to Berg, and through Von Karman, in 1958, he did Berg a favor in return. It was obvious to Ferri that Berg was having financial difficulties, and he suggested to Von Karman that he help him out. It was no easy business getting Moe Berg to take a job. No matter how strapped he was, the work had to satisfy his pride, appeal to his curiosity, and accommodate his distaste for regular working hours. Von Karman had something in mind that would cover all that. He asked Berg to accompany him to the 1958 AGARD meeting in Paris, and Berg accepted.
On Berg’s government employment form, Von Karman noted, somewhat generously, that “Mr. Berg is an expert in the field of foreign diplomacy and public relations.” Berg was paid $50 a day and called a consultant. AGARD’s aim was to encourage European countries to develop weapons technology of their own instead of relying on the U.S. defense industry to do it for them. This was not a subject upon which Berg could offer much consulting expertise. In one of his notebooks, Berg described his job more accurately, writing, “My new career to see scientific friends—bolster.” He was, in fact, a lobbyist and a personal representative for Von Karman. If Berg didn’t know much about aeronautical science, he did know some scientists, and Von Karman wanted him to talk with them.
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