In 1967, Berg met Sayre Ross, the owner of a small Manhattan publishing firm, in the office of a mutual friend who was a lawyer. They left at the same time, and Berg walked Ross back to his own office on Park Avenue. It was a new office, and Berg admired it. The next day, when Ross arrived for work at 8:45 AM, Berg was waiting for him with seven newspapers under his arm. Setting them down on a table in a neat pile, Berg said, “Look, I don’t want anybody to touch it.” During the next three years, nobody in Ross’s office ever touched Berg’s stacks. Berg became a regular, sitting around the office every day, flirting with Ross’s secretaries and reading the courtesy copies of books Ross got him from other publishers. Soon Ross could count 120 books piled beside the stacks of newspapers.
Ross was intrigued. “It was better than reading books to listen to him,” he says. “He was a great storyteller. He was an embellisher, and who the hell wasn’t. His language was a weapon of description. He colored it because people were interested.” Berg became Ross’s nearly constant companion. Everywhere Ross went, Berg wanted to go. They had long lunches together, and long walks afterward. Like everyone else who played such a role in Berg’s life, Ross delighted in the singular experiences a man had when he was out on the town with Moe Berg. One morning, Berg walked into the office with Nelson Rockefeller and introduced him to Ross. Rockefeller gave them a ride to Toots Shor’s in his limousine, they took a table, and in walked four Japanese men. “Let’s have a little fun, Sayre,” said Berg. “When I put up one finger, it’s laugh. When I put up two, it’s stop laughing.” Berg began speaking in Japanese to Ross, mentioning Babe Ruth. Every few seconds he’d hold up a finger and Ross would laugh. The Japanese were astonished. Finally they interrupted, there were introductions, and, it turned out, they were businessmen working for Shell Oil. “Are you going to see the chairman of the board?” Berg asked. They were. “You tell him Moe Berg says hello,” said Berg, writing down his name in Japanese.
It was obvious to Ross that Berg was broke and was miserable living at Ethel’s, and so Ross began to take care of Berg. Some nights, Berg would sleep on the office daybed. On others, he would check into the Biltmore or the Roosevelt hotel, and have the bills sent to Ross. The hotels Berg selected were always those frequented by professional baseball teams, and Berg was careful to get Ross discounted baseball rates. Ross worried about him on weekends, and always gave Berg $50 on Friday. When Berg walked into the office one day, with his white shirt gone gray, Ross took him to Brooks Brothers and bought him a fresh one. When his pants began to fray, it was back to Brooks Brothers, where, Ross noticed, Berg had a hernia at his midsection that was so large he couldn’t cross his legs. Berg never asked Ross for anything. Ross gave instinctively and freely. He thought Berg was “a little pathetic” and wondered why none of Berg’s many friends gave him a job. The answer would have been that traveling the town with Ross was as much of a job as Berg wanted in New York.
In exchange for Ross’s gifts, Berg provided him with information. If Ross wanted to contact Casey Stengel or Joe DiMaggio or the president of Chrysler, Berg knew the number and was willing to call. “Hello,” he’d say, “tell him it’s Moe Berg.” And, says Ross, everyone spoke with Berg. “I enjoyed his intellect and his truthfulness,” says Ross. “He refused to take money unless he could in some way offer recompense.” Once Berg agreed to go with Ross to see the editor in chief of Doubleday Books, Kenneth McCormick, to begin work on Berg’s autobiography. They met, and McCormick, who had long wanted to meet Berg, was ecstatic. A contract was arranged. They met again in the Doubleday reception room, to go out for lunch together. A junior editor stopped by to say hello and, thinking this was Moe of television’s comic “The Three Stooges,” he greeted him as such. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Berg said to Ross, his face white with rage. A moment later, he was gone, and so was the book contract. Ross thinks that Berg reacted so strongly as a means of getting himself out of an obligation he never intended to fulfill.
Now and again Berg did offer Ross some respite from his visits. In November 1971, Berg was in a coffee shop on L Street in Washington around the corner from the Mayflower Hotel. At an adjoining table, Mary Barcella, twenty-two, a newly married recent graduate of Vanderbilt University and now working as a research assistant for a Washington labor union, was having lunch with some college friends. Barcella had studied linguistics at Vanderbilt, as had one of her friends, and they were discussing symbolic logic when the elderly gentleman seated at the next table cleared his throat. “May I join you?” he asked, and then proceeded to explain during the ensuing conversation that he’d persuaded Princeton to create a linguistics department.
Barcella encountered Berg a few more times at the coffee shop. He told her that he’d been a baseball player with the Red Sox and the Senators, that he’d attended Columbia law school, and that now he came to Washington regularly to do consulting work for the defense contractor Fairchild Industries.
A few weeks later, Barcella’s father-in-law, Ernest Barcella, learned about her new acquaintance. Ernest had once been a sportswriter for the Boston Globe. He knew all about Berg and demanded that Barcella introduce him. She arranged a lunch where Berg and Ernest Barcella spent a vibrant two hours. Then Ernest had to leave for his office, and Berg said he would walk Mary back to work. As they turned down the sidewalk, Berg looked at her and said, “Mary, I love you,” in a tone of voice that, she says, “was not very grandfatherly.” She was stunned. “I thought he was very handsome,” she says. “He was tall and not stooped. He had these killer eyebrows, and he was very much a gentleman. I did think he was attractive. He certainly looked his age, but he was aging well. He was still masculine and courtly.” Barcella was still happily married, however, and so she never went back to the coffee shop. On Valentine’s Day she received a card signed “By another M.B.,” but she never saw Berg again.
Ross did. But by 1972, his business was flourishing. He had less time for Berg, and found the large fractions of the day that Berg demanded of him for conversation a burden he couldn’t afford. When Ross decided to move to a larger office space, it was Berg’s turn to frown. “He didn’t like the idea of my becoming any bigger than I was,” says Ross. “He wanted to be together and small. I think he felt because we were so busy, I didn’t have time to listen.” One day that spring of 1972, Berg vanished from Ross’s office without a word. Ross never heard from him again—the usual story with Berg. Except that this time he really had disappeared. Berg was dead.
In late May 1972, Berg fell out of bed, bashing his torso into the corner of a night table. It was a painful experience, but he was, by now, stoically accepting the consequences of sundowner’s syndrome. When Ethel asked him if he’d like to see a doctor, he declined. But he couldn’t eat, and after four or five days of fluids, on May 27 Ethel telephoned Murray Strober, the doctor who had treated Dr. Sam in 1958, and said that Berg was requesting that he be his doctor. Strober checked Berg into Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville, New Jersey, and recorded his symptoms. Berg felt anemic. He said he’d swallowed some bad fish and couldn’t eat. Berg also mentioned vague abdominal pain and told the doctors that he’d fallen out of bed. There were black and blue marks on his face and abdomen. Strober listened and said to Berg that he might be suffering from diverticulitis. “Just a minute,” said Berg. “That’s derived from the Latin ‘diverticulum’ and the plural ‘diverticula.’ ” Strober asked a young nurse to make a cardiogram. The nurse was wearing a name plate that said “Hippos,” and when Berg saw that, he said, “You’re Greek, aren’t you, Miss Hippos?” She said she was. Berg then guessed that her ancestors came from Thessaly, and Miss Hippos was stunned. He was right. “How did you know that?” she wanted to know. “ ‘Hippos’ is Greek for horse,” said Berg, “and Thessaly was the province in ancient Greece where people raised horses. If you are Greek and your name is Hippos, you must have come from Thessaly.”
By the end of the day Strober still hadn’t decided what was wrong with Be
rg. Two other doctors, including a urologist, were called in to examine him, but it was not until his blood count dropped that it was clear that what was ailing Moe Berg was neither bad fish nor a bad fall. It was a bad heart. Berg was suffering from an aortic aneurism, and he was bleeding to death. On May 29, 1972, he asked a nurse, “How are the Mets doing today?” and died before she could answer. It was baseball to the last.
BERG LEFT NO estate of any sort, but he did leave two distraught siblings. Both were furious with Berg’s doctors for not saving him. Dr. Sam was on a train tour of England and Scotland when his brother became ill and died. When he learned what had happened, he stopped talking with one of the doctors who had treated Berg and confided to colleagues that he felt he should have been home to help save his brother. As for Ethel, she swore to people in Roseville that Berg had been poisoned, contributing to rumors that drifted around New Jersey that someone in the espionage trade had “done Berg in.” Ethel was ever after nearly hysterical on the subject of her younger brother. Mostly she referred to him with close to mystical hyperbole, though she did confide to a Newark librarian that she disliked Berg because he used her. Ethel wrote crazed letters to everyone from John Kieran to the CIA, beseeching all for information about her brother. One letter to Kieran arrived written on a spool of paper that measured eight feet when he unwound it.
Berg’s ashes were buried in a cemetery outside Newark, and Sam visited the plot to pay his respects every year on March 2, Berg’s birthday. In 1986, Ethel Berg was discovered unconscious in her home. Dr. Sam visited her faithfully. Shortly before Ethel died the next year at age eighty-seven, Dr. Sam learned that, in 1974, Ethel had dug up Berg’s urn and taken it with her to Israel. In Jerusalem, she asked a rabbi she’d met in New Jersey to help her arrange a burial, but he refused, explaining that cremation was against Orthodox ritual. When Ethel requested that the rabbi select an appropriate site for her younger brother’s ashes, he pointed to a hill overlooking Jerusalem, which is known as Mount Scopus, and mentioned a grove of trees on top, not far from the campus of the Hebrew University. For years, Dr. Sam tried to learn where the grave was located so that Berg could be brought home and buried with his family, but the rabbi could not tell him. Dr. Sam died in 1990 at the age of ninety-two, so the final mystery of Moe Berg’s inscrutable life is that nobody knows where he is.
14
The Secret Life
of Moe Berg
After rousting Earl Brodie from the cigar shop at the Mayflower Hotel for a long walk through Washington late one night in 1949, Moe Berg told him about the brutal subtext of his Zurich meeting with Werner Heisenberg. And although he had not intended to do so, Berg betrayed another of his secrets to Brodie that evening. This second revelation came in the form of a question that was so unexpected and so painfully direct that for a brief moment it dissolved the patina of mystery beneath which Berg obscured himself. The two men had been walking for several miles at a rapid pace when Berg suddenly stopped dead under a street lamp, swiveled a face taut with anxiety and tension toward Brodie, and asked “Earl, did Colonel Dix like me?” Brodie was startled. “I had no idea whether Dix liked Moe,” he says, “but I said that Dix indeed liked him very much. Any other reply would have devastated him.”
After meeting Berg in Washington in 1943, Howard Dix and his wife, Bertha, spent many pleasant evenings getting to know him. While Berg was working for him in Europe, Dix sent a faithful stream of messages filled with affection, praise, and encouragement. In New York, after the war, he had accompanied Berg to baseball games and lectures, and had traded news and gossip with him. Dix’s loyalty to Berg was so great that Dix’s superiors concluded that Dix had let “personal irons” interfere with his work as an administrator. Many of the irons were one man, Moe Berg. Dix had also allowed himself to spend chunks of time over the course of a year laboring on draft after draft of a letter recommending Berg for the Medal of Freedom. In some ways, Dix was like everybody else. What he knew of Berg was what Berg had told him, and Dix believed all of it. “Well, young fellow,” Dix once said to Brodie, “when you invade Japan, you’ll be doing it on the basis of pictures Moe took.” Dix more than liked Berg. He admired him, bragged about him, and indulged him with a jocose, grandfatherly affection.
Berg would have had to be blind to doubt Dix’s feeling for him, and in a way he was. He was blind to himself. Berg spent a lifetime crafting a brilliant persona that fascinated almost everyone who brushed close to him. But all that effort seemed only to reinforce Berg’s conviction that he was nothing but a fake. Berg questioned Howard Dix’s affection in the same way that he was skeptical of all people who claimed they liked him. Berg knew better. What they admired was the carefully orchestrated collection of set pieces he presented as himself. The real Moe Berg, he implied, was less impressive, which anyone would eventually see if he gave them the chance. He never did. To avoid exposure as a charlatan, Berg lived a bedouin life, ever on the move, always avoiding sustained relationships where people might get a clear look at him. And he was equally determined to skirt situations where he might be forced to consider himself. Berg suffered from an insecurity so severe that at times it debilitated him completely. More often, his lack of self-esteem banished all tranquillity from his life.
Berg’s transition from a man who was unusually private to an obsessively secretive loner came during the war, when secrecy was his job. Berg liked secret work, and he liked the secret world. “There is a comfort to the secret world,” says an American intelligence community psychiatrist. “One of the great stresses of undercover work is the inability to say what you are doing. You must take pleasure and gratification in that.” With Dix and Donovan feeding him a rich diet of praise, Berg could do so. The trouble began when the CIA excluded him from the secret world. True spies can always live without recognition. Berg could not. Inside the secret world, Berg asked for reassurance from his superiors. In from the cold, he found he needed it more than ever. For some men, imposed secrecy becomes so ingrained that the habit carries over into civilian life. That wasn’t what happened to Moe Berg. With Berg, the secrecy was worn self-consciously, like a thick topcoat, with a finger to his lips in place of a silk scarf at his throat.
In the press box one day, Bob Broeg told Berg, “You’d make a great spy—you know, you’re the man who knew too much.” Berg smiled at that. Broeg was thinking what Berg wanted him to think. Moe Berg lived a secret life because, as a matter of pride, he wanted to maintain the illusion that he was still an intelligence agent, and because it was a convenient way of avoiding things that caused him pain. The secrecy allowed Berg to say as much as he wanted to and no more. If an uncomfortable subject arose, the finger went to his lips. He could never be found out, his measure could never be taken.
As a baseball player, he avoided competition. In 1924, Berg had delayed his passage back from Europe when he needed to impress the Brooklyn Dodgers with sharp play if he wished to remain in the major leagues. Then, in 1926, he had gone to law school when there was a chance at winning the job as starting shortstop for the Chicago White Sox. Later, with the Senators and Red Sox, he made it clear to his teammates that his ambition was to be on the team, not to play. It was Berg’s policy to make himself unique, so that comparisons were impossible. In baseball, he was not first a player but an intellectual, and so he told his teammates and the press about Japan, linguistics, and the stars. Only outside baseball was he a ballplayer, one who sketched diamond diagrams for Paul Scherrer, told William Donovan’s entourage about the exploits of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, talked about the Pirates with William Fowler, the Nobel Laureate, and the Phillies with the learned astronomer I. M. Levitt. On the radio program “Information, Please!” he refused to discuss the law, probably fearing exposure as a lawyer who didn’t know his field. Now, after the war, nobody knew what he was doing, which kept Berg sealed from failure. Perhaps one reason he was comfortable when other people were in crises is that there was no competition, and his generosity and composure were so
obviously appreciated. It’s also possible that people talked with him so easily because he was restrained. There was no aura of competition. For a man with so many qualifications, people found him remarkably unthreatening.
That Moe Berg was secretive did not mean that he refused to say anything about himself. When he got back from the war, there came a gradual shift in Berg, from living to talking about living. He became a troubadour, telling and retelling the story of his life. He told it in bars and he told it in parlors, he told it in restaurants, he told it on walks through parks, and he told it while riding in cars. The audience did not seem to matter. Berg’s standard repertoire of events began with his years at Princeton, moved on to Columbia law school and the Sorbonne, skipped his career as a baseball player except to mention the fleeting moment early in the 1929 baseball season when he was outhitting Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and always contained a detailed account of his second trip to Japan, where he nosed about Tokyo with Babe Ruth and took illicit photographs from the top of Saint Luke’s Hospital. Then it was on to the war, Rockefeller, Amaldi, Wick, Groves, Heisenberg, Meitner, and Von Karman. It was a wonderful oral history except for two flaws. It was highly selective and highly embellished.
Berg never discussed in detail his religion, his childhood, or his family, and he told nobody about Estella Huni or Clare Hall Smith. His time at New York University and his delayed graduation from Columbia law school remained secrets, as did the real reasons he “broke” with the CIA. When Berg wanted something to remain secret, no pincer in the world could pull it from him. His superiors at the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs felt that they never learned exactly what Berg had done for them. Later, the CIA had the same frustrating problem with him.
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