The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  What Berg did share with people was calculated to impress them, and usually it did. Berg implied that he had gone to the top of Saint Luke’s Hospital at the behest of the U.S. government, and that the photographs he took there were used to plan the Doolittle raids. Fabulous stories, which became famous and oft-repeated, except that neither was true. He let people believe that he was a fluent speaker of a dozen languages and that he learned to speak Japanese in the course of a boat trip across the Pacific. Not true either. Berg sometimes said that he’d arrived in Rome by submarine, that he’d had love affairs with countesses all over Europe, and for years he implied that he was working as a deep cover agent for the CIA. All of this was altered or fabricated history.

  Why did he do this? The answer is that although other people might have been impressed with the truth about Moe Berg, he was not. In 1945, when Whitney Shepardson requested that Berg write down an account of his war service so that the U.S. government would be aware of the OSS’s valuable contributions to the war effort, Berg could not do it. Beginning in 1958, Berg tried many times to make a written record of his life, and he always failed. He began it on hotel stationery and on plain white paper, on notepads and on scraps of napkins, but inevitably, after two pages or twenty, the prose slackened into outlines, which dwindled to notes and soon sputtered to a complete stop. Berg’s ready public explanation for his failure to write about himself would have been that he was a spy and couldn’t reveal what was classified, but that was an excuse. There was no need to keep military secrets from Shepardson or Groves. Berg’s real reason was that the story didn’t please him. Seated at a formica diner table stained with coffee mug rings, telling five people about himself, Berg the storyteller embellished freely and no harm was done. Alone at his desk, Berg could gloss over and manipulate things no longer; he worried that the life he saw unfolding on those pages was a failed life. He never said what he really thought of himself, but his actions suggest that he saw Moe Berg as a mediocre ballplayer, a scholar only within the unlearned community of baseball, and an intelligence agent whose work had come to nothing. There was no bomb, and the CIA didn’t want him.

  The older Berg got and the further removed he was from his glory days in baseball and the OSS, the more his need for recognition grew. He could not tolerate interruptions, and he stalked out of the room if they occurred. He courted praise and he devoured it. He became lonely and compulsive, filling notebook after notebook with copious lists of his friends, frantic outlines of his life, conversational fragments like “Charlie: ‘Moe Berg is a great guy’ ” and notations like “I was on TV for quite a while before game Sunday with Lindsey Nelson, top Mets announcer.” Berg rarely shared his emotions with other people, but in his notebooks he would write, as though confessing something horrible, “M.B. embarrassed.” He sent himself postcards, and saved everything, cards and letters, ticket stubs, press badges, Japanese hotel bills, German telephone books, restaurant menus, European train schedules, old passports, and clippings from newspapers. They were all touchstones, and he went back to them as he went back to the few central events in his life, over and again, needing to see them and to talk about them, to feel that they mattered. One trinket that was not in the collection of this man who saved everything was the Medal of Freedom, which might have served as an obvious ratification of his abilities. Why Berg refused it is, like so much else, unresolved, but one possibility is that he felt he did not deserve it.

  An American intelligence community psychiatrist who is familiar with Berg’s classified intelligence files, which include agent evaluations, says that “one thing in his files that was on some level traumatic for him was his concern about the permanence of CIA because OSS went away. That OSS disappeared fed his insecurity about performance. It doesn’t exist anymore—does that mean it had no value?” Receiving the brush-off from the CIA might have angered another man, but Moe Berg avoided confrontation here just as he had with Dom DiMaggio in Florida, with Dr. Sam in Newark, and with Milton Kahn over Novelart. When he gave people legal advice and they did not offer to pay him for it, Berg did not request a fee or even ask to be reimbursed for his expenses. Instead, he wrote down on a piece of paper, “Those who behave this way must live with themselves. When I have to ask it is too late.” Then he filed the piece of paper away. Always, instead of making an angry outburst, he kept his turbulent feelings to himself and walked away with them.

  Berg’s personal uncertainties were the most obvious in the way he resisted close bonds with other people. He was a wonder at meeting people and thoroughly unsuccessful at sustaining relationships with them. When things began to get close, he disappeared. Berg need not have been lonely. Many people would have thrilled to become his intimate, but such friendships were impossible for him. So was love. Save his romance with Estella Huni, Berg’s known relationships with women were superficial and confused. He had sex, but only with Estella did it deepen into lasting affection, and then he let her go too.

  This skittish behavior led people to wonder about him. Although Berg told the New York Times sportswriter Arthur Daley that he wished he had children, many people who knew him speculated that he was homosexual. There is no evidence that Berg was ever in a gay relationship, but there was plenty of gossip implying that he was. Some players on the Boston Red Sox saw an eccentric bachelor and they were suspicious. “He was always a guy to put his arm around you and give you a hug,” says Bobby Doerr. “Once in a while he’d say, ‘Just a little feel.’ He did that with a lot of guys. Some took offense and would give him a shove or a little jab. You wondered a little bit, but you knew he was fooling around with women.” Jack Wilson, Berg’s friend from the bull pen, says, “Some guys thought he was queer. Guys from other teams would say, ‘You’ve got a queer bastard.’ He never made a pass at me or Jimmie Foxx, and he had all the chances in the world. I’ll be damned if I believe it.” Berg did make ambiguous friendships. On one of his visits to London, he met an Englishman and walked around the city with him. Two months after their meeting, the Englishman wrote Berg a letter, asking for money. Early in the letter, the man says, “I am ‘He’ who showed you around London the night you were here. I was to have seen you the next morning to have wished you ‘God Speed’ from Southampton. Would to God I had taken your advice and stayed the night with you.” Who knows what it meant? To Irene Goudsmit, wife of Berg’s friend Sam Goudsmit, “Moe seemed to have no leanings toward either men or women.” Says Irene, “My husband always said that nothing could ever be determined about Moe’s predilections.” There were rumors in H. P. Robertson’s family that Berg was amorously drawn to Robertson’s son, Duncan, but Duncan, now a doctor, doesn’t think so. “I think he was in the closet and he didn’t know it,” he says. “I don’t think he was a practicing homosexual. I think he was attracted to people, period. I don’t think he was more attracted to females than males. I don’t think he knew his identity.” What Moe Berg did not know, nobody else could either.

  ——

  BERG’S PERIPATETIC EXISTENCE may have seemed to most people to be a hard way to live, but for him it was comfortable. By keeping on the move he didn’t need to look at himself; he avoided work; he avoided competition; he avoided expectations. Yet much of Berg’s behavior toward the end of his life went beyond eccentricity and became worrisome. Somewhere along the way Berg had become what Philip Larkin calls “one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.” His increasing obsessions with newspapers, umbrellas, and baths, his irritation at hearing the sound of his name in public, his refusal to take Newark buses because someone might discover him, the antipathy toward doctors that led him to walk around for years with a bulging hernia, these all sometimes interfered with Berg’s ability to live a full life. His strange behavior with young girls and with Clare Hall Smith in her hotel room suggests that he was not always in control of himself. Dr. William Morgan, a clinical psychologist who assessed intelligence officers for the OSS and the CIA and is familiar with Berg’s life, says, “It seems to me that as
he got older, his personality constricted and he became more and more schizoid. For a schizoid person, think of a ball of yarn: 90 percent is tightly woven, 10 percent is loose. Berg is a complex personality. Within himself he may have been well integrated. He made sense to himself. I think some personalities cannot be explained, the more gifted and talented they are. I think Moe was in that range.” The sources of a man’s agonies are not easily sifted, and we cannot know what stones in Berg’s nature conspired to trip up a person of such promise. One thing, however, is certain: it could not have helped him to be Bernard Berg’s son.

  BERNARD BERG KNEW only one way to work, and that was constantly. He made no time for vacations, holidays, or respite, and seemed to his children to live in his white pharmacist’s coat. In 1942, the year he died, he was still working the same long hours. Only late in the evening did he relax. After hanging up the white coat and hiding away the day’s receipts, before retiring Bernard liked to read books of philosophy and politics in French, Italian, Spanish, and English. When Bernard wrote prescriptions, he did so in English, but Yiddish was the language of his imagination, and it was in bright, florid Yiddish that he wrote a novella. The story of Yerachmiel the cantor is a romance, and as far as anyone knows, it is the only story Bernard ever wrote.

  Bernard dedicated the story to his sister-in-law Bessie and his brother-in-law Benny, and it begins in the homespun fashion of one of Old Peter’s Russian tales: “Bessie and Benny, I am going to write a story for you.” Yerachmiel is a poor cantor with a limpid singing voice who lives in a Ukrainian village. His life is unfulfilled, largely because of his arranged marriage to a woman who stutters and will not permit her husband to see her naked. Near the modest home that the expressive and passionate Yerachmiel shares with his tongue-tied, frigid wife is a large house recently purchased by a wealthy Englishman. One day, as Yerachmiel is walking past the Englishman’s house, he hears the strains of someone playing classical music on the piano. To this point Yerachmiel has known only liturgical music. He is transfixed. Night after night Yerachmiel returns to stand in the shadows outside the Englishman’s house, listening to wonderful sonatas. In time he learns that the pianist is the Englishman’s daughter, they meet, and Yerachmiel falls in love with her and she with him. Alas, he is married. What to do? The conflict seems resolved when the Englishman and his daughter move away, but then one day the daughter passes through town and decides to attend one of Yerachmiel’s services. As she enters the temple, Yerachmiel is in the full flight of song. When he sees her, he is overcome. He stops singing and drops dead on the spot.

  Yerachmiel has the misfortune to live in a rigid society, which pulls the spirit out of a man by forcing him to submit to life as convention arranges it. That Bernard Berg, who abandoned life in a Ukrainian Jewish village for a secular existence in Newark, wrote such a story is ironic, because when his own son made choices that ran contrary to what Bernard had arranged for him, Bernard reacted with fury and derision. In fiction, he was a romantic. In life, he was no better than a small-minded small-town moralist who decrees with a frown that anyone indiscreet enough to flout convention must be punished.

  Bernard Berg could be very gracious, greeting his nieces and nephews with chocolate bars when they came to visit him. At the Sunday family gatherings he and Rose sometimes hosted, the food was plentiful but the levity more sparse, because, whenever Bernard was in the room, challenges were always in the offing. “I always thought that the standard of behavior in Newark was very high,” says Elizabeth Shames. “A lot of my cousins didn’t want to go there. The table was very beautiful. They’d always seat me next to Moe and my sister next to Sam, and Sam would look at her and he might say something or not and she’d start to cry. Moe would be piling things on my plate. Creamed onions, sweet potatoes, pickles, pickled beets, it was all gorgeous. Moe was warm. My aunt was warm. My uncle was reserved but very passionate. I felt when he embraced me it was with longing fervor.

  “Picture Dr. Albert Schweitzer,” she continues, “that’s what my uncle Bernard looked like and sounded like. He was soft spoken, and he spoke with deep care. I always felt a sadness in my uncle Bernard. It was almost as if a lot of people had disappointed him, but he understood. I think of him as a man of enormous wisdom and great compassion.”

  Bernard raised his children to revere him, and so they did, with an intensity that bordered on idolatry. Ethel Berg’s voice was at its most frenzied pitch when she described her father as not just a pharmacist but “a healer.” After Bernard died, Ethel told anyone who would listen, “My father was a genius.” Dr. Sam was not given to such rapture about anything, but here he was in agreement with his sister. Portraits of his father and mother dominated the wall in Dr. Sam’s living room, and, like Ethel, Dr. Sam seems never to have questioned anything about his parents. There is no record of any Berg, Moe Berg included, ever publicly speaking in anything but respectful terms about Bernard Berg. Not that there weren’t tempting opportunities. There was, for example, Bernard Berg’s unusual method of banking. If he wished to deposit $60, he sent one child to the bank cashier with sixty one-dollar bills, instructing the child to exchange the ones for six tens and bring them home. The next child was given the tens and told to return with three twenty-dollar bills. And then, only on the third trip, might the $60 be deposited. Habits like this Berg blithely ascribed to his father’s “idiosyncratic European behavior.” Because the Berg children were so scrupulously loyal to their father, most of what went on in the apartment upstairs from the pharmacy never left the apartment. But enough seeped out to make it clear that Moe Berg and his father did clash, and painfully. The issue was always the same—what a young man should do with his life.

  A great many Jewish American immigrant parents of Bernard Berg’s generation pushed their children into professions. Most sincerely believed that work as a doctor or lawyer would guarantee their children an easier life than theirs had been. There were other motivations. Some first-generation Jewish immigrants sought to transcend their own sense of cultural inferiority vicariously, by elevating themselves, as Philip Roth says, “through the children—through us.” Bernard Berg had made sacrifices for his family. He left behind the woman he loved in the Ukraine, came to a new country, learned a new language, and took on a new trade in middle age. Bernard positioned his children to have lives as well-educated professionals, and he expected them to become nothing less.

  Sam became a doctor, and Ethel, who wanted to be an actress, submitted to her father’s suggestion that she become a teacher and use her summer vacations to pursue dancing and music. Berg was the maverick. He read and he studied, but he also played games. Bernard could not understand his son’s obsession with baseball.

  Here Bernard’s views dovetailed with those of many of his peers, including another Russian immigrant father, who addressed a baffled letter to Abraham Cahan, the daily advice columnist for the Yiddish-language newspaper Jewish Daily Forward. “It makes sense to teach a child to play dominoes or chess,” the anonymous father wrote. “But what is the point of a crazy game like baseball? The children can get crippled. When I was a boy we played rabbit, chasing each other, hide and seek. Later we stopped. If a grown boy played rabbit in Russia, they would think he had lost his mind.” Spoken and unspoken was the Jewish coda that games were for the goyim. Berg wasn’t shirking his schoolwork for athletics. He was successful at both. Yet this was no conflict of reason but one of wills and mores, and so the pristine report cards and French medals Berg brought home from school did nothing to soften Bernard’s firm opposition—no, revulsion—to baseball. By the time Berg had reached high school, Bernard’s hostile feelings about baseball were well known around Roseville.

  Berg was obviously the most gifted of Bernard’s three children, and his every success encouraged him to stand his ground. But he wanted more than just to play. Berg was a young American boy excelling at the American game and, unlikely as it was that he would be able to, he wanted to share it with his father. He wanted
his father to be impressed. Bernard, of course, was not in the least impressed, and felt baited by the constant mention. Baseball, a game he knew nothing about, became an affront to his stature. His other children submitted to their brilliant father, and this one would learn to bend too.

  Early in Berg’s freshman year at Princeton, Bernard was already writing him scathing letters, mocking the quality of the letters Berg sent him, rebuking his son for his lack of common sense, and faulting him for taking so many languages. Berg replied with a six-page defense that begins by explaining, “When I sit down to write, I do not attempt to write a literary gem (as you would probably have me).” He informs his father that although Addison, Cicero, and Pliny’s epistolary masterpieces were composed “not for the purpose of information to a friend, but … for the purpose of publication, or as you would probably put it, to appeal to the hoi polloi,” their casual letters made crude reading. As for the lack of common sense, says Berg, “I never pretended to have any.” Berg then defends his interest in foreign languages, with the help of an extended metaphor in which he explains that “having been acquainted for more than five years [with] that beautiful creature known as Latin,” it is only natural to want to be introduced to Latin’s “offspring.” As Berg warms to the battle, he grows snide. “I surely cherish the possession of your ornate, loquacious, and highly instructive epistle.… Therefore, dear father, I hope that in the future, you will not be disappointed by my miscues in grammar, logic etc., but in addition, you must not think that I always am in earnest. This, I hope, explains my ignorance and lack of common sense so profusely displayed in that letter. I wish you would continue to pour out your consoling, fatherly advice.” Then Berg signs off, “Your dearer? son Moe.” A postscript adds, “Princeton won today 34–0.”