The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  This letter is many things—petulant, witty, intelligent, overwrought, and calculated to remind Bernard how much his son knows that he does not, but most obviously it is sad. For all his spirit, when Berg sarcastically thanks his father for his consoling advice, he sneers where he craves. And when Berg passes along a football score, the postscript that must have been a final galling affront to Bernard, it reads like a regret. When Berg wonders if he is the dearer son, the gesture is puckish and yet remarkably poignant, for he seems to have been asking that all his life.

  A few weeks later, Berg sent home brief word that he had won the autumn baseball series and that he had been awarded his “Princeton 1923 numerals,” and received a “fine” Princeton letter sweater from Spalding. “How are you Pa?” he asks, before asking his father, “Write me a few more inspiring letters.” Then this cheeky seventeen-year-old who has just breezed through his freshman uniform tests—“not very hard”—signs off as “The Bum.”

  The letter Berg sent home from Camp Wah-Kee-Nah, where he was a counselor in the summer of 1921, is preoccupied with informing his father how impressed everyone is with him. Bernard is told how “nice” it makes Berg feel to find that his work is “appreciated by the directors et al.” The boys are described as jumping “with glee” to “play ball with me.” In their own letters home, “all the kids tout me to the skies,” so that “when the parents come to visit over a weekend they know me immediately.” When Berg says he is happy because “it’s what I like most of all, the open country air with unprejudiced boys for real companions and none of the stiff-collar conventions or proprieties of the city and especially because I’m getting paid for what is easy for me and appreciated by those above,” he is comparing celebrity life at a boys’ camp in New Hampshire both with his lonely existence as a reviled Jewish undergraduate at Princeton and with his plight as an unappreciated son.

  Here were two men who each spoke many languages, but didn’t understand each other. Back at Princeton as a junior that fall, Berg kept trying to share his enthusiasms with his father. In one letter he describes the fall class baseball championships and evaluates the prospects for Princeton’s football team with a seasoned appraiser’s eye—“Watch for the Chicago Princeton game here next week, a real intersectional match,” he tells Bernard. In the winter, Berg closes a hastily scribbled account of himself with a brief musing on—who else?—his father. “I’ve got some good stuff for Pa to read when I get home,” he says. “I just thought of it—Sam takes Pa’s scientific mind, I his literary, Eth his instructive.”

  After Princeton, Berg consulted with a man his father’s age before deciding to sign a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Bernard never went to a game. That winter, Berg attended the Sorbonne, and sent back letters alternately complaining about a father who was always working in “that damn white coat,” chiding himself for being “lacking in filial devotion,” and slipping into the caustic argot favored by Bernard to send him back ingratiating tidbits. “I told one of the history profs already that Papa could talk his customers to a standstill quicker than he could the pupils.” After France came demotion to the minor leagues and the sudden decision—maybe Bernard was right—to enter law school. Most people regarded Berg’s moonlighting with the law while simultaneously playing professional baseball as an extraordinary feat, and it was. But this was nothing that Berg hadn’t always been doing, bifurcating his existence so he could accommodate his father while also accommodating himself.

  Berg was on the road with the Chicago White Sox when he learned, from the results published in the May 9, 1929, New York Times, that he’d passed the New York bar exam. Immediately he telephoned his father with the news. “Pa,” said Berg, “I passed the bar.”

  “You didn’t have to call long distance,” Bernard Berg told his son. “I read the papers,” and he hung up.

  That winter, during the baseball off-season, Berg began working for a prominent Wall Street firm, but he hated the work and soon gave it up. Bernard was disgusted and so was Dr. Sam, who ingratiated himself with his father by linking arms with him in opposition to Berg’s baseball career. “Pa and I detested the baseball part of his life,” said Dr. Sam. Standing in front of the drugstore with his father one day in the early 1930s, Dr. Sam remarked how nice it was that his brother was playing ball and making good money during the Depression, which left so many young Princeton graduates without work. Bernard snapped, “He’s just a sport, he doesn’t have a profession.” Then he spat. Bernard habitually spat when baseball was mentioned.

  Bernard Berg sent his son letters full of spleen. “There is nothing new here,” he writes around 1930, describing a Depression-blasted Newark full of threatening weather, violent crime, and reeling drunks. Then he widens his lens in an extraordinary and uncontrolled screed that reads like a cross between Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the midnight rantings of a sidewalk lunatic. The state of the world is

  a veritable chaos. The young generation running forward after bubbles taking them for realities, the old generation staring forward with disgust, afrighted and full of concern for their offsprings—and backward with regret, unable to retreat unwilling to advance, and made fools of.…

  This is not pessimism—true conditions.

  Political world corrupted, degenerated, perverted. In civil life money making, scheming, pleasure seeking, not for real well deserved recreation, but to get ones befogged brains drunk—to forget to bury the conscience. A great deal of base money making interpreted as “sport” is made by playing made to order, stuffed athletes in the human arena at the baseball diamond and other places like so many were pulled—jumping jacks, soon to be dropped with degenerated hearts, deformed, rough-necky, slangy, glorifying in their former performances with an obscure future, and the public hoodwinked, cheated with pockets inside out applauding, yelling getting crazy.

  Such is life now. It is left for you, new generation, and educated to change systems. Would like to live and see how you will do it.

  Berg, who was one of those “stuffed athletes” on the baseball diamond, must have read such a violent diatribe with horror. Or maybe just with resignation. He was used to them by then.

  The battles with Berg wore on Bernard, too, of course, as did his son’s increasingly prodigal behavior. Attempting to understand the latter, toward the end of his life, Bernard made self-conscious efforts to skirt conflict. He began a letter in 1937 cautiously, writing, “I do not want you to think I am abusing my authority as a parent to command or reprove—that age is long past between us.” The problem was that on his most recent visit home, Berg had asked to borrow a thousand dollars, and the time before that, he had requested two hundred. Bernard says, “I care nothing about the money.” But on Bernard’s mind is not concerned sympathy for a son in trouble, but only Bernard’s reputation. Bernard says he worries that Berg is either gambling, spending too much money on women, or giving handouts to needy friends. “After the example I have been setting to my children with my life it would be revolting to me and mama to think of you as a debauche,” he says, before demanding an explanation. Berg is now in his mid-thirties, and Bernard says, “It hurts me to see the almost best part of your life’s work dwindle away. I may be old fashion in many ways, but there ought to be a sound reason back of ultra modern ways.” After cautioning Berg not to “get angry and upset,” he makes it clear that Berg should feel contrition for putting his father through such duress. “And you must know,” he says, “that parents misgivings about their children work overtime and act on the nerves and heartstrings like the tedious, enervating and devastating monotony of an even measured, ear splitting drip of drops of water on same spot same time and same noise. Be yourself your judge and ours and do not get angry.”

  From the time eight-year-old Moe Berg changed his name to Runt Wolfe to play for a Newark church league baseball team until his retirement as an active player with the Boston Red Sox thirty years later, he begged his father to come see him play baseball. Bernard Berg never did.
“No matter how much I entreat the man, my father will not see me play,” Berg once said. “Perhaps he’s to be commended. He’s a great man who sticks by his convictions.” One of the pale ironies of Berg’s life is that January 14, 1942, the day he finally retired from baseball to go to work for Nelson Rockefeller, was the day Bernard Berg died. Baseball made Berg famous and respected throughout the country, but it left him a pariah in his father’s home. The same happened when Berg shared a Manhattan apartment with Estella Huni. Whereas Rose, Ethel, and Sam Berg all visited Berg and the love of his life, Bernard refused to meet her. Berg’s enthusiasms created a chasm between him and his father, because for Bernard they were the wrong enthusiasms. As for Berg, for all the bluster in his letters and the coltish independence of his actions, there was a part of him ever uncertain that Bernard Berg might not be right.

  Fifteen months before Bernard died, Berg wrote to his father on his birthday from Washington, offering congratulations and conciliation. Berg told Bernard that he was “an oracle.” He thanked him for imbuing them “with a firm grasp of the human side of life,” and for giving all three children “a sense of values.” Then Berg cut to the heart of the matter. “If ever there was any uneasiness,” he said, “it was because we are all of us quick to react.” He urged Bernard to have more fun, to relax. It was a nice gesture, and it must have made Bernard feel good. But if a father’s aim is to raise children who themselves raise good citizens, he failed. None of the three Berg children ever married or had children. It’s almost futile to begin to say why. Dr. Sam was the only Berg to discuss the situation. “I never got married, my sister never got married—the three of us stayed single,” he once said. “Lack of sanity.” For Berg, one other possible explanation looms obvious. Fatherhood was associated with disappointment.

  IF HAVING A father who so bitterly disapproved of him was confusing for Berg, so was the experience of growing up with parents who told him he had no religion, only to discover, when he set foot outside his parents’ house, that to other people he was a Jew. Your background mattered to many Americans, and some held Berg’s creed against him. Either way Berg looked, he felt alienated. Who was right? His father, who told him to ignore Judaism and yet wrote in Yiddish and resisted changing his name as so many Jews did, or the bigots who saw that name, knew that Moe Berg was a Jew, and ostracized him because of it?

  Bernard Berg had settled in Roseville because there weren’t any Jews there, and here Berg followed his lead. He was always drawn to institutions—Princeton, Satterlee and Canfield, professional baseball, the OSS, and the CIA—where there were few if any Jews. When he fell in love, he fell in love with a Christian. Berg’s desire was to avoid his Jewishness, to blend in. His persona as Professor Berg had everything to do with being baseball’s lone intellectual and nothing to do with his existence as one of its only Jews. In the OSS, when people talked about Berg, they talked about baseball and they talked about books, but if he could help it, they never talked about him as one of the organization’s few Jews.

  For many minorities in America, athletics has been a means of achieving cultural parity, but Berg wanted no part of breaking bloodlines. Yet if Berg seemed to many people not to care at all about religion, it was an act. It’s difficult to say how Judaism affected him spiritually, but socially it was a problem and a puzzle. Princeton told him quickly that, like it or not, he was different, and a kind of different that some people loathed. After Princeton, he was always conscious of his religion, and sometimes, usually among other Jews, he let show how much. Roman Catholics to him were “my R.C. friends,” as in “Oh, if my R.C. friends could see me now!” He once explained that for him to say “Oh Jesus” was “not swearing, because I’m Jewish.” When he badly wanted work from the CIA, he proposed a mission to Israel, insisting that “a Jew must do this.” In 1956, Berg was invited to Howard Dix’s funeral, but he did not attend. He may have wished to avoid his former OSS colleagues. When Bertha Dix arrived at home after the service, Berg was standing alone in front of her house. He offered his sympathies and wanted to know whether he could be of assistance in any way. She thanked him, said no, he couldn’t, and then she asked Berg why he hadn’t come to the funeral. “I would not have been welcome,” said Berg. “I am a Jew.” A man who says such things is a man who anticipates rejection and avoids it by calculating limits for himself beyond which he will not pass. He wasn’t going to stay around long enough to give people a chance at rebuffing him because of what he was. One of the reasons Japan was “a page out of a dream” to Berg may have been that there all foreigners are the same—gaijin, outsiders.

  THAT BERG GOT along badly with his intransigent father and was ambivalent about his religion are important clues in unlocking the mystery of Moe Berg, but they are no Rosebud. Berg sought to fashion a secret life for himself, and he was successful enough in doing so that there is much about him that will forever remain opaque. When he wanted company, Berg sought out people who refrained from asking him questions about himself. Some things Berg kept to himself, and other clues as to how a warm, enthusiastic child became such a haunted and inscrutable old man were as much a secret to him as to anybody else.

  When A. J. A. Symons began to look into the life of the talented English writer and painter Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), who died poor and broken in Venice, he found that he “could not banish from my mind the thought of that gifted and intellectual man dragged down by his kink of temperament to perish in shame, want and exile.” There is a similar tendency among some people who saw the aging Berg to lament what he might have been. This seems misguided. Berg did a great deal with his life. He gained admission to two of the most rarefied clubs in the world—professional baseball and professional espionage—and for a brief time, his service in each compared favorably with anyone’s. As a spy working in Europe for the OSS, Berg was at the center of the seminal event of his time, the building of an atomic bomb, and his performance was exemplary. Some of Berg’s other accomplishments are a matter of degree. He was no scientist, but he learned more physics than most people. He was not formally a linguist, but he was a sensitive and appreciative student of languages, and knew a lot about them.

  Most compelling, however, is the way he responded to life after the war. He might have lived as most men do, with a home, a family, a driver’s license, and a profession. People were always trying to saddle him with work, and had he been inclined, he might well have enjoyed a brilliant career as a CIA agent, or a corporate lawyer, or in any number of other fields. Yet whatever quirks of constitution and spasms of uncertainty kept Berg far outside the world of biweekly paychecks, they also allowed him a crepuscular existence, which suited him. Berg molded himself into a character of fantastic complication who brought pleasure and fascination to nearly everyone he brushed against during his fitful movements around the world. In the end, there are few men who find ways to live original lives. Moe Berg did that.

  A Note on the Sources

  Moe Berg, and also his brother and sister, died before I began writing about him, so I never spoke with any of them. As I hope this book makes clear, Berg was a willfully secretive man and he made it difficult for people who met him to learn very much about him. Yet, sometimes in spite of himself, Berg did leave behind abundant traces of his life.

  I have chiefly relied upon interviews with and letters from people who either knew Berg or the Berg family, or who had information that figured into the narrative. Among the few hundred people interviewed for this book, some of them over several days, are the following: Heinz Albers, Kurt Alder, George Allen, Hubert Alyea, Ugo Amaldi, Dave Anderson, Roger Angell, Fred Armenti, Lee Arnold, Eldon Auker, Howard F. Baer, Mary Barcella, Joel Barr, Buzzy Bavasi, Jonathan Bayliss, Eleanor Berg, Irwin Berg, Ted Berg, Virginia Berg, Warren Berg, Boze Berger, Ira Berkow, Gilberto Bernardini, Edward Bernstein, Richard Beth, Hans Bethe, Richard Bissell, Martin Bloom, Vera Boles, Russell Bowen, Horace Bresler, Jimmy Breslin, Earl D. Brodie, Joseph Brodsky, Bob Broeg, Harry Broley, John Buckl
ey, Dave Burgin, Timothy Burke, Georg Busch, Paul Busse, Robert M. Callagy, Horace Calvert, Joe Cascarella, George Chaplin, Frances Chavis, Julia Child, Elsie Chmelnik, Fred Cifradella, Rhoda Clark, Ray Cline, Giuseppe Cocconi, William Colby, Robert Cole, Ken Coleman, Nancy Corcoran, Max Corvo, Mildred Cronin, Joseph Crowley, Charles Cummings, Christine Curtis, Anthony DelGaizo, Gene Desautels, Sal DiGerlando, Dominic DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Dobson, Bobby Doerr, Sid Dorfman, Fred Down, Mel Edelstein, Richard Edie, Carl Eifler, Edith Engel, Richard Evans, Clifton Fadiman, Markus Fierz, Gary Foster, Terry Curtis Fox, Mariette Fay, Margaret Feldman, Rick Ferrell, Renata Ferri, Robert Fish, William Fowler, Eugene Fubini, Robert Furman, Margaret Jennings Gahan, Joel Gaidemak, Denny Galehouse, Charlie Gehringer, Cliff Gelb, Dorrit Gloss, Ken Gloss, Stanley Goldberg, Murray Goodman, Bert Gordon, Irene Goudsmit, Stephen Jay Gould, William Greifinger, Wilma Grey, Calvin Griffith, Richard Gurner, Nettie Hafer, Barry Halper, Mel Harder, Charles Hardy, Lee Harrison, Ernie Harwell, Herb Hash, Yoshihisa Hayashi, Mary Hedges, Richard Helms, W. Hardy Hendron, Cyril Herrmann, Jerome Holtzman, Cordelia Hood, William Hood, William Horrigan, Lawrence R. Houston, Otto Huber, Willis Hudland, Jane Smith Hutton, Henry Hyde, Aldo lcardi, Masaru Ikei, Barbara S. Irwin, Jerry Izenberg, Donald Griffin, Louis Jacobson, Oscar Janiger, Martin Jassie, Geoffrey M. T. Jones, Ines Jucker, Steven Jurika, Paul Kahn, Monroe Karasik, Frances Book Kashdan, Sam Kashdan, Milton Katz, Helen Klein, William Klein, Willie Klein, Johann Kloimstein, Julius B. Kritzer, Mariette Kuper, John Lansdale, Max Lapides, Bud Leavitt, I. M. Levitt, Bernie Levy, Paul Libby, Robert Lindsay, Hannah Litzky, Ing Gianni Luzi, Alice Lyon, Elsie Lyon, Jane Lyons, Charles McCarry, Jimmy McDowell, June McElroy, Elizabeth McIntosh, Lee MacPhail, Jr., Fred Makrauer, Jean Makrauer, Susan Makrauer, Abe Matlofsky, Heinrich Medicus, Ron Menchine, Larry Merchant, Craig Miller, Dorothy T. Miller, J. P. Miller, William Morgan, Philip Morrison, William Moskowitz, Edmund Mroz, Timothy Naftali, David Niceberg, Leo Nonnenkamp, Henry Ringling North, Lou Nucci, Eugenia O’Connor, Jim Ogle, Bruce Old, Murray Olderman, Charles O’Neill, Charles Owen, Victor Parsonett, Boris Pash, Eddie Popowski, Jack Porter, Shirley Povich, Thomas Powers, Edwin Putzell, Jacqueline Reifsnider, George Reynolds, Arthur Richman, Diane Roberts, Duncan Robertson, Ray Robinson, Harold Rosenthal, Larry Rosenthal, Sayre Ross, Giorgio Salvini, Grace Sandager, Marjory B. Sanger, Ted Sanger, Kazuo Sayama, Morris Schappes, Charles Segar, Pasquale Sforza, Denise Shames, Elizabeth Book Shames, Donald Shapiro, William Sharpe, John Shepardson, Allan Siegal, Morrie Siegel, Arnold Silverman, Seymour Siwoff, Frank Slocum, Clare Hall Smith, Richard F. S. Starr, Jack Steinberger, Murray Strober, George Sullivan, Ted Tannenbaum, Birdie Tebbets, Caroline Thomas, Margaret Thompson, Peter Tompkins, Cecil Travis, Thomas Troy, Marian Visich, Herman Waftler, Charlie Wagner, Claire Wagner, Robert Wallace, Arthur Weisman, Richard Weiss, Victor Weisskopf, Joe Wells, Billy Werber, John Wheeler, Vanna Wick, Arthur Wightman, Ted Williams, Jack Wilson, Harvey Yavener, Duke Zeibert, and Werner Zünti.