The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  7 “He slept on a”: Berg letter, November 26, 1932.

  8 “You must inhale”: Berg letter, November 9, 1932.

  9 “He even made”: Arthur Daley, New York Times, December 2, 1964.

  10 “He also attended”: Hirano, The Spy Who Loved Japan, p. 253.

  11 “She refused, telling”: Interview with William Klein, New York.

  12 “Berg was intrigued”: Spink, Sporting News, November 16, 1939.

  13 “Matsumoto helped him”: Berg letters, November 9 and 26, 1932.

  14 “Don’t fear—safe”: Berg letter, November 26, 1932.

  15 “He toured Shanghai”: Ethel Berg, p. 137; and Berg letter, December 31, 1932.

  16 “After a day”: Ibid. and Spink.

  17 “I am always”: Berg letter, December 31, 1932. 81. “I have decided”: Ibid.

  18 “It was clear”: Hirano, p. 125.

  19 “Instead, by February”: Biloxi Daily Herald, February 27, 1933.

  20 “a rather poignant example”: Washington Post, March 7, 1933.

  21 “Japan was the”: Hirano film The Spy Who Loved Japan.

  22 “As a rule”: Frank Young, Who’s Who in Major League Baseball, 1933, p. 76.

  23 “Alice’s mad chess game”: Correspondence from Melville D. Shapiro. See The Annotated Alice, edited by Martin Gardner, p. 172, for chess-game details.

  24 “During spring training”: Francis Stann, Washington Star, November 16, 1955.

  25 “Berg didn’t play”: Kaufman, p. 95.

  26 “He was studying all”: Interview with Cecil Travis by telephone.

  27 “One day, instead”: Interview with Marjory Sanger, Winter Park, Florida.

  28 “Another person who”: Interview with Frank Slocum by telephone.

  29 “On July 25”: Washington Post, July 26, 1943.

  30 “The Cleveland manager”: Jewish Independent, Cleveland, September 14, 1934.

  31 “He has performed”: Ibid.

  32 “His performance on”: “The Most Exciting Game,” by John Kieran, This Week, April 24, 1960, p. 2.

  33 “By 1934, Japan”: Reischauer, “What Went Wrong?” in Morely, Dilemmas of Growth, p. 496.

  34 “In particular, there”: War Department memo, July 27, 1933, in the Department of State Far Eastern Affairs Division archive at the National Archives.

  35 “To Japanese eyes”: See especially Osaka Jiji Shimpo, July—September 1934; Japan Chronicle, July—September 1934; Kokumin Shimbun, July—September 1934; and Japan Times, July—September 1934.

  36 “They come ostensibly”: Tokyo Nichi Nichi, July 20, 1934.

  37 “Despite the utmost”: Japan Chronicle, September 29, 1934.

  38 “An American entomologist”: American consulate memo from Richard F. Boyce to Cordell Hull, August 6, 1934.

  39 “He liked to dance”: Kaufman, p. 12, and interview with Jane Lyons, Baltimore.

  40 “With Moe it became”: Interview with Jane Lyons, Baltimore.

  41 “I wanted to be”: Interview with Joe Cascarella by telephone.

  42 “After two weeks of”: Hirano, pp. 54–55.

  43 “That was two weeks”: Bus Saidt, Trenton Times, July 1972, and interview with Harvey Yavener by telephone.

  44 “Ruth arrived to”: Osaka Mainichi, November 3, 1934.

  45 “Everybody wanted to see”: Japan Times, November 3, 1934.

  46 “The next time”: Interview with Cliff Gelb by telephone.

  47 “But Berg was”: Charles Owen owns this film footage, some of which appears in the Japanese NHK production The Spy Who Loved Japan.

  48 “The Americans played”: It was Lefty O’Doul who suggested that the Tokyo team call itself the Giants.

  49 “One fan walked”: Berg file and Spalding Baseball Guide, 1935.

  50 “In February, Shoriki”: Kaufman, p. 87.

  51 “He’s more a scholar”: Baseball News of Osaka, November 25, 1934.

  52 “You have done us”: Text courtesy of Lou Jacobson.

  53 “Berg may have heard”: Interview with Masaru Ikei, New York.

  54 “Entering the hospital”: Berg told a great many people this story. Chapter 1 of Kaufman is the best written account. A written description by Berg is included in a letter he wrote to Theodore Von Karman in the summer of 1958. Also, interviews with Elsie Lyon, Hancock, New Hampshire; and Bob Broeg by telephone. See also Hirano, for a more skeptical presentation.

  55 “Berg had been riding”: Osaka Mainichi, February 5, 1935.

  56 “In Manchouli he”: Interview with Clare Hall Smith, Washington, D.C.

  57 “I was young then”: Bus Saidt, Trenton Times, July 1972.

  58 “Berg told John”: Kieran, New York Times, January 22, 1935, and July 5, 1935. See also Saidt; Henry P. Edwards, American League press release, January 23, 1938; and interview with William Klein, New York.

  Other valuable information for the Japan section of this chapter was provided to me in interviews with General Jimmy Doolittle by telephone; Margaret Feldman by telephone; Charlie Gehringer by telephone; Ken Gloss, Boston; Dr. Hardy Hendron, Boston; Jane Smith Hutton by telephone; Steve Jurika by telephone; Esther Kelser by telephone; Charles Owen, Washington, D.C.; Jacqueline Reifsnider by telephone; Grace Sandager by telephone; and in a letter from John Snell, of the Honolulu Advertiser.

  Chapter 8. Mr. Berg, You’ve Been Brilliant

  1 “In December, Griffith”: Newark Star Eagle, incompletely identified clipping from Powers Berg file, October 1934.

  2 “On April 11”: Boston Evening Transcript, April 17, 1935.

  3 “Cronin asked him”: Larry Merchant, “Moe Berg” and “More on Moe,” New York Post, June 6 and June 7, 1972.

  4 “Joe Cronin liked”: Interview with Ted Williams, Boston.

  5 “Boston pitchers like”: Interview with Jack Wilson by telephone.

  6 “He didn’t care”: Interview with Gene Desautels by telephone.

  7 “He was a fine catcher”: Interview with Billy Werber by telephone.

  8 “Joe Cronin’s locker”: Interview with Rick Ferrell by telephone.

  9 “Isn’t this wonderful”: “In the Dugout with Rumill,” clipping, otherwise unidentified, from Berg file.

  10 “In this way”: Interview with Leo Nonnenkamp by telephone.

  11 “In the bull pen”: Interview with Jack Wilson by telephone.

  12 “After one game Al Schacht”: Schacht, Clowning Through Baseball, p. 161.

  13 “Moe was really something”: Sporting News Berg obituary, June 17, 1972.

  14 “I was warming up”: Boston Globe, October 12, 1967.

  15 “Berg even put in”: Boston American, September 7, 1935.

  16 “The Red Sox traveled”: Interviews with Billy Werber and Joe Dobson by telephone.

  17 “I remember one”: Interview with Eldon Auker by telephone.

  18 “Quite a few of us”: Interview with Jack Wilson by telephone.

  19 “Once in a while”: Interview with Bobby Doerr by telephone.

  20 “For all his color”: Interview with Charlie Wagner by telephone.

  21 “Berg and Wagner also”: Interview with Boze Berger by telephone.

  22 “None of us”: Interview with Billy Werber by telephone.

  23 “Tom Daly and I”: Interview with Jack Wilson by telephone.

  24 “ ‘Secret,’ Williams called Berg”: Interview with Ted Williams, Boston.

  25 “Whenever possible, he”: Sam Berg file.

  26 “It all looked”: Interview with Arthur Weisman, Boston.

  27 “We were friends”: Interview with Larry Rosenthal, Boston.

  28 “Bernstein had the same”: Interview with Edward Bernstein by telephone.

  29 “For at least part”: Interview with Denny Galehouse.

  30 “Berg helped Takizo”: Letter from Masumoto, February 17, 1937; Cappy Harada, “Bridge over the Pacific Ocean,” from Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame collection; and Charles Owen collection.

  31 “Marjory Bartlett
of Baltimore”: Interview with Marjory Sanger, Winter Park, Florida.

  32 “Margaret Ford had”: Interview with Margaret Ford Kieran by telephone and correspondence.

  33 “With the Red Sox”: Ethel Berg, p. 151; and undated Princeton University Department of Public Information press release.

  34 “Greek classes”: Arthur Sampson column, New York Herald Tribune, February 16, 1939.

  35 “St. Louis could mean”: John Kieran, New York Times, January 28, 1935.

  36 “He once went from Washington”: Kaufman, p. 110.

  37 “One day in the”: Interview with I. M. Levitt, Philadelphia.

  38 “match races were a prime”: Nicholas Dawidoff, “Meet George Case,” Sports Illustrated, October 6, 1986.

  39 “Others were plain bizarre”: Ritter, pp. 195–97.

  40 “He was well known”: Boston Post, September 21 and 23, 1935; Merchant, “Moe Berg” and “More on Moe,” New York Post, June 6 and June 7, 1972; and interview with Frank Slocum by telephone.

  41 “He boasted that”: Time magazine, interoffice memo proposing Berg story, February 3, 1942.

  42 “When the footage”: Interview with Margaret Jennings Gahan by telephone.

  43 “Two years earlier”: Ethel Berg, pp. 112–13; Berg file; and Kaufman, p. 234.

  44 “Ratner filed a story”: Newark News, January 21, 1943.

  45 “Down in Washington”: Boston Globe, July 9, 1937.

  46 “an excellent example”: Boston Post, March 6, 1938.

  47 “Truth or Consequences”: John Dunning, Tune in Yesterday, pp. 303–5; Harrison Summers, Radio Programs Carried on National Networks, 1926–1956; Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, Radio’s Golden Age, pp. 168–69. I listened to “Information, Please!” tapes in the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and at the Library of Congress audio archive in Washington, D.C. Berg’s three appearances were on February 21, 1939; October 17, 1939; and November 21, 1939. Those three recordings are not available at the Museum of Television and Radio. I transcribed them by hand at the Library of Congress.

  48 “As the train pulled”: Arthur Sampson, New York Herald Tribune, February 16, 1939.

  49 “Edith Engel interviewed”: Interview with Edith Engel by telephone.

  50 “Other people thought so”: Ethel Berg, p. 121.

  51 “Berg replied”: Taylor Spink, Sporting News, November 16, 1939.

  52 “Kenesaw Mountain Landis”: Trentonian, July 9, 1971. I think it’s likely that Berg embellished this story.

  53 “To a legal mind”: “Information, Please!”, November 21, 1939.

  54 “He was not”: Interview with Clifton Fadiman by telephone.

  55 “Many immigrant Jewish”: Roth, “The Man in the Middle,” New York Times, October 12, 1992.

  56 “That made baseball acceptable”: Roger Angell, “Three for the Tigers,” in Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion, pp. 96–122; Jewish Daily Forward, June 21, 1991; and correspondence from Lester Rodney, June 24, 1992, informed this section.

  57 “Hank Greenberg, by”: Interview with Don Shapiro by telephone.

  58 “Harry Danning, a”: Interview with Harry Danning by telephone.

  59 “Yet to close friends”: Berkow and Greenberg, The Story of My Life; and interview with Ira Berkow, New York.

  60 “a dirty kike”: Sam Berg, August 17, 1989.

  61 “Most of the Red Sox”: Interviews with Eldon Auker and Joe Dobson by telephone.

  62 “Jack Wilson, who”: Interview with Jack Wilson by telephone.

  63 “Players could be”: Interview with Billy Werber by telephone.

  64 “Pitcher Herb Hash”: Interview with Herb Hash by telephone.

  65 “I think he liked”: Interview with Ted Williams, Boston.

  66 “does everyone still”: Kaufman, p. 118.

  67 “The linguistic Moe Berg”: Boston Globe, February 2, 1940.

  68 “At spring training”: Boston Post, March 11 and 12, 1940.

  69 “DiMaggio found Berg”: Interview with Dominic DiMaggio by telephone.

  70 “Although he claimed”: Office of Administrative Service investigation report, November 12, 1942.

  71 “In a Cuban restaurant”: Interview with Charles O’Neill by telephone.

  72 “On the boat”: Interviews with Bobby Doerr by telephone and Charles Owen, Washington, D.C.

  73 “Except to give”: Joe Cronin letter to Charles Owen.

  74 “The Red Sox had”: Kaufman, p. 110; Merchant, “Moe Berg” and “More on Moe,” New York Post, June 6 and June 7, 1972.

  75 “Berg did some composing”: Edward Weeks to Berg, May 12, 1941.

  76 “Pitchers and Catchers”: “Pitchers and Catchers” is reprinted in The Armchair Book of Baseball, edited by John Thorn, pp. 35–45.

  77 “Good fielding and pitching”: Ibid., p. 35.

  78 “to fool the hitter”: Ibid., p. 38.

  79 “Judges, if you”: Ibid., p. 43.

  80 “ ‘The catcher,’ says Berg”: Ibid., p. 44. 123. “The physical requirements”: Ibid. 123. “Finally, displaying grace”: Ibid., p. 45.

  81 “I seek no other man’s”: Kaufman, pp. 247–48.

  82 “Sam Berg, who despaired”: Sam Berg letter, December 31, 1978.

  83 “Another time Sam said”: Nicholas Dawidoff, Sports Illustrated, March 23, 1992.

  Chapter 9. Southern Junket

  1 “As things turned out”: William Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler, pp. 10–11. Note that R. Harris Smith says that the OSS did operate secretly in Latin America; see Smith, OSS, p. 20.

  2 “Montaigne said a”: Ethel Berg, p. 138.

  3 “Europe is in flames”: New York Times, June 1, 1972. 128. “In November Berg”: Ethel Berg, pp. 163–65; and Kaufman, p. 136.

  4 “By Berg’s account”: Joe Fitzgerald, Keene Sentinel, October 12, 1967.

  5 “Berg’s angst”: Translation of document by Michie Yamakawa. Document courtesy of Lou Jacobson.

  6 “Initially the idea”: Document courtesy of Lou Jacobson.

  7 “They would not”: FBI file.

  8 “Jerry Nason, describing”: Boston Evening Globe, January 15, 1942.

  9 “Berg himself was”: Newark News, January 16, 1942.

  10 “Time and Newsweek”: The publication date for both magazines was January 26, 1942.

  11 “What’s the past participle”: Interview with Charles O’Neill by telephone.

  12 “I never had a friend”: Hilton, p. 19.

  13 “Free food was sent”: This discussion of the OIAA was informed by interviews with Charles O’Neill and Rhoda Clark by telephone; OIAA memo, July 16, 1941; the journal Berg prepared for Nelson Rockefeller to describe his Latin American trip, which is in the Berg file, Rockefeller archives; Life magazine profile of Rockefeller, April 27, 1942; David Bradley, Journal of a Johnny-Come-Lately; and Kaufman. Berg’s reports to Rockefeller appear in Ethel Berg and in the Rockefeller archives.

  14 “The speech, of course”: Kaufman reprints the whole thing, pp. 141–46.

  15 “In a meeting”: FBI file.

  16 “On July 11”: Letter to Berg, July 11, 1942; and Ethel Berg, p. 169.

  17 “On July 17”: A. Seymour Houghton to Berg, July 17, 1942.

  18 “A week after that”: Berg, undated letter to his mother, saved by Ethel Berg.

  19 “On the thirtieth”: Berg to Ethel Berg, July 30, 1942.

  20 “for the surprise”: Interview with James Doolittle by telephone.

  21 “Beginning in 1939”: Interview with Steven Jurika by telephone; Ted W. Lawson, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, p. 37; Carroll V. Glines, Doolittle’s Tokyo Raiders, pp. 84–86, 176.

  22 “In 1944, when”: Glines, p. 86.

  23 “plenty of published sources”: Interview with Professor Carol Gluck by telephone.

  24 “Jurika himself had”: Glines, p. 84.

  25 “almost certainly apocryphal”: I say “apocryphal” because Jurika, who spent eighteen days on the Hornet, planning the raids and briefing
the pilots, never saw the films and neither did Doolittle. One of Doolittle’s pilots, Royden Stark, when shown copies of Berg’s films by a Japanese NHK journalist, said he had never seen them before. There is no evidence that Berg in 1934 was involved in secret government service in any of the State Department, Naval Intelligence, or OSS records that I have reviewed. Most obviously, it would have been impossible for the Berg films to be used by pilots charged with bombing Tokyo, since those raids took place months before Berg screened his films for military officers.

  26 “Always a mysterious bird”: John Kieran, New York Times, August 20, 1942.

  27 “one day he did”: See Walter Winchell’s name card in the Morris “Moe” Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

  28 “Berg’s enthusiasm”: Time magazine interoffice memo, November 5, 1942.

  29 “He stayed a week”: Journal to Rockefeller, March 29, 1943, p. 1.

  30 “To get to”: Ibid., p. 2.

  31 “He bought all”: Time memo, November 5, 1942.

  32 “Man without woman”: Journal to Rockefeller, March 29, 1943, p. 5.

  33 “venereal Utopia”: Ibid., p. 6.

  34 “from our ‘bad’ boys”: Ibid.

  35 “Nobody has been accepted”: Berg to Ethel and Rose Berg, September 14, 1942.

  36 “So it was”: Leslie B. Rout and John F. Bratzel, The Shadow War, p. 202.

  37 “He was also treated”: Journal to Rockefeller, March 29, 1943, p. 13.

  38 “In Natal, Berg”: Donald Griffin to Lou Jacobson.

  39 “Elsewhere about town”: Journal to Rockefeller, March 29, 1943, p. 16.

  40 “Bounding about town”: Ibid., p. 21.

  41 “Berg couldn’t do that”: Ibid.

  42 “There isn’t much”: John Clark to Ethel Berg, November 5, 1942.

  43 “By this time”: Hilton, pp. 231–35.

  44 “Still, it was”: Ibid., p. 24.

  45 “In January”: Journal to Rockefeller, February 27, 1943, p. 4.

  46 “In all my visits”: Ibid., p. 7.

  47 “ ‘At times,’ admitted”: Berg to Rockefeller, April 10, 1943.

  48 “Instead, four days”: Rockefeller to Berg, April 14, 1943. Appears in Ethel Berg, p. 183.

  49 “Clark, writing to”: Bradley, p. 129.

  50 “There wasn’t the fear”: Interview with Charles O’Neill by telephone.