BOOK NOTES by Joan Ruddiman
Harvey Yavener of The Times sports page recently wrote a personal retrospective on his friend Moe Berg. Berg’s ties to Princeton University, and to sports, connected him to folks at the Trenton Times. The impression of Berg, from this biography and others, is not exaggerated. According to those who knew him (or thought they did), he was one fascinating man.
To those passionate about baseball, the name Moe Berg recalls mixed images. Mr. Baseball to the end – his last words were, "How are the Mets doing today?" – Berg’s name also is associated with the world of espionage.
Nicholas Dawidoff in the book, "The Catch Was a Spy," pulled together the multiple facets of an extraordinary life. Subtitled "The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg," Dawidoff examines Berg the collegian and professional baseball player, Berg the OSS officer and Berg the scholar. Who was this Renaissance man, who, decades after his death, continues to fascinate and frustrate?
Linda McCarthy, CIA museum curator, is an unabashed fan. The plates on her vehicle read "Moe Berg."
"People think I’m making him up," Dawidoff quotes her. "He did it (spying) for the right reasons. He joined the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) with a purpose in mind. He knew he’d be useful to this country. He knew what the Germans were doing with the atomic bomb. That’s what intelligence is all about. You have to know what the other side is doing."
That he spoke a dozen languages fluently (he autographed his baseball cards in Japanese) was a huge asset in his spying, as was his brilliant mind. Berg was a Princeton graduate and held a degree form Columbia University’s law school, which he earned over a period of years in the late 1920s as he juggled his budding professional baseball career.
Perhaps that says as much about Berg’s conflicted life as anything. He was not a great ballplayer. Far from it. ("He can speak a dozen languages but can’t hit in any of them.") He persevered to get a law degree, but never pursued the career.
Nothing seemed to make him happy. Though a rapscallion womanizer, he never married. Though clannish with his immediate family, (he lived with his siblings on and off throughout his life and died while under sister Edith’s care), he’d disappear and reappear in their lives without warning or explanation. Though brilliant and well-educated, he chose to sit the bench as a third-string catcher well after his contemporaries gracefully retired.
Berg’s story is not an easy one to tell, not a pleasant one to hear. The fascination with his life is tempered with frustration that he didn’t do more with what he was blessed with having.
It is a credit to Dawidoff that the biography reads like a story. Berg’s notorious secret nature makes research difficult, but for Dawidoff, not impossible. A Harvard graduate, Dawidoff is a recognized writer for Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, The American Scholar and other national periodicals. His scholarship and reporting skills are appreciated here in his first book.
In order to uncover the enigma that was Moe Berg, he shifted through archives as diverse as the ivy-ed halls of Princeton and Columbia, the Morris "Moe" Berg Special Collection of the New York Public Library and the musty National Archives, Records Division, where he picked though "thousands of overstuffed boxes of old records and hundreds of spools of microfilm," all uncataloged.
Though Berg and his siblings had died before he began the research, Dawidoff spoke to hundreds of acquaintances and family friends. Like the man himself, the perceptions of Moe Berg are dramatically multi-faceted. Some, like Linda McCarthy, idolize him. Others, like the owner of an antiquarian bookshop in Philadelphia where Berg read for days on end, and ultimately spent $1, see him as "a charlatan, a layabout, a professional liar, an outright fraud."
Somewhere in between is the truth of who Moe Berg was. Dawidoff’s riveting biography may come closest to conveying that truth.
Joan Ruddiman is a teacher and member of the Allentown Library Board.