BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Catcher Moe Berg: A Mysterious Sleuth Who Got Caught : THE CATCHER WAS A SPY:The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg <i> by Nicholas Dawidoff</i> ; Pantheon : $24, 453 pages
One of the charms of baseball is that it has always sustained sportswriters who cover it by providing them with picturesque moments that have become the stuff of legend--from the heroic (Babe Ruth waving his bat at the bleachers in Wrigley Field, ostensibly to predict a home run in the 1932 World Series) to the ludicrous (Bill Veeck, owner of the pitiful St. Louis Browns, sending a midget named Eddie Gaedel to pinch-hit during a 1951 game).
Then there was Moe Berg, a Princeton graduate who entered the major leagues in 1923, when most other players were small-town boys who may or may not have made it through high school.
Berg spent 10 of his 15 major-league years as a backup catcher for the Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox, hanging on primarily because Walter Johnson and Joe Cronin, the teams’ managers, liked him.
If that were all there was to Berg, who finished his career with a .243 average and six home runs scattered among 1,812 at bats, he would only be another of the hundreds of obscure players listed in “The Baseball Encyclopedia,” tucked in my edition between Lou Berberet, a .230-hitting catcher who spent most of his seven years with the Senators and Tigers, and Augie Bergamo, who got two years with the St. Louis Cardinals during World War II because most of their regulars were in the military.
However, Berg was more than a mere educational anomaly (after all, stars like Christy Mathewson and Lou Gehrig were college grads).
His reputation was burnished by sportswriters who loved his displays of erudition, by his obsessive penchant for secrecy, and by the stories, when he retired, that he was a spy.
Berg claimed that he had taken films in Japan during an off-season baseball barnstorming tour in 1934 that were useful to the U.S. military after Pearl Harbor, and that he had worked for the OSS (predecessor to the CIA) in Europe during the war, assessing whether Germany might make good on its promise to use an atomic device as its last, and most devastating, super-weapon.
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Nicholas Dawidoff’s meticulously researched biography reveals that both stories were essentially true, although both were embellished by Berg, who spent the last quarter-century of his life as a freeloader whose currency as a house guest was not only his wide-ranging intelligence, but the assumption of most of his hosts, never contradicted by their guest, that he continued to be a spy.
He wasn’t. Dawidoff describes a lonely soul who could bear only infrequent intimacy--he had a few serious relationships with women, and no close male friends.
Berg never learned to drive, so he literally trudged though life, leaving behind a trail of newspapers (he read as many as 10 a day) and secondhand books that he occasionally bought or was given by store proprietors who enjoyed his company.
Berg’s reputation as a spy rested first on his 1934 movie of Tokyo. Dawidoff makes the case that his footage revealed nothing of military value, but did serve as the calling card which got him his job with the OSS.
As for his work during the war, Berg, armed with a pistol and a poison capsule, attended a lecture in Zurich delivered by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in December, 1944, with instructions to kill Heisenberg if he revealed the Germans were close to constructing an atomic bomb.
Berg concluded from the presentation only what other OSS spies had reported, that the Nazi regime was not at all near completion of a bomb. Berg’s confirmation came with hefty luxury-hotel bills, a fiscal characteristic that put him in bad odor when he tried to catch on with the CIA after the war.
As Dawidoff tracks his elusive subject, it is easy to agree with a bookseller who described Berg as “a professional liar, a layabout who lived on his brother . . . a self-invented mystery, a charming chap, but an outright fraud. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
True enough, but in the last 40 or so pages, as Dawidoff describes Berg’s difficult relationships with his brother and sister, and then assesses the effect of their emotionally distant father on all of them, the story becomes more than a search for the core of someone who spent his life making himself a mystery, but a dark, moving human tragedy.
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