[.ca] The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (ISBN 0679762892)

The catcher was inscrutable:
Let's face it, most of us these days have never heard of Moe Berg, except in passing. Not a single one of the baseball games he played in still exists on videotape. He never saw action in a World Series game. By the end of his career as a ballplayer (variously for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Washington Senators, and Boston Red Sox), Berg plaed so infrequently, you might think him the Bartleby of baseball. When asked to play, the occasional second game of a doubleheader, he preferred not to. So he sat on the bench. As Nicholas Dawidoff portrays him, Berg was a bizarre man who spent the final 25 years of his life essentially homeless, living off the charity of friends and family, trading his stories of pre-war baseball and wartime espionage for the offer of clean clothes, hot meals, and warm water for a bath. Trained in the law, and a skilled linguist who spoke half a dozen languages, he refused all employment, apart from the rare consulting job or intelligence mission. While most print accounts of Berg make extravagant claims about his World War II espionage, Dawidoff boils everything down to what he can find on paper from the CIA (and its precursor agencies). The truth, as reported here, is that Berg's probing of German atomic secrets in 1945 was vital to the war effort, but that he hardly ever worked as a spy again. He simply pretended to be one, while remaining cloaked in an increasingly insular lifestyle. The research for "The Catcher Was a Spy" is impeccable. Dawidoff interviewed hundreds of sources, and as a result the book's index is clogged with famous names -- athletes or otherwise (not too many other books quote both Ted Williams and Albert Einstein). However, most sources knew Berg only tangentially, and I spent a lot of time flipping back and forth to the index and the (extensive) footnotes to keep track of who was saying and thinking each particular passage. The end result is a finely detailed psychoanalysis of Moe Berg, who passed away more than 20 years before this biography was written. Lots of secondary sources (and their opinions, in many cases, of a man they met for 2 or 3 days, half a century previous) are cited, as are many of Berg's private journals and letters. What no-one knows, however, including the author himself, is what Moe Berg really thought. Therefore Dawidoff spents a lot of time telling us what "Berg must have known", or "would have believed". For example, Berg was a non-practicing Jew who rarely mentioned the Holocaust, and Dawidoff is forced to fill in the gaps with auhorial speculation. Other speculations (on homosexuality, death by poisoning, and child molestation) seem forced or unnecessary. "The Catcher Was A Spy" is often heavy going, as it seems to require equal knowledge of baseball, nuclear physics, and abnormal psychology. I found the account of Berg's postwar meanderings to be the most exciting material, although I wish these had been arranged chronologically rather than geographically. On the whole, I recommend the book, and wish that Berg had left behind a completed biography of his own. He had so many stories to tell.

The Spy Who Couldn't Come in From The Cold:
Moe Berg was one of those people who could never conform to conventional life. He decided early on in his adult life to march to the beat of his own drummer, letting very few people know the true man. Nicholas Dawidoff in his book "The Catcher was a Spy" explores this strange individual. Berg started out as a professional baseball player, who was a Princeton and Columbia Law School graduate. A star in high school and college but a medicore one in the pros. Berg was a man who liked being on a team but did not mind not playing very often, the antithesis of most athletes. Baseball gave him the opportunity to travel, meet people and do the things that interested him such as prowling old bookstores, reading tomes on linguistics and scientific topics. When Berg played all games were played in the afternoon giving him plenty of time to indulge in his solitary persuits. For the most part his teammates tended to be country boys or young men with limited educations, although it would be wrong to say there were no players in the 1920's or 1930's who went to college like Berg. Berg got into the espionage business during World WarII working for "Wild Bill" Donovan's OSS. Moe was a skilled linguist familiar with six or seven different languages, he was also gifted enough to learn a great deal about atomic physics while trying to ferret out information about Germany's attempt to create an atomic bomb. His four years in the OSS were his salad days and he would live off these exploits the rest of his life. Donovan ran a very loose ship and Berg many times ignored his superiors orders, but because Donovan liked him he was able to avoid the rules and regulations. This inability to conform to bureaucratic rules was his undoing after the war. Berg desparately wanted to join the CIA but those running the agency during peace-time expected field agents to account for their time and expenses something Moe could not or would not do. The last 25 years of his life he became a total vagabond living on the charity of friends and family. He was a personable man and a spinner of yarns, but his stories always put himself in the best light. Berg floated from place to place never leeting anyone know him well or wearing out his welcome. Dawidoff does a very good job describing Berg's life in baseball and the OSS, but the book bogs down in the chapters depicting his life when the CIA would not hire him except for several brief stints. Essentially, everyone who knew him said basically the same thing about him. A nice guy but aloof never going beyond a certain point in a relationship that he did not want you to know. Considering the banalities that most athletes today spout the book is worth the read just to reminisce about a bygone era. Berg was an enigmatic individual and the jury is still out on how much he contributed to the war effort. Dawidoff believes he did both to the OSS and to the teams he played for during his career. Moe Berg's failing was not utilizing his intellectual talents beyond living the life of a total free spirit without any responsibility.

Skullduggery, twisted mentalities, wartime brutality ...:
The skullduggery of spies; the warped mental state of the homeless vagabond, Jewish concerns in the war, and baseball on top of all that! Great reading.

A Trudge:
I'd been anticipating reading this book for some time, but getting through it was a chore. Dawidoff's writing and research are thorough. Berg left behind a wealth of personal material and many who knew him were still alive and available by phone or personal interview to Dawidoff. Hundreds of anecdotes and details about Berg's life emerge from these resources, and Dawidoff marches them all past the reader. The question is "Why?" Berg never becomes very interesting. It is well-known that he was a mediocre major league catcher. He was not much better as a spy, excelling mostly at running up large expense accounts. His tradecraft was abysmal; making and keeping notes to himself about briefings he received is such a fundamental error as to be ludicrous. After more than 300 pages it remained hard for me to take Berg seriously in any of his endeavors. In the end this is the biography of a moderately interesting obsessive dilettante, whose avoidance of normal human contact except on his own often strange terms seems almost pathological. Dawidoff tries valiantly but a New Yorker profile of about one-tenth this length would have been a sufficient account of Moe Berg's mildly curious life.

A REAL-LIFE JOHN LE CARRE CHARACTER:
Moe Berg is truly one of the most interesting, and enigmatic, characters in sports history. What always fascinated me was how, after WWII and no longer in baseball, Berg never worked. He would stay at friends and relatives' homes throughout the country, reading multiple newspapers, and maintaining strict control of those papers. My guess, and this would make for an interesting investigative study, is that he stayed on the OSS/CIA payroll and was working for them, in some capacity: Dissecting the news, dealing with Communist espionage - or who knows, maybe he was working with foreign elemnets. Berg was something. He has to be considered a major hero. Surely the fact that he was an ex-ballplayer makes him stand out from the other heroes under "Wild Bill" Donovan, as does the fact that a Jew was sent to Nazi-controlled Finland to get German scientists. This is a terrific story. (...)