RUTHFULLY YOURS

Morris “Moe” Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972), was a baseball catcher and later coach in the Major League. Berg graduated from Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He was a polyglot with scholarly interests in history.

In 1934 during a trip to Japan, ostensibly to play in baseball demonstrations, Berg was able to surreptitiously film Tokyo City harbor. As spy he traveled in Europe to gather intelligence on resistance groups and the German nuclear program.

During World War 2 Berg traveled throughout Europe gathering intelligence on partisan groups and German nuclear programs.

At great risk as a Jew, Berg spent parts of 1944 and 1945 in Germany, helping arrange for the capture of several prominent German atomic scientists by U.S. troops before the Russians got them. At war’s end, Berg was offered the Medal of Merit, the highest award given to civilian in the war effort, but he modestly declined it. His sister accepted on his behalf.

He died in May 1972. His remains were cremated and the ashes spread on Mount Scopus in Israel.

His baseball card is displayed in the CIA.

One of my favorite things is to read about baseball players who served in World War II, from Bob Feller in the U.S. Navy to Jerry Coleman in the U.S. Marines.

How do you get any attention when your brother Joe is the best paid player in the game and your teammate playing right field is arguably the best hitter ever?

Well, that’s the story of Dominic Paul DiMaggio, who was born in San Francisco and actually wanted to be a chemical engineer. Eventually, baseball caught up with engineering, and Dom played in the majors with his famous brother Joe and other brother Vince.

The story goes like this:

Dominic made his major-league debut on April 16, 1940, and had little trouble adjusting to the big leagues, hitting .301 and scoring 81 runs in 108 games in his rookie season. Going into spring training, Dom was concerned that he might not get to play because Boston was loaded with good outfielders: Ted Williams in left, Doc Cramer in center, Lou Finney in right, and Joe Vosmik, a 10-year veteran, as backup.

But Dom, at age 23, had a solid spring and was able to beat out Finney, a .300 hitter the year before, for the starting right fielder’s job. Later in the season, Dom was moved to center field, and there he remained for the rest of his career. The Red Sox showed confidence in DiMaggio by trading Doc Cramer to the Senators during the offseason.

Dom had fond memories of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, and especially the media interest in the DiMaggio brothers in center field. He recalled that the newspapers made a big deal out of the first time in 1940 when the Yankees visited Boston for a five-game series.

Dom had 11 hits to Joe’s nine, or as Dom said, “Twenty hits for the family in one series.”

One week later in New York, Joe advised his younger brother to move back because the ball carried well in that part of the ballpark. The next day Dom, taking Joe’s advice, was able to run down a fly ball hit 460 feet to deep center – off the bat of brother Joe.

Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and baseball had to take a back seat:

In July 2016, the Obama administration announced its decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felony mishandling of classified information and destruction of government files. In the aftermath, I observed that there is a very aggressive way that the Justice Department and the FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case — one profoundly different from the way they went about the Clinton emails investigation. There, they tried not to make the case.

That observation bears repeating today, as we watch Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of any possible Trump-campaign collusion in Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is a former FBI director and top Justice Department prosecutor. To say he is going about the collusion caper aggressively would be an understatement. The earth is being scorched by the stunningly large team he has assembled, which includes 16 other prosecutors (among them, Democratic party donors and activists) along with dozens of investigators (mostly from the FBI and IRS).

At the end of October, Mueller announced the first charges in the case. In the intensive commentary that followed, another investigative development attracted almost no attention. But in terms of Mueller’s seriousness of purpose, it speaks just as loudly as the George Papadopoulos guilty plea and the indictment of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates.

Mueller succeeded in convincing a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and Gates to provide grand-jury testimony against them. As Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, just as the charges against these defendants were announced with great fanfare, the U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., quietly unsealed a ruling compelling the testimony of the lawyer — who, though not referred to by name in the decision, has been identified by CNN as Melissa Laurenza, a partner at the Akin Gump law firm.

Interestingly, the jurist who rendered the 37-page memorandum opinion is Beryl A. Howell, who served for years as a senior Judiciary Committee adviser to the fiercely partisan Democratic Senator Pat Leahy (of Vermont) before being appointed to the bench by President Obama. Howell is now the district court’s chief judge. Why do I think that, in choosing to set up shop in Washington, Mueller and his team noted the district court’s local rule that vests the chief judge with responsibility to “hear and determine all matters relating to proceedings before the grand jury”? (See here, Rule 57.14 at p. 168.)

And why do I think that the Trump collusion case is not getting the kid-glove Clinton emails treatment?

What does America owe its veterans? Perhaps the best answer to this question came from my friend, Julie Ponzi, in response to a review I had written of Karl Marlantes’s Vietnam War novel, Matterhorn. She observed that by providing a real understanding of war and its sacrifices, memoirs and novels such as Matterhorn make it possible for “our fighting men to finally get some genuine gratitude. Not sympathy or pedestals; but real gratitude. .  .  . Every civilian should understand that the veteran has done nothing less, and also nothing more, than what is sometimes required to maintain liberty.”

Neither sympathy nor pedestals, but gratitude: How simple! But as Rosa Brooks has observed, there are three dominant images of veterans: the killer; the victim; and the hero. The first two date back to Vietnam. The third is an attempt to rectify the Vietnam view by overcompensation. Today, most Americans do not think of veterans as killers. But, alas, too many Americans see veterans as victims. Those Americans are wrong.

The view of veteran-as-victim was roundly rejected by our current secretary of defense, James Mattis, in a 2014 speech in San Francisco to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

During the question and answer portion of his speech at the Marine’s Memorial Club, Mattis said:

You’ve been told that you’re broken, that you’re damaged goods and should be labeled victims of two unjust and poorly executed wars. I don’t buy it. The truth, instead, is that you are the only folks with the skills, determination, and values to ensure American dominance in this chaotic world.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

Mattis observed, how the veteran-as-victim narrative exerts a powerful influence over civilians. It can be seen in news stories that paint veterans as over-represented in rates of suicide, drug abuse, homelessness, and incarceration.

Rather than assuming all souls touched by combat must necessarily suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Mattis offered an alternative, which he calls “post-traumatic growth,” echoing Nietzsche’s aphorism from Twilight of the Idols: “From life’s school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger.”

In Mattis’s view, PTG describes a reality that is far more common in veterans than PTSD, which is most veterans return from war with the potential to be stronger than before. The PTG orientation holds that what the returning veteran needs are time and support to realize that potential for growth.