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My Prison Without Bars My Prison Without Bars by Pete Rose, with Rick Hill Rodale, 2004 288 pp. $24.95 The Fog of War The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara dir. by Errol Morris SONY Pictures Classics, 2003 DVD $26.96

Although former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did not initiate The Fog of War, a film about his life and what he has learned, the movie is consonant with McNamara's many attempts to find absolution for policy over Vietnam during the 1960s. He is poles apart from Pete Rose, the former baseball star whose bestselling book about his troubled career has gotten far more publicity than the movie. McNamara was a member of the intellectual élite that came to political power in the Kennedy administration; the ballplayer is a working-class tough endowed only with grit and physical skill. The Secretary has a grasp of world historical affairs, while Rose has little sense of life outside of the card shows where he sells his autograph. Rose is more a liar than a self-deceiver. Yet Rose too, most sensationally in his new book, wants people to forgive him-for betting on baseball.

These two attempts at redemption tell us a lot about modern secular life, and the cultural resources and the rationales individuals use to come to terms with moral failings. Each man owns up to past blunders, but each refuses to admit any character defect; and each tries, in different ways, to deflect serious criticism.

Rose's autobiography, My Prison Without Bars, is a unique piece of baseball writing. The point of the volume is to tell us about his gambling, and through the confession to make possible his election to the Hall of Fame, which Rose wants more than anything else.

Betting on the game is the cardinal sin in baseball, and players are told from day one that they will be declared permanently ineligible if they break the no-betting rule. In Rose's case, when he managed the Cincinnati Reds in the mid-1980s, he always wagered on his team to win but did not wager on every contest. He did not, for example, gamble when Mario Soto pitched for the Reds-he didn't trust Soto's skills. Suppose Rose had a bet on a game subsequent to one in which Soto was pitching. Can we assume his managerial strategy in the Soto game was unaffected by his doubts that the Reds could win and that he had a great incentive to win the next game? Almost certainly Rose could not help having his judgment influenced. Not that he did anything as crude as throwing a game. But, enmeshed as he was in the world of gambling, he compromised the integrity of the sport.

Even in this tell-all book Rose cannot get his mind around this issue. He says that as a betting manager, he "never took an unfair advantage." "I never bet more or less based on injuries or inside information, never allowed my wager to influence my baseball decisions." It is hard to credit this because it is so outrageous, and the problem was clear to baseball's administrators over 15 years ago when they discovered the infraction and moved to banish Rose from the sport. At the time he denied the charges, and continued to lie about them on every occasion that he was queried. He wrote a deceitful book about his betting, Pete Rose: My Story (1989). But probably because of Rose's gifts and enormous popularity as a player, the commissioner at the time of the punishment had given Rose an out: he would be reinstated if he showed a "redirected, reconfigured, or rehabilitated life." Most people who took a hard line against Rose thought that meant he had to make a clean breast of the gambling and show some remorse for what he had done; then he would be reinstated.

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