Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  Having won the U.S. Chess Championship, Fischer had automatically qualified for the 1958 Interzonal, which was to take place in the resort town of Portoroz, Yugoslavia. He announced confidently, to anybody who would listen, that his strategy for making it through to the Candidates was to draw with the strong grandmasters and hammer the weaklings, predictions that were dismissed as youthful bravado. In the event, Fischer did pretty much as he had pledged, winning six games, losing only two, and coming in joint fifth. He thus became an international grandmaster, the youngest in history. It was hailed, rightly, as a staggering performance, as was his fifth place the following year in the Candidates tournament—also held in Yugoslavia.

  The contrast between his star status in international chess and his mundane status as a high school student would have been difficult for any fifteen-year-old to manage, even one with the happy background which Fischer lacked. Fischer was now arguing incessantly with his domineering mother. There was much of the mother in the son: for instance, high intelligence. She was a brilliant linguist—in addition to English, she spoke French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Her master’s degree in nursing from New York University was obtained, it is said (probably apocryphally), with the best marks ever recorded. Like Bobby, she was also instinctively antiauthority and a nonconformist. Difficult and uncompromising, she had few friends and little social life. She often behaved as though the primary function of the United States Chess Federation (USCF) and the U.S. government was to nurture the talent of her precocious Bobby. Regina became a regular at USCF meetings, a bundle of outraged energy, forcibly putting the case for more financial backing for her boy. In short, to an awkward, withdrawn, obsessive, and independent-minded teenager, she must have been the mother of all embarrassments.

  At the local school, Erasmus Hall, Fischer was sullen and uninterested; he did little work and ignored authority. He did not see how a high school diploma could advance his true career and his real calling. The teachers understood that in Fischer they had a singular mind, but he proved impossible for them to teach. Sometimes he was caught in lessons playing chess on a pocket set. And even though they could confiscate the set, they could not control the insatiable journeyings of his mind around the sixty-four squares. Perhaps they could not empathize with how insecure he felt in the world beyond the board. As soon as he could, he abandoned his formal education.

  From inside his chess isolation ward, Fischer showed no interest in that external world. America was on the verge of social upheaval; the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover was being ripped apart. Race was the deepest fissure: the demand for civil rights had moved onto the streets. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. led 250,000 marchers through Washington to hear him make his historic declaration: “I have a dream…” In 1964, Cassius Clay rejected his “slave name” to become Muhammad Ali. In the 1968 Mexico Olympics, sprinter Tommie Smith gave a Black Power salute from the gold medalist’s podium. There were riots in the black ghettos across the nation. King’s doctrine of peaceful protest was challenged by the militant Black Power demands of Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael.

  Lyndon Johnson’s government plunged deeper and deeper into debt, drawn on not only by the cost of the war on inequality, discrimination, and poverty, but by the steadily increasing commitment to Vietnam that would see 58,000 Americans killed and another 300,000 wounded. The “body bag” count entered the language of public debate and private anguish; antiwar demonstrations on the streets and campuses battered American confidence. The antiwar movement joined hands with the campaign for equal rights. Students played a significant role in both.

  Esmond Wright remarks in The American Dream how “parents watched in bewilderment as their children dropped out of college, burned their draft cards, grew their hair long and joined free-living communes where drink, drugs and sex were readily available.” “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was the mantra of Harvard LSD guru Timothy Leary. (He used chess sets as visual props in his lectures on the drug: “Life is a chess game of experiences we play.”) But in some neighborhoods where the counterculture flourished, drugs and guns, gangs and violence fell in behind. Inner-city crime in particular rocketed—as did the prison population.

  President Nixon contrasted student “bums blowing up the campuses” with the young men who were “just doing their duty…. They stand tall, and they are proud.” On 4 May 1970, part-time soldiers of the National Guard fired into demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding eleven. In the turmoil that followed, state governors, alarmed at the breakdown of order, sent the National Guard into colleges across the nation. However, an older America remained the bedrock of society. As the 1970s opened, troops were withdrawn from Vietnam in increasing numbers. The “trillion-dollar economy” blossomed. By 1972, the “silent majority” was ready to return Richard Nixon to the White House.

  By his mid-teen years, Fischer was showing signs of the personality that would make him forever dreaded as well as respected. In this period, the government documents contain a report that “the State Department did not want him overseas as a representative of the U.S. anymore.” To obsession with chess and the belief that he was the best in the world was added an insistence on total control that brooked no compromise. His tempestuous relationship with his mother deteriorated to such an extent that she moved out of their apartment, going to stay with a friend on Longfellow Avenue in the Bronx, leaving him alone. Visitors found him living amid chaos, clothes strewn across the floor, chess books and magazines everywhere. There were four rooms and three beds. He is reported to have slept in a different bed each night; a chessboard stood by each one.

  He met Boris Spassky for the first time in 1960 at a tournament in Mar del Plata in Argentina. The two men shared first prize, fully two points ahead of the Soviet grandmaster David Bronstein, who took third place. In their individual match, Spassky, with the white pieces, played the King’s Gambit, a fierce opening in which white gives up a pawn in order to dominate the center of the board and rapidly develop his major pieces. (The opening has become largely discredited: accurate play by black leaves white with next-to-no compensation for the loss of the pawn.) Fischer analyzes this game in his book My 60 Memorable Games. His big mistake, he admits, was not to exchange queens on move twenty-three, when he would have gone into an ending with his pawn advantage still intact. On move twenty-five, “I started to feel uncomfortable, but little did I imagine that Black’s game would collapse in four short moves!” Three of these short moves later, it was clear his bishop could no longer be defended. “I knew I was losing a piece, but just couldn’t believe it. I had to play one more move to see if it was really true!” Resignation came on move twenty-nine. That same year, Fischer won a small tournament in Iceland, his first visit there.

  In 1962, Fischer, not yet twenty, came top by a large margin in the Stockholm Interzonal. He was the first non-Soviet to win an Interzonal, and in so doing he qualified for the Candidates tournament, held later that year in the island of Curaçao in the Dutch West Indies. He was now one of the favorites; certainly that is how he regarded himself. In the event, he got off to a terrible start, and although he managed to claw back some ground, he finished only in fourth place, several points behind the leaders, Tigran Petrosian, Paul Keres, and Efim Geller. Commentators were divided: either Fischer had not achieved full chess maturity or he was simply off form. The would-be champion had an alternative explanation, one that revealed his belief in his chess invincibility: If he had not won, he must have been the victim of a conspiracy.

  In an article in the American weekly Sports Illustrated, he raged against the Soviet players, charging them with collusion. All twelve games between Petrosian, Keres, and Geller, he pointed out, had been drawn; many were quick draws. They had settled these games, he wrote, to conserve their intellectual and physical energies for struggles against the non-Soviets—Fischer himself in particular. And he concluded, “Russian control of chess has reached a point where
there can be no honest competition for the World Championship.”

  Even if it was true that the Soviet players went easy on one another (grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi—then a Soviet—says it is true), they were able to do so only because Fischer lagged behind on points. Otherwise, to finish ahead of him, they would have had to press for victories. The American player Arthur Bisguier, in Curaçao to act as chess aide to both Fischer and Pal Benko, is dismissive. “It’s absurd to say [the Soviets] were cheating. Of course they agreed draws; they were ahead in the tournament. Fischer’s complaint was just sour grapes.”

  The need for control was incompatible with respect for the rights of others. Anger lay just below the surface. In Curaçao, Bisguier, who says his principal job was “to calm Fischer’s ruffled feathers when he had a bad result,” was himself caught up in the teenager’s dark moodiness. Fischer maintained that as he was America’s best prospect in the tournament, Bisguier should be there to support him alone, not Benko as well. Just before midnight on 9 May, the thirty-three-year-old Benko came looking for Bisguier in Fischer’s room; he needed some help in analyzing his adjourned game with Petrosian. Fischer and Benko started scrapping—what Bisguier calls “fisticuffs.” The following day, Fischer wrote to the tournament organizing committee, saying Benko should be fined and/or expelled from the tournament. It was a letter they chose to ignore.

  Bisguier has a more disturbing memory of Curaçao. During a break in the tournament, they went to stay on the beautiful tropical island of St. Martin. “I used to look in on him every day to try to cheer him up. And I saw that there was a door open and he had a shoe in his hand. I said, ‘Why do you leave the door open? You get all these tropical bugs in here.’ And he said, ‘That’s what I want.’ And it turned out he had captured some poor creature and was banging on each one of its legs. There were other things of this sort. And it was scary. If he wasn’t a chess player, he might have been a dangerous psychopath.”

  Tigran Petrosian went on to win the tournament and then to become world champion in 1963. Considered a strong bet for the 1966 title, Fischer stated that he would stay away from future Interzonals and Candidates tournaments unless the system was reformed to prevent collusion. He got his way: it was subsequently announced that, henceforth, the round-robin Candidates tournament would be replaced by a series of knockout matches.

  Fischer’s difficulties with competition organizers had already begun to escalate. His attendance at tournaments became conditional upon high appearance fees, which the sponsors reluctantly found—they understood that the participation of the American added glamour to any lineup and stimulated public interest. But money was only part of it. Playing conditions had to be up to Fischer’s rigorous standards. The lighting had to be just right, the crowd had to be kept far enough back to limit noise. Less unusual, the rounds had to be prearranged so as to accommodate his religious practices. (Reshevsky, an Orthodox Jew, had the same requirement.)

  In the mid-1960s, Fischer had become involved in the Worldwide Church of God, though he never formally joined. Based in Pasadena in Southern California, it was a rapidly growing fundamentalist sect, with over 75,000 members in 300 congregations across the country and abroad. The founder was an erstwhile newspaper advertising designer turned charismatic radio preacher, Herbert Armstrong. He served a Bible-based theological cocktail, part Judaism, with salvation through Jesus Christ, and a strict moral life. Followers were ordered to observe the Jewish Sabbath and such festivals as Passover and to adopt a kosher diet. With one exception, Fischer fitted in with the Church’s religious practices, broadly observing its dietary code as well as more strictly following its Sabbath injunctions. Even so, one has the sense that the American imposed his personalized interpretation on the rules of his Church, just as he did on competition rules. Yevgeni Vasiukov records seeing Fischer on the Sabbath at a tournament: “I have no wish to cast doubt on Fischer’s religious beliefs, but it was somewhat strange to see him come to the hall and analyze the games that had ended.” The pronouncement Fischer chose to ignore entirely was the Church’s doctrinal prohibition on board games, anathematized as “frivolous.”

  In December 1963, Fischer entered the U.S. Chess Championship. He had already won it five times, but nobody could have foreseen the outcome. Against eleven of the highest-ranked players in the country, he won every game. It was an awesome performance; “historic” was the adjective used, rightly, in the press. To win a national tournament is one thing, to win it several years in succession is another, but to win it without losing or even drawing a single game is staggering. He had proved himself in a different league.

  On such form, Fischer posed a real threat to Soviet supremacy, and the chess world buzzed in anticipation of his participating in the Amsterdam Interzonal of 1964. Not to participate—missing this world championship cycle—would mean that he could not hope to become world champion until the end of the following cycle, in 1969. Surely this was a chance he would not pass up.

  But still raging against the “Soviet swindlers,” Fischer did indeed pass it up. His fury was turned in on himself, in the rejection of what he wanted most. He did not play competitive chess again for a year and a half. Offers came in, but Fischer turned them all down or asked for appearance fees beyond even the most munificent of sponsors. At the age of twenty-one, he staged his first retirement.

  The tournament that brought him back was the Capablanca Memorial in Havana, which opened in August 1965—Fischer’s first international event since what he regarded as the catastrophe of Curaçao. For an American, participation was a diplomatic challenge. This was only a few years since the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis. Contact between Cuba and the United States was severely curtailed—when Fischer applied to the U.S. State Department for a permit to visit Cuba, they flatly turned him down.

  Rather than fight the bureaucracy, Fischer’s ingenious solution was to offer to play by telex. (Some claim the idea originated with the Cuban chess organizer José Luis Barreras.) He would make his moves in New York while his opponents made theirs in Cuba. The solution would set the Cubans back $10,000. In the meantime, his lust for control was undiminished. Before the tournament began, Fischer read that Castro was proclaiming his, Fischer’s, involvement a propaganda victory. Fischer reacted with a cable to the Cuban leader withdrawing from the tournament unless “you immediately [send] me a telegram declaring that neither you, nor your government, will attempt to make political capital out of my participation.”

  To students of Fischer’s psychology, Castro’s choice of riposte carried an interesting lesson, as the Cuban leader stood his ground. Scornful counterattack was the mode. Cuba, he wrote back, had no need of propaganda victories. “If you are frightened… then it would be better to find another excuse.” Fischer agreed to play. He came joint second.

  In January 1966, Fischer took his seventh U.S. title, qualifying him for the 1967 Interzonal in Sousse, Tunisia. He was again on his way to another shot at his ultimate goal, the world title. In the meantime, there was a tournament in Santa Monica, in which the then world champion Tigran Pertrosian would participate, together with his recently defeated challenger Boris Spassky. Fischer had a disastrous first half, losing his individual game against Spaasky. As so often, however, he somehow stepped up a level, gathered momentum, and began cruising through the field. In the penultimate round, he faced Spassky again (all players played each other twice). This time he secured a draw—he had still not managed to beat the Russian—and Spassky went on to take the top prize, with Fischer finishing second.

  Fischer and Spassky were to square off once more, in the chess Olympiad in Cuba in November 1966. There was almost a diplomatic incident when the Soviets initially refused to adjust the game times to fit in with Fischer’s Sabbath. Eventually the entire U.S.-USSR match was rescheduled, and hundreds watched Fischer and Spassky eke out a long draw. Castro and Fischer were later seen in amicable conversation as though no cross words between them had ever been exchange
d. By now, Spassky and Fischer had played four times, with Spassky drawing two and winning two.

  The following year, the Interzonal was held in the Sousse-Palace hotel. What happened there continues to stimulate comment. Fischer was the favorite, and the organizers had done what they could to accommodate his wishes, including placing additional lamps by his table, so that the lighting met with his approval, and scheduling the matches in such a way that both Fischer and Reshevsky would be free of chess for twenty-four hours from Friday night as well as on religious holidays.

  Nevertheless, the tournament was beset by problems. Fischer was acutely sensitive to offstage noise and commotion, demanding on one occasion that a cameraman be removed from the hall. More important, as a result of the rescheduling, he had to play a number of games in succession—which he claimed put him under unreasonable strain. Although he was way ahead on points, halfway through he summarily departed his hotel and the tournament—and set off for Tunis.

  Soviet international master Aivar Gipslis was his scheduled opponent the following day: Fischer was defaulted for failing to appear. A representative of the U.S. embassy went to see him, as did one of the organizers, begging him to return. In the next game, he was pitted against his old adversary and compatriot Samuel Reshevsky. Reshevsky watched Fischer’s clock slowly tick down and must have expected not to have to make a move. With only five minutes to go before the automatic forfeit, Fischer strolled in and began to make accurate moves with extraordinary speed. Emotionally drained, Reshevsky capitulated quickly despite his time advantage. The veteran American then went around the other players with a petition objecting to Fischer’s behavior.