Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Bobby Fischer Goes to War: The True Story of How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

By David Edmonds and John Eidnow

Faber and Faber, 2004

302 pages, $39.95(hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/29983

"This little thing between me and Spassky", said Bobby Fischer to a BBC reporter in Reykjavik, "it is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians". After two months of titanic chess and low farce in Iceland in 1972, the victorious US challenger for the chess World Championship added: "It's given me great pleasure as a free person to have smashed" the Soviet chess machine.

In 1972, chess emerged briefly from its quiet existence into the dazzling glare of symbolic Cold War battle when the first non-USSR challenger to the Soviet Union's total dominance of post-war chess won his way to the final against the title-holder, Boris Spassky.

Bobby Fischer, intensely patriotic but reluctant to play due to a pathological fear of losing, eventually, as Edmonds and Eidnow recount in Bobby Fisher Goes to War, did his duty as a cold warrior at the prompting of US national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

Cometh the hour, cometh the super-patriot chess genius. At 14, Fischer was the youngest ever US champion. His political development was as immature as his social and emotional development. His ambition was to get rich, he regarded all women as "weak and stupid", he hated Jews and he admired Hitler. He was devoted to the radio-evangelism of a Christian fundamentalist sect, the Worldwide Church of God, and he loathed everything Soviet.

Bobby Fischer's principal cause, however, was Bobby Fischer. His domineering, demanding, self-absorbed, insensitive personality, which at one stage forced his (left-wing) mother to leave home, was on full, arrogant display during his chess matches. He demanded appearance fees and the scheduling of tournament games around his religious observances. He would storm out if playing conditions were not to his exact liking.

He got his way, and broke International Chess Federation (FIDE) rules with impunity, because his talent was as huge as his ego. His prodigious memory, which gave him total recall of hundreds of games, allowed him to play like a computer with nerveless precision and speed, panicking his opponents into error and despair.

Boris Spassky, too, was a child prodigy (Soviet champion at age 17) but, learning his chess in a Leningrad devastated by the war, this son of a peasant mother and builders' labourer father had found a rather more sober maturity - whilst Fischer the grown-up was reading Tarzan and Superman comics, Spassky was devouring Dostoevsky.

Chess, with its skills of logic and mental discipline, had been promoted and supported by the Bolsheviks to raise the cultural level of the peasants and workers of the young socialist republic. The Stalinist counter-revolution, however, turned state support of chess into a political symbol serving the prestige of the bureaucracy. The Stalinist chess lords spoke of "organising shock brigades of chess players" and "fulfilling the five-year plan for chess".

Off the chess production line rolled millions of chess players, the cream separated off into a stratum of domestic celebrities rewarded with state stipends much greater than the average wage (Spassky's remuneration at his peak put him on a par with a government minister).

However Spassky's failure to defend the "superiority of the soviet system" by losing to the US in the international Student Team Championship in 1958, saw him banned from overseas travel and competition for two years. After Soviet grandmaster Mark Taimanov was trounced 6-0 by Fischer in one of the lead-up matches to the 1972 world championship, Taimanov was publicly disgraced by the regime and financially ruined.

Spassky, however, as world champion, retained a rare autonomy in belief and expression (getting away with refusing to join the Communist Party, and refusing a "translator" whom he suspected to be a KGB agent) because of the glory he reflected on the bureaucrats. Spassky was no dissident, but kept his distance from the regime.

When Fischer finished his barnstorming charge to the 1972 final against Spassky, he baulked at the final challenge. Fear of failure, and unmet demands for bigger prize money, saw him bolt from JFK airport four days out from the match.

Fischer's flight posed political trouble for US President Richard Nixon. Iceland had a reformist government which included communist ministers. Iceland also had a US military base of strategic importance to the US and NATO. A no-show in the high profile chess match by the US challenger would possibly endanger the future of the US base.

Kissinger telephoned Fischer in New York to urge him to do his patriotic duty. Bobby got the message - "Get back out there, soldier!" - and came out of hiding to take up arms against the political enemy. Kissinger was also a friend of British celebrity reporter David Frost, who was in turn a friend of UK millionaire, James Slater. A few phone calls later the prize money had been doubled (to US$250,000) by Slater, meeting Fischer's demand. The match was on.

Then off. Then on again. And so on in a burlesque of Marx Brothers proportions featuring Fischer's petulant walk-offs, aborted flights home and impossible demands over the table, the chair, the board, the pieces, the lighting and the proximity of the seating to the stage. Fischer raged - at the TV cameras, the chief arbiter and the Icelandic Chess Federation which he accused of being a "communist front". Fischer's antics kept Spassky on nervous edge.

A beginner's blunder by Fischer, however, cost him the opening game, and a breach of FIDE rules on a one-hour maximum time limit per move (which FIDE, for once, stood firm on) cost Fischer the second game. Fischer looked like chucking the whole match until another phone call from Kissinger ("you're our man up against the commies") again pushed Fischer's red, white and blue button. Epic sagas, and stunning miniatures, got Fischer back into the match and he then edged his way (half point by half point in tedious draws) to match victory, much to the delight of cold warriors in the US, where pub TVs were switched to chess instead of baseball.

Fischer's relentless chess and his psychological tactics mentally drained Spassky but did Fischer have covert help? Team notes were mysteriously disturbed in Spassky's hotel room, his medicine chest and food interfered with, and there was a strange metal pipe device, aimed at Spassky, in Fischer's chair. Spassky noted a persistent inability to concentrate during games. Was this paranoia or, given what we now know of the CIA's expertise with psychotropic drugs, was this justified suspicion?

After his loss, Spassky remained a Soviet citizen but lived in Paris on a permanently renewed visa. Fischer refused to defend his new title against the Soviet Union's Anatoli Karpov in 1975 and became a recluse, grooming his latest ideological pet, Holocaust denial. Fischer pocketed the lion's share of the US$5 million prize put up by a Serbian capitalist for a Fischer-Spassky rematch in 1992 in Belgrade, a sad affair in the midst of a terrible Balkans war.

Chess devotees can only regret that one of the game's greatest exponents was a fanatic, anti-communist, anti-semitic, pro-fascist, Christian fundamentalist, conspiracy theorist and an ideological soldier in Nixon and Kissinger's Cold War army of zealots.