Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time (Hardcover)

by David Edmonds (Author), John Eidinow (Author) "It is five o'clock in the evening of Tuesday, 11July 1972..." (more)
Key Phrases: chess department, chess authorities, world championship cycle, New York, United States, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The duo that crafted the bestselling Wittgenstein's Poker returns to chronicle "the most notorious chess duel in history," the 1972 match between world champion Boris Spassky and challenger Bobby Fischer. Although the competition has achieved iconic status, Edmonds and Eidinow do an excellent job of making the story fresh, recreating the atmosphere of controversy that surrounded both players long before they met in Reykjavik, not to mention the extraordinary hurdles tournament organizers faced in getting the already eccentric Fischer to even show up, which ultimately required a phone call from Henry Kissinger and prize money put up by an English millionaire. Fischer's troubling personality is a matter of common knowledge, but the thawing of the Cold War enables the authors to flesh out the Soviet side of the story, offering a fuller perspective on the friction between the rebellious grandmaster and Communist officials, and revelations about the very active presence of the KGB during the games, while debunking other rumors about plots to poison or brainwash Spassky. (Declassified FBI files also present groundbreaking information about Fischer and his family.) The actual chess has been analyzed to death elsewhere, so the authors don't delve into the games' details much except when the players made horrendous blunders, which segue into the underlying focus on psychology, addressing Fischer's ability to get away with bullying officials into meeting his exacting demands and Spassky's loss of confidence over the course of the match. Even if you think you know the story, this highly entertaining account will surprise and delight.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Not long ago, in the days of that post-Cold War bliss when Americans and Russians looked longingly at one another, a friend in Moscow told me a story about chess. A mini-oligarch, Nikolai had made a fortune importing chicken parts from Arkansas. He tried to explain the significance of chess in the USSR. "It was never a game," he said. "For liberal intellectuals, chess was an escape, and for them" -- the old men in the Kremlin trying to keep a calcified grip on power -- "it was a weapon."

Ever since a Soviet captured the world championship in 1948, the USSR had reigned on the chessboard. Grandmasters had obvious allure to the Party. Compared to ballistic missiles, they were far cheaper to produce, never seemed to backfire and delivered enviable propaganda rewards. Cosmonauts, weightlifters and gymnasts were sources of pride, of course. But chess players elevated the Cold War to a cerebral realm; chess was a proving ground, Soviet leaders and many ordinary Russians were convinced, for the USSR's greatest strength -- the indomitable Soviet mind.

Enter Bobby Fischer, gangly kid from Brooklyn, all brains and no grace, a high-school dropout with the sartorial sense of Gary Glitter, who gate-crashed the chess world in the age of Elvis. Fischer did not climb to the top. He bulldozed his way. He got his first chessboard at age 6; by 15, he was a grandmaster. More than a prodigy -- the word is too benign -- Fischer was, in the words of one player, "a prototype Deep Blue." He did not have rivals, but victims. Soon opponents and critics would talk of the boy in Nietzschean terms -- he destroyed wills and usurped psyches.

The advent of a homegrown chess champion spawned a new genre in American letters. Frank Brady's Profile of a Prodigy: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer, a 250-page biography, appeared in 1965, when Fischer was 22. The Library of Congress catalogue yields 78 listings for "Bobby Fischer." Most are accounts of his most famous match -- when he challenged the Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972. Everyone from Sports Illustrated to George Steiner weighed in on the match. Moreover, in the years since, as Fischer went into a world-class downspin, nearly everyone who has ever had contact with him seems to have added something to the canon. Even a former German girlfriend offered a memoir in 1995.

It comes as a surprise, then, that the Reykjavik match should inspire yet another book, more than 30 years on. Bobby Fischer Goes to War, by British journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow, professes to break ground: to tell, as its subtitle announces, how the Soviets lost the most extraordinary chess match of all time. Edmonds and Eidinow, BBC veterans and authors of the acclaimed Wittgenstein's Poker, have met their goal: This is the definitive history of Fischer vs. Spassky. Edmonds and Eidinow carefully relate the complex turns of the championship while detailing the unseen prodding of the powers behind the Cold War curtains (namely, KGB minders and Henry Kissinger), without allowing the match's twin plots -- the moves on the chessboard and in the political arena -- to eclipse each other.

The cast is comprehensive. The authors have tracked down nearly all the participants on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as those on the island that had the dubious honor of hosting the match. The Icelandic lighting engineer, the mason who remade the marble chess board (at Fischer's insistence) and the chemist who tested (at the Soviets' insistence) the players' chairs for "chemical chicanery" all appear. But for all this attention to detail -- at times, the narrative reads like a Warren Report of chess's greatest match -- the eponymous hero (or in Nietzschean terms, anti-hero) of the piece is oddly absent.

Not that Fischer has been silent. It is true that he has not talked to the press since Reykjavik. But unlike Salinger or Pynchon, he reappears now and then -- either for money or for malice. He surfaced in 1992 for a profitable, if pitiful, rematch with Spassky in Yugoslavia -- breaking U.N. sanctions and earning a U.S. arrest warrant. Since 1999, he has blazed across the airwaves, in bizarre radio rants, most often from the Philippines. In the recordings (available on the fan Web site www.bobbyfischer.net ) he sounds like an insomniac extremist on a libertine talk show. He rails against the Jews, the United States, the Commies, the Russians, Ed Koch, both President Bushes, the chess establishment, even the police in Pasadena. (During perhaps his lowest low, in 1981, Fischer was arrested in southern California. He claims he was tortured and has written a pamphlet detailing the trauma.) On Sept. 11, 2001, he hit rare form. Asked about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he screamed for joy: "This is all wonderful news. It's time for the [expletive] U.S. to get their heads kicked in. To finish off the U.S. once and for all."

Fischer is, to paraphrase Dostoyevsky, insulted and injured. A corps of psychiatrists and grandmasters could perhaps find the root of his madness. Edmonds and Eidinow flash an interest in its origins but fail to delve any deeper. The authors address his anti-Semitism -- he is a devotee of both Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- in two paragraphs early in the book and one toward its close. And they give but two brief nods to Fischer's dalliance with Pasadena's Worldwide Church of God, a fundamentalist sect founded by a charismatic former newspaper ad designer.

These lapses are costly. Fischer's road to Reykjavik is revelatory, presaging the turmoil and madness that followed his victory over Spassky. (In 1975, after feuding with chess authorities, Fischer refused to defend his crown, despite a $5-million purse put up by Ferdinand Marcos, forfeiting the world championship to the ascendant Soviet, Anatoly Karpov.) At the heart of their tale, the authors stress not the games but the antics that marginalized them, and they couch Fischer's behavior in terms of psy-ops, not psychosis. The authors hint at the nature of their protagonist's trouble but bury it in a quote, as if Fischer's waning grasp on sanity were an incidental or eccentric tic: "Chess is not something that drives people mad," says Bill Hartston, an international master and psychologist. "Chess is something that keeps mad people sane."

Edmonds and Eidinow do a better job bringing Spassky to life. In chapters on his childhood, they depict Leningrad aptly, painting its historical and psychological landscape: the burden of the Nazi blockade, the Dostoyevskian sense of the phantasmagorical, the inborn yearning for autonomy, whether spawned by the proximity of the West or the surrounding waterways. Above all, they capture why Spassky dove into chess: "Amid the ruins of the city, chess provided the near destitute young Spassky with a connection to society, subsistence, and a much needed sense of order."

Chess may not seem like sexy copy. But think Nabokov. The 64 squares and the singular spell they hold over select men -- and, increasingly, women -- around the world make for taut drama. Off the board Fischer played chicken, but his moves bore names like "the Sicilian Defense," which boasted 17th-century roots. When the authors at last come to the games, their prose -- which at times reads like a transcript of a BBC science documentary ("We have already touched on a final aspect . . . ") -- gains pace. Wisely relying on chess masters as kibitzers, they recreate the pivotal turns faithfully: how Fischer lost the first game, refused to play the second, nearly caved in for good but regained his strength, somehow survived the ensuing marathon and, in a hailstorm of brilliance, defeated a crushed Spassky.

Throughout it all, Fischer tacks between obstinacy and acquiescence, blundering and brilliance, rage and greed, fear and egotism. Yet absent a deeper portrait, one that does not gloss over his paradoxes and ugliness, the shifts appear inexplicable. The authors do detail his relentless demands; the lights, cameras, noise, crowds, shading of the chessboard and, above all, the money had to meet his standards. (The Icelanders joked, the authors note, that "Bobby had demanded the setting of the sun three hours earlier.") But they seem to see such behavior as exacting or eccentric, not pathological. Instead of studying a multi-polar sociopath, they settle for terming Fischer "a volatile genius, enthralling and shocking, appealing yet repellent."

Edmonds and Eidinow also offer the tease of new material. They trace the KGB's fears that the Americans were poisoning Spassky or probing his mind. (Fischer's same fears of the Soviets are old news.) And, based on declassified FBI documents, they offer a new patrilineal genealogy for the boy from Brooklyn, suggesting that his biological father, as well as his mother, were both Jewish. Both were also "Communist sympathizers," perhaps even Soviet agents. Sadly, they bury the details of this revelation in an appendix. Moreover, theirs is not the first published account of the FBI file. (That credit, though unnoted, belongs to two reporters then at the Philadelphia Inquirer, for a 2002 investigation that gets no mention in Bobby Fischer Goes to War.) Edmonds and Eidinow reveal the chaos in the Soviet chess world, which, as the West would learn after the fall of the USSR, mirrored the chaos in the Soviet armed forces. But they apparently find no KGB documents -- only the private papers of a deputy sports minister. Their chapter probing Soviet fears that Fischer used "dirty tricks" ("Extra-Chess Means and Hidden Hands") is twice as long as the one on the beauty and allure of chess. Yet after exploring all corners of speculation, they find no smoking gun.

Bobby Fischer is not John Nash, the troubled genius of A Beautiful Mind. For America's first -- and, so far, only -- world champion, there has been no Hollywood coda. Yet Fischer's achievement did reach beyond chess. At their best, Edmonds and Eidinow set the record straight. Fischer-Spassky, despite its billing, was not about the Cold War. It was about détente. The summer of 1972 was fateful -- with the endgame in Vietnam, the Watergate break-in and the Olympic massacre in Munich. But those 21 games in Iceland, for all the belligerence and paranoia of their participants, brought the world's superpowers closer. Both players, in their flawed greatness, brought hope. That is why my friend Nikolai loves to remember Reykjavik. Fischer-Spassky, he says, held a beautiful irony. For many in the USSR, the match of all times afforded a secret joy: "We loved that insane American."

Reviewed by Andrew Meier

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (March 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060510242
• ISBN-13: 978-0060510244
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #326,289 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All the Levels of Gamesmanship, March 2, 2004

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

For a brief time in 1972, chess was the only game in the world. Bobby Fischer came face to face with Boris Spassky in Iceland, and the world took delight in a simple morality play. Fischer was depicted as the lone American hero gunning to win the title from the Soviets who had held it for decades. The Cold War was reduced to the free world's champion versus the apparatchiks spawned by the Soviet socialist chess machine. It was fun to watch the battle in such black and white terms, but in _Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time_ (Ecco), David Edmonds and John Eidinow show that the true story was much more complicated although just as exciting. For instance, Spassky may have been a Russian patriot, but he was not a Soviet patriot and he was not a member of the Communist Party. Fischer was eccentric and asocial, and his bratty behavior seemed un-American to many of his fellow Americans. But both their governments had a stake in the match, and people all over the world who knew nothing about chess watched the contest carefully, and many took up the game. It was quite truly the most extraordinary chess match of all time, just as the book's subtitle says, and the book makes clear in how many ways it was extraordinary.

Spassky loved the game for itself, and, as a well-rounded gentleman who liked fishing and festive parties with his friends, seemed sincerely to be looking forward to what he called "a feast of chess," win or lose. He admired Fischer, but the book shows that beyond a colossal talent for chess, Fischer possessed few admirable qualities. He was a morose man who one journalist said "was likely to greet even an old friend as if he were expecting a subpoena". His frequent tantrums (which earned him much derision from his compatriots) did, at least, stop when he sat down to play, and he never attempted to disturb an opponent across the table. He was called by Dr. Henry Kissinger when he did not show up for the match, assured that he was "our man up against the commies." Having lost the first game, he didn't even show up for the second, and thus lost it as well. But then he crushed Spassky in the third, and went on to a match full of hard-fought draws and wins, many of which are regarded as among the finest games ever played. President Nixon sent congratulations. Spassky eventually went into contented retirement in France, continuing to regard the Soviet chess administration with disdain. Fischer never defended his title, although he has played some exposition games. He went on to join a fundamentalist Christian church, then to denounce it as satanic. He may have been the American hope during the match, but he is now deeply anti-American, spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (ironic, given his parentage on both sides, revealed here) to any radio station that will allow him voice.

The authors have interviewed all the important officials involved who are still alive, especially Spassky; they didn't interview Fischer, and don't say why, but that was probably just not possible. _Bobby Fischer Goes to War_ is not a book for those who want to study the chess games. It has exactly one board diagram, and the games are described generally, not play by play. Chess players interested in this aspect of the match already have bought better books on the games themselves. This is a book about personalities, about the history of the times, and about the off-board gambits and counter-gambits, and you certainly don't have to know any details about chess to enjoy it. There is, to be sure, a great deal to enjoy here, in the re-creation of the match and the geopolitics of the time that lent it importance.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Mother of All Matches, March 19, 2004

By	A.Trendl HungarianBookstore.com "RIP MJ" (Glen Ellyn, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

If Bobby Fischer's name is affiliated with a book, it comes to reason that there is some amount of weirdness forthcoming. I am not referring to the chess books Fischer wrote, as those are guidelines to chess perfection. This refers to any discussion of his life, which this book does. The world's greatest chess player, Fischer, has lived his personal life much less logically than his life is an eight by eight square cell.

To help the nonchess reader sort out the menagerie, authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow provide a "Dramatis Personae," listing 21 Americans, 24 Soviets, six Icelanders, four match officials, and six sundry others, explaining their relationship to the Reykjavik, Iceland chess match. They also include a short glossary to educate us in the vocabulary of competitive chess.

The book begins with a vital quote by Boris Spassky, "When you play Bobby, it is not a question of whether you win or lose. It is a question of whether you survive. This sets the tone for all that follows.

Edmonds and Eidinow lay out the social mire Fischer was growing up in, and his quick rise to chess dominance.

In 1954, when Fischer was 11, he was attending matches and doing well enough but not at his later prodigy level. In that year, as he is quoted, he "just got good." Modern chess history, or at least for one its most colorful characters, begins then.

1972: Boris Spassky was the champ. He deserved to be there. Bobby Fischer was the contender. He deserved to have the opportunity. Between these two men stood a world of complex politics, money, national pride, idiosyncrasies, and suitors to the game. Reykjavik, Iceland was the location of what has become one of the most legendary chess matches ever, between Spassky and Fischer.

Early on during Fischer's career, he had the same impact Michael Jordan would later enjoy later enjoy as professional basketball player. "Fischer-fear" was the description of some players' psychosomatic illnesses from Fischer's intimidation. Opponents would make mistakes as a result. Fischer had the bravado of Muhammad Ali, but none of his class. He would take this personality and boorish demands to the match.

Boris Spassky is painted differently. A product of the Soviet support system, he became professional about the game. Affable and popular, an opposite to in every way to Fischer, he still had what Fischer lacked -- the title "World Champion."

The bulk of the book moves on from biography and personality profiles. It follows the path the chess culture -- all chaotic in its apparent systemic approach. Going from the need to compete to the actual match turned through every convoluted corner, with Kissinger's involvement, the FBI, the KGB, and as much intrigue as a James Bond movie.

The travails of the match are outlined as needed (but not heavily), highlighting the most interesting parts and never boring nonchess players. The psychology of the players and chess players in general is discussed, as is the history of modern champions, providing a field for tension and a framework for the match.

This was in the midst of the Cold War, and the Soviets -- not just Spassky, owned the chess champ title. Nixon was president. Fischer, the bombastic, arrogant American who hated Russia, had a knack for successfully risking it all on the board by knowing the principles of chess as a sublime art form. Spassky, the methodical Russian, against Fischer, became a symbol of the Cold war itself. The image of the match was only half of the matter. Neither man was the caricature the press saw them as, but such are the stories of legend.

I fully recommend "Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time," by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Oh, and if you somehow missed the big news back in 1972, Fischer won the match.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Who Says Chess is Boring?, March 28, 2004

By	Tom Moran (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow, responsible for the best-selling "Wittgenstein's Poker," have now turned to the surprisingly gripping 1972 World Championship chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in their new book, "Bobby Fischer Goes to War."

As someone who is old enough to remember the match (and who watched Shelby Lyman's engagingly dorky commentary about the matches on Channel 13), I thought I knew the outline of this story fairly well. But Edmonds and Eidinow have come up with plenty of new details about what happened in the Icelandic city of Reykjavik that Summer, and the result is a book that, oddly enough, will keep you on the edge of your seat wondering how a chess match is going to turn out. Or, given Bobby Fischer's legendary eccentricities, whether the match is going to happen at all.

The book is not free from flaws. Perhaps out of a desire not to alienate the non-chess playing reader, the commentary on the individual games seldom rises above the perfunctory: in fact, they don't bother to print the moves of any given game in their entirety, not even in an appendix, which strikes me as extremely misguided.

Also, the book has a few conspicuous errors of fact. On page 175 the authors mention Henry Kissinger taking Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin and his wife to Hollywood "to mingle with the stars." The next sentence begins, "There is no record of them meeting the Marx Brothers..." which would have been a trifle unlikely, since Harpo and Chico were both long dead by 1972. On page 228 they claim that the Metropolitan Museum is "just up the road from the UN..." which they would never have written had they ever actually walked from one building to the other, since they're more than three miles apart (and halfway across town from each other).

But the heart of this book is Bobby Fischer, the brilliant but wildly unstable genius who was the most gifted (and easily the most troubled) chess player of the last century. This story is, as the authors admit towards the end, a tragedy: a perfect example of the saying "Be careful what you wish for: you might get it." Fischer had trained almost all his life with a monomaniacal passion to be the World Chess Champion, although on more than one occasion putting self-destructive obstacles in his own way, as if he was afraid of achieving what everyone said he was destined for, and when he finally achieved his lifelong ambition, he promptly fell apart mentally, to the point where today he is a fugitive from American justice, giving insane interviews to whoever will listen to him spewing out vicious anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda.

The final part of the story, Fischer's descent into seeming madness, is a little skimped by the authors, and really deserves a book of its own (although it would be decidedly depressing reading). But with all its flaws, this is a fascinating book about a moment in history that anyone, chess player or non-chess player, can find interesting. And if it intrigues you enough to inspire you to pick up a chess set and start playing, so much the better.