CHILD:
If he won, he'd be the first American world champion in history. If he lost, he'd just be another putzer from Brooklyn... On the 40th move of the 21st game, he countered Spassky’s Bishop to King 6 with the Pawn to Rook 4. And it was all over. He came home an American hero.

Then Bobby Fischer made the most original, unexpected move of all. [WHISPERING] He disappeared.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That’s from the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, about one chess prodigy here recounting the exploits of another – the chess prodigy, Bobby Fischer.

Last week, Fischer died in Iceland at the age of 64. The obituaries had to reconcile two opposing portraits of the man, one of the cold war hero who beat the Soviet Union at its own game in 1972 and the other of an unstable fugitive raging against Americans and Jews.

Many journalists summed up his life with a chess metaphor – bold opening moves and a tragic end game. We'll never know what went on in Fischer’s head, but his public dramas played out on a global stage.

Frank Brady is chair of mass communications at St. John’s University, head of the Marshall Chess Club and author of Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy. He says that right from the start, Fischer was a media magnet.
FRANK BRADY:
Well, he was a natural in terms of story ideas and photo ops. Here was this little boy, 10, 11 years old, dressed in corduroy slacks, a flannel shirt and sneakers in these staid environments, playing against people who were physicists and lawyers and judges and doctors. And he captured the imagination of the press and the imagination of the public.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let's talk about the interview that Ralph Ginzburg had [LAUGHS] with Fischer in Harper’s in 1962. Now, here he is a young man of 18, quite good looking, impeccably dressed – and a real schmo. I think Ginzburg wrote it himself – I have the quote here – “Though Fischer is 18 years old, he shows some traits of much younger children who behave as if the world is centered around filling their needs.”
FRANK BRADY:
Yes. I remember that article well. I was actually interviewed by Ginzburg for it. I talked to Bobby about it many times. Up until that point, articles that appeared about him, in local newspapers and so forth, had just sort of outlined his achievements. Ginzburg did an in-depth article and spent a great deal of time with him, and he wrote a really finely written article.

But it exposed Bobby in a way that he had never been exposed before. It showed him as anti-feminist. It showed him as anti-Semitic. And, of course, being a Jew,that was pretty inconsistent. He was extremely naive and sophomoric and solipsistic, and he showed that to Ginzburg. This one particular article really turned Fischer off of the media.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That's interesting, because it was a pretty devastating piece.
FRANK BRADY:
It certainly was.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And so much of it is in the form of dialog, which, I guess, we have to trust was accurate.
FRANK BRADY:
Yeah. Ginzburg didn't misquote him at all. The most ironic and poignant thing, though, I felt that he said is that he wanted someday to live in a house that was shaped like a rook.
[LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Now, Fischer reached the apex of his career in 1972 with the world championship match against Boris Spassky.
[BEGIN CLIP]
MIKE WALLACE:
This championship match between you and Spassky, is it in any sense a grudge match?
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That was Mike Wallace interviewing Fischer before the match.
[BEGIN CLIP]
BOBBY FISCHER:
In a sense – I mean, not personally against - me against Spassky, because, you know, I don't care two cents about him one way or the other. He’s just another guy. But it’s against the Russians, and, you know, all the lies they've been saying about me.
MIKE WALLACE:
Do you worry about Spassky?
BOBBY FISCHER:
Not overly. I mean, he’s a little better, I think, than the other Russians I've taken on in the series.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let's talk about the PBS coverage of those matches and what it meant for chess and for the cold war.
FRANK BRADY:
Well, I actually was the PBS correspondent in Reykjavik. It really created a sensation. People in New York City and throughout the nation were playing in restaurants and playing on park benches and playing all over the place. All of a sudden chess dominated the country like it normally would dominate in the Soviet Union.

I mean, the United States Chess Federation had about 5,000 members before 1972, and around 1973 they had about 100,000 members.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Wow.
FRANK BRADY:
And people were playing in tournaments all over the country, as they still are. We're still feeling the strength and vitality of Fischer.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Did all the attention warp Bobby Fischer?
FRANK BRADY:
I wouldn’t say it warped him but it made him Garbo-like. I think he just became very reclusive. If he found that one of his friends had made a friend of a journalist, he would often cut them off.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Did he ever play for the cameras or for the journalists? Didn't he once claim that Muhammad Ali stole the line “I am the greatest” from him?
FRANK BRADY:
He certainly did. And Fischer could do a little bit of an act, especially on television. He knew who he was. He was the zeitgeist of chess. He was the icon. He was more than an icon. He was chess. And he knew it.
[BEGIN CLIP]
BOBBY FISCHER:
People have been calling me arrogant for many years, but lately they're not calling me arrogant. Why? Because now, you know, I've been winning all these matches and I'm doing what I've always said I was, you know.

So I used to say I was the best player in the world. Everybody’s - arrogant, terrible, conceited person, you know.

MIKE WALLACE:
Right.
BOBBY FISCHER:
But this is just an obvious fact.
[END CLIP]
FRANK BRADY:
The fact that here this kid from Brooklyn, poor, living in Park Slope, high school dropout, takes on the entire Soviet Union – and, by the way, now that the KGB archives have been released, we find out that every Grand Master in Russia was required to write an analysis not only of Fischer’s chess but his personality as well, as they knew him, as they played him over the years.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Frequently commentators, pundits, the press in general wanted to depict Bobby Fischer as just out-and-out nuts.
FRANK BRADY:
Oh, his anti-Semitic statements, denying the Holocaust, applauding 9/11, saying America got what it deserved – I mean, these were outrageous statements. It depends on what your definition of sanity or insanity is.

I personally just think he was a mean-spirited son of a bitch, a mean-spirited, evil kind of guy who was politically outré. And he developed this over the years.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So then I think it’s fair to say that the media in the later years had him pegged.
FRANK BRADY:
Yeah. They had him pegged. There’s one problem that the media has with chess, unfortunately, and that is sometimes the media equates madness with chess. They think that anybody who reaches that height in chess has to be insane, and that’s not true. [BROOKE LAUGHS]

There are people walking around in the media, at newspapers in New York City, you know, top reporters who are great chess players.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS] So let's talk about Fischer’s final chapter, the last 15 years. I'll just briefly summarize. He defied U.S. law and he went to Yugoslavia to play a pretty lucrative rematch against Boris Spassky in 1992. Afterwards, he was wanted by the U.S. authorities for playing that match. He couldn't return home.

He called a station in the Philippines on 9/11 to say that the terrorist attacks were great news.
[BEGIN CLIP]
BOBBY FISCHER:
Finish off the U.S. once and for all. But I'm hoping for some kind of a Seven Days in May scenario where the country will be taken over by the military. They'll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And then finally Iceland gave him asylum. He lived there until his death. As you heard the reports about Fischer through the years, did any of it surprise you?
FRANK BRADY:
It saddened me. It saddened me that he was the way he was. And I had hoped – I had given a speech just about a month ago about Bobby, and it was on You Tube and it was on Public Broadcast. And I hoped that he had seen it. Little did I know that he saw it on his deathbed.

The charges are going to be dropped. Pay your back income tax – he hadn't paid his income tax since 1972 – and get on with your life.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Seventy-two or -
FRANK BRADY:
-Seventy-two.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Wow.
FRANK BRADY:
Get on with your life and come back to chess. We miss you. We want you. And apologize to the Jews of this world and apologize to the Americans for what you said.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It’s a tall order you gave him, isn't it?
FRANK BRADY:
And probably totally naive on my part to even suggest it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Were you in contact with him then, in recent years?
FRANK BRADY:
No. I was in touch with him just a few weeks ago. He saw my speech on YouTube. And I told a little anecdote about him drinking a bottle of Lowenbrau in the Marshall Chess Club, which you’re not allowed to do. There’s no drinking allowed.

But I allowed him to do it, and he, through an intermediary, sent a little note.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It sounds like he was watching his media coverage to the end.
FRANK BRADY:
Yeah. And I'm sure he kept looking on the Internet and the blogs and seeing what people were saying about him. You know, he did call in to a match on a Reykjavik television station, a chess match. And someone had made a slightly weak move, and he called up. [BROOKE LAUGHS]

That was just a few months ago. And he said, you know, you could have done much better [BROOKE LAUGHS] by playing your rook to this position and your knight over here. So that was actually his last real public statement.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Frank, thank you so much.
FRANK BRADY:
Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Frank Brady is chair of mass communication journalism and television and film at St. John’s University and author of Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy.