David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Complaining seems to have been cathartic for Fischer. Game thirteen certainly suggests so. Just to replay the seventy-four moves of this nine-hour marathon is to sense the tension. For much of the time, the position was mind-bogglingly complex, and it was unclear who was ahead. C. H. O’D. Alexander described it as “a struggle of heroic proportions.” Fischer gave up a piece but retained and then activated a phalanx of pawns on the wing; they marched, slowly, inexorably, and menacingly, up the board. Several times, under intense pressure, Spassky found just the right saving maneuver. But then on move sixty-nine, exhausted, he slipped up, making the wrong check with his rook; the Soviet press called it “the fatal check.” After that, he could not stop one of Fischer’s pawns from queening. “Bobby poured more into the endgame than he ever did in his life,” said Lombardy. When the victorious Fischer left the stage, Schmid—disregarding U.S. allegations of bias—sat with a demoralized Spassky and rehearsed the latter stages of the game. His mistake and his fatigue apart, Spassky could have taken comfort from his part in such a tour de force. David Bronstein went through the moves countless times and wrote of the game’s delightful intricacy, “It’s like an enigma titillating my imagination.”

Larisa Spasskaia, together with the wives of the other Soviet team members, had now arrived in Iceland. “I hope I can make him relax and think,” she said. Following his titanic and ultimately futile exertion, Spassky needed time to recuperate. On the morning of the fourteenth game, a second postponement was announced. Ulvar Thordarson, a keen chess player and eye specialist who had been asked to be the official doctor shortly before the Fischer-Spassky match began, issued a statement confirming that he had “today at this time [10:20 A.M.] examined Boris Spassky, who does not feel well. I have on medical reasons advised him not to play the scheduled game today.” The exact nature of the illness was not disclosed at the time. Thordarson now says that it was not serious—a cold, no doubt brought on by stress. When the doctor went to see Spassky in the hotel Saga, the champion was well enough to joke with him. “He challenged me to a game of chess. I said, ‘You stick to chess, I’ll stick to medicine.’”

Cramer was less than sympathetic. “Poor Spassky. The Russian bug has struck again because I’m sure there is nothing wrong with the Icelandic climate. Perhaps he wants a couple of days to talk with his wife and get his mind off chess.” Then Cramer approached Thordarson, demanding to see the medical report and receiving instead a stern rebuke. “Before I threw him out, I explained the ethical code between a doctor and a patient.” Thordarson handed the report over to Schmid, forbidding the arbiter from making it public. Cramer next tried it on with Schmid, too, earning him a second scolding. “Spassky does not feel well. That is enough,” the German grandmaster said. The widespread perception in the Western media was that Spassky, behind in points and mentally drained, would now capitulate without much of a fight.

After the trauma of the first phase of the match, the organizers and contestants settled into a familiar routine. The shock of Fischer’s approach had worn off. Like inhabitants of an occupied town, they accommodated to a new way of life. There was the certainty of a complaint or more each day by letter, sometimes signed by Fischer, sometimes by Cramer; there were threats, tantrums, ultimatums. But there was also a built-in momentum arising out of a comforting regularity—the game, the day(s) off, the familiarity of the proceedings. As under occupation, the citizens could never let down their guard: there was always the danger that a Fischer complaint would escalate out of control. Some of the protests, however, began to lose their edge; indeed, tension levels among the organizers peaked when no objections were lodged. What was Fred Cramer planning now?

This self-made millionaire from Milwaukee and former president of the U.S. Chess Federation was a tiny man with a giant ego who had made his fortune in the lighting industry. Brad Darrach described him as five feet five “with a little help from his shoemaker” and added that, depending on his mood, he “looked like any of the seven Disney dwarfs.” When Cramer was encircled by the press, his lack of height rendered him invisible and all the journalists on the edge of the group could make out was a squeaky voice somewhere in the void.

Cramer was then in his late fifties and held the official title of vice president of FIDE, responsible for Zone 5 (the United States). He became Fischer’s unofficial spokesperson after Edmondson was summarily fired. Two men more different than Edmondson and Cramer would be hard to imagine. U.S. Air Force colonel Edmondson had a dignified military bearing and a calming influence. Former captain Cramer was excitable and self-important. However, he was highly regarded for his work as president of the USCF—bringing in the Elo system, named after its inventor, professor of mathematics Arpad Elo, which rated the strength of chess players. Cramer also left the USCF a substantial legacy.

Cramer regarded himself as a man of many key roles: gatekeeper to the American genius, main organizer, strategist, and spokesman—someone equivalent to the U.S. president’s chief of staff, barring the way to the Oval Office. In reality, he was little more than chief gofer, in charge of a coterie of lesser gofers, all tensely awaiting Fischer’s barked orders and sweating in case they failed to meet their fickle master’s whims at any hour of day or night. He once even admitted as much: “I am authorized only to complain.” Complain he did. Barely a day passed without a volley of his discourteous notes. He would also complain in person to officials—sometimes rather conspiratorially by whispering to them in a public place. “Ear-shattering whispers from six inches,” according to the British Guardian newspaper.

He was in the habit of holding impromptu press conferences in the antechamber to the main playing hall or in the lobby of the Loftleidir hotel, oblivious to how comical or portentous the journalists found them. He reveled in the attention and would dramatize the latest developments using an idiosyncratic vocabulary consisting predominantly of warring metaphors such as “The Russians are supporting their frontline troops with a paper barrage.” Not being blessed with the spokesman’s qualities of wit, tact and diplomacy, he was a journalist’s godsend, always to be relied on for a quote. In public relations terms, he was twenty years ahead of his time, defending Fischer’s behavior by launching verbal counterthrusts rather than by apologizing. The more outlandish Fischer’s conduct, the more vociferous Cramer’s defense. The Russians were always talking “nonsense,” “garbage.” The officials were “stupid” or “incompetent” or “biased.”

Reporters aside, he was not popular in Reykjavik. Spassky accused him of acting as though Fischer were the champion and “I was nothing.” The officials disliked him, too. Today, Schmid dismisses him with a laugh as “Bobby’s servant,” simply carrying out his wishes in a way Edmondson might not. He found fault so often, says Schmid, “that I was well trained.” Following his early attempt to have Schmid removed as chief arbiter, Cramer had aired doubts about the German grandmaster’s impartiality when he played bridge with the champion on a day off and when on a separate occasion he was observed dining with Ivo Nei. Schmid dismissed the accusations robustly: “Whenever I see Mr. Cramer, he tries to hide behind a big man.”