Frank Brady - Endgame

As he continued to tithe more and more money to the Church, he enjoyed perks only available to high-ranking members, such as occasional use of a private jet and a chauffeur-driven limousine; invitations to exclusive events such as parties, concerts, and dinners; and a continuous parade of bright and pretty women whom he couldn’t touch. He was also given access to the Church’s personal trainer, Harry Sneider, a former weight-lifting champion who took a special interest in Bobby. Sneider trained Bobby in swimming, weight lifting, tennis, and soccer, and they became friends.

With the same diligence he’d brought to the task of soaking up chess knowledge, Bobby around this time started a relentless search for general knowledge. The library at the Worldwide Church’s Ambassador College, to which he had access, was highly limited. It contained books on religion and theology, but he wanted other points of view and to explore other topics, and he never set foot back in the library after he heard it was sprayed with insecticide for termites.

Botvinnik may have been right when he suggested that Bobby suffered from a lack of culture and a thinness of education. But he was determined to catch up. He started by going to bookstores in Pasadena, and when he’d depleted their shelves, he took the bus into downtown Los Angeles and scoured the shelves of every bookstore he could find. He became a voracious reader.

There have been many theories offered over the years as to why Fischer eventually turned against Jews, including speculation that Bobby’s rhetoric was triggered by distaste he felt as a child for his mother’s Jewish friends; that he was antagonistic toward officials of the American Chess Foundation, most of whom were Jewish; that he was ultimately disillusioned with Stanley Rader, who was Jewish but had converted to the Worldwide Church of God; that he was somehow influenced by Forry Laucks’s Nazism; and that he was propelled by ideas he’d read in some of the literature that fell into his hands during the time he lived in California. Perhaps all of those factors contributed.

David Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, described the prototypical self-hating Jew in his book The Wicked Son , and his description, although arguable, could conceivably be applied to Bobby: “The Jew-hater begins with a proposition that glorifies and comforts him, that there exists a force of evil that he has, to his credit, discovered and bravely proclaimed. In opposing it he is self-glorified. One triumphs over evil, thus becoming a god, at no cost other than recognition of his own divinity. Ignorant of the practices of his own tribe, he (the apostate) gravitates toward those he considers Other … thinking, as does the adolescent, that they possess some special merit. But these new groups are attractive to the apostate merely because they are foreign.”

In at least one significant case, Bobby woke up to the fact that the Other was less appealing than he’d first thought. More and more he was becoming alienated from the Worldwide Church of God. Herbert W. Armstrong had made prophecies that there would be a worldwide catastrophe and that the Messiah would return in 1972. As 1973 wound down, Bobby didn’t need much convincing to have an epiphany about the evils of the Church. In an interview that he gave to the Ambassador Report (an irreverent and controversial publication that criticized the Church) he said: “The real proof for me were those [false] prophecies … that show to me that he [Armstrong] is an outright huckster.… I thought, ‘This doesn’t seem right. I gave all my money. Everybody has been telling me this [that 1972 would be the date that the Worldwide Church of God would flee to a place of safety] for years. And now he’s half-denying he ever said it, when I remember him saying it a hundred times.’ … If you talk about fulfillment of prophecy, he [Armstrong] is a fulfillment of Elmer Gantry. If Elmer Gantry was the Elijah, Armstrong’s the ‘Christ’ of religious hucksters. There is no way he could truly be God’s prophet. Either God is a masochist and likes to be made a fool of, or else Herbert Armstrong is a false prophet.”

Before he knew it, Bobby’s winnings from Reykjavik were beginning to diminish, and yet he saw that Rader and Armstrong were flying all over the world, entertaining lavishly, and proffering gifts to world leaders. “The whole thing is so sick,” said Bobby.

Wandering into a used bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, Bobby stumbled on a dusty old book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . Though he was introduced to the book by happenstance, he was ready for it. A work of fiction, it purported to be the actual master plan by Jewish leaders to take over the world. First published in 1905, the book, at the time Bobby found it, was still believed by some to be an authentic work of nonfiction. Even today those who are predisposed to believe it swear by its accuracy, and over the years its publication has done its share to stoke worldwide anti-Semitism. To fire up hatred toward Jews, the book uses reverse psychology in presenting a damning case against gentiles: “It is the bottomless rascality of the goyim people, who crawl on their bellies to force, but are merciless toward weakness, unsparing to faults, and indulgent to crimes, unwilling to bear the contradictions of a free social system but patient unto martyrdom under the violence of a bold despotism.”

As Bobby read The Protocols , he thought he saw authenticity in the book’s pages, and their implicit message resonated with him. Soon he began sending copies of the book to friends. To one he wrote: “I carefully studied the Protocols . I think anyone who casually dismisses them as a forgery, hoax, etc., is either kidding themselves, is ignorant of them or else may well be a hypocrite!” At the time, one of the most militant anti-Semites and anti-blacks in the United States, Ben Klassen, had just written his first book, Nature’s Eternal Religion , and Bobby, who wasn’t particularly anti-black, nevertheless connected with Klassen’s theories concerning Jews. “The book shows,” Bobby wrote, “that Christianity itself is just a Jewish hoax and one more Jewish tool for their conquest of the world.” As Regina had proselytized all her life for various causes—always liberal and humanistic ones—so, too, Bobby had become a proselytizer. The pawn did not stray too far from the queen.

At one point Bobby had both Protocols and Nature’s Eternal Religion mailed to Jack and Ethel Collins, without asking whether they wanted to read them. He gave their address directly to the bookseller and then wrote them a letter of apology for disclosing their address.

Bobby’s evolving credo was not only anti-Semitic, but as he fell away from the Worldwide Church of God, completely anti-Christian. He discredited both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, the very book that had been so much a part of his belief system. The idea of God in the form of a man appearing on Earth and then doing a “disappearing act,” as Bobby put it, for two thousand years was both “incredible and illogical.”

Despite holding what had become strongly antireligious views, Bobby liked to quote from a song written by Les Crane, a radio and television talkshow host. Based on the poem Desiderata , the lyrics conveyed that everyone in the universe has a right to be here. Apparently, Bobby didn’t see the discrepancy between the gentle acceptance espoused by the song and poem, and his growing philosophy of exclusivity, which rejected all people who didn’t believe as he did.

The Collinses didn’t know what to say to Bobby about his newfound convictions, which on their face seemed contradictory: If everyone has the right to be here, why was Bobby inveighing against Jews? Following the gift of the Klassen book, Fischer sent the Collinses another hate-filled screed, Secret World Government , by Major General Count Cherep-Spiridovich. The count starts off his book by saying that the Jews are Satanists, and it offers the theory that there’s a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Bobby followed up with another letter: “Did you like the books I sent you?” Jack Collins never answered, and indeed, it’s possible that neither he nor Ethel ever read the books.