Endgame (17 page)

From that point forward, there wasn’t a tournament Bobby played in or an exhibition he conducted that wasn’t pre-ballyhooed by a press release Regina sent to the media.
She also compiled the addresses and telephone numbers of the major radio and television stations, newspapers, and magazines in New York City, and if her press release didn’t work in generating coverage, she called, wrote personal letters, or—like a true stage mother—visited the newsrooms to promote her son.
I. A. Horowitz, the editor of
Chess Review
, claimed that she was a “pain in the neck” for always appealing to him for more publicity for Bobby. She even tried to get on various radio and television quiz shows herself, hoping to bring home some money for being a successful contestant. She was pre-interviewed for television quiz shows such as
Top Dollar
and
Lucky Partners
, but despite her high intelligence and erudition she was never chosen.

That Regina was apt to put Bobby’s interests above her own and, out of love, signed on to Bobby’s dream of chess dominance is hinted in a letter she wrote back when her son had been vacillating between attending the Hastings Christmas Tournament and playing for the U.S. Championship. To Maurice Kasper, president of the American Chess Foundation, she wrote: “
I hope Bobby will become a great chess champion some day because he loves chess more than anything else.”

During tournaments, either in the United States or abroad, she’d often send Bobby letters, cables, and telegrams of encouragement and advice, such as: “I see you are 1½ so far after two rounds, which is terrific.
Keep it up but don’t wear yourself down at it. Swim, nap.”

Eventually, through Regina’s persistence, Bobby received an invitation to be a possible contestant on the most popular show on television,
The $64,000 Question
. The idea was that he’d be answering questions about chess. Several other players were also invited to audition for the proposed show, which would present questions that would focus on the history and lore of the game. Fourteen-year-old Bobby showed up at CBS’s Television Studio 52, garbed in his characteristic corduroy pants and flannel shirt buttoned at the
collar and displaying an attitude that was one part assurance and one part skepticism.

The way the show worked was that contestants would choose a category, such as movies, opera, baseball, etc., and answer questions that would become exponentially more difficult and ultimately more valuable. The first correct answer was worth $2, then $4, then $8, doubling week after week until the sum of $64,000 was reached, if ever. If a contestant reached the $8,000 plateau and failed to answer that question correctly, he or she was given a new Cadillac as a consolation prize, worth about $5,000 at that time.

The $64,000 Question
was so popular that even President Eisenhower watched it every week, telling his staff not to disturb him during its time slot. On the Tuesday nights when the show was broadcast, crime rates fell, and attendance at movie theaters and restaurants dropped. It seemed as if all of America was watching the show, and successful contestants were becoming celebrities in their own right. If chess were chosen as a category for the show, the result could greatly promote the game to the public. The chess fraternity, at least in New York, was all aquiver over the possibility.

Regina Fischer was also atypically giddy about Bobby’s prospects, and Bobby, for his part, was excited about using his immense knowledge of the game and the possibility of going all the way, emerging with $64,000 (equivalent to about a half million dollars in today’s wealth), thereby solving the family’s financial woes.

In the audition, everything went well at first. Bobby correctly answered question after question, until he was asked in what tournaments Yates defeated Alekhine. Bobby thought for a long while, then told his interrogator that it was a trick question, because Yates had never defeated Alekhine.

Surprised because Bobby’s answers had been unerringly correct up to that point, the quiz show representative told the boy that Yates had beaten Alekhine in two tournaments: in Hastings in 1922, and in Carlsbad the following year. Bobby was furious, unwilling to admit that he was mistaken.

Yates did defeat Alekhine in those tournaments. Nonetheless, it was not as a result of Bobby’s peevishness or slip of the mind that the producers decided against initiating a chess-devoted category segment. The idea died because of the arcane nature of the game. Ultimately, the producers concluded that there
just weren’t enough people interested in chess to maintain a large enough viewing audience.

Bobby took some of the blame himself. His dreams of wealth quickly slipped away, and he wrote, humbly: “I guess none of us were smart enough to pass inspection.
It made interesting conversation while it lasted, anyway.”

Returning home one afternoon from her hospital shift, Regina was approached in front of her apartment house at 560 Lincoln Place by two sun-glassed men, conservatively dressed. “Mrs. Fischer? Regina Fischer?”

“Yes?” she said.

The men flashed their credentials: They were FBI agents.

“What’s this about?”

“May we go inside? We don’t like to talk on the street.”

“Before I do anything,” said Regina, “tell me what you want.”

“We just want to ask you some questions.”

Regina demurred: “I don’t want to answer anything unless I have my lawyer present.”

“What are you afraid of? Do you have something to hide?”

“
I’m not afraid of anything,” Regina answered, “and I have nothing to hide. I just don’t want to talk to you unless I have my lawyer with me.”

With that, she walked proudly away, entered the vestibule of her building, and trudged upstairs. She was shaking, not because she was concealing anything, but because of the scenario that had just taken place: two law enforcement agents, men who towered over her relatively tiny frame of five feet, four inches, coming at her in a confrontational way in the street.

Regina’s political activities—any or all of which could be considered “subversive,” taking into account the near hysterical anti-Communist climate of the day—were fodder for the FBI: her six years in Moscow, her mercurial ex-husband in Chile, her work at defense plants, her association with rabble-rousers, her affiliation with left-wing political organizations, and her active participation in protests—such as a vigil she joined on the night of the execution of the convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Had she done anything illegal? Were any of her friends spies? She questioned herself, and then called her lawyer, before telling Joanie and Bobby what had happened.

To her relief, there were no further overt visits from the FBI. What Regina didn’t know, however, was that since 1942 the Justice Department had suspected her of being a Soviet espionage agent.
Consequently, there was a sweeping investigation taking place of her activities, past and present, spearheaded by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

The confidential FBI report on Regina dramatically points up the degree to which McCarthy-inspired paranoia gripped America at that time:

The telephone in the Fischer home was tapped.
Undercover agents rifled through Joan Fischer’s records at Brooklyn College. Regina was shadowed. Her fellow nurses and neighbors were questioned. Her high school and college records were examined, and her former teachers and administrators were questioned. Even the second wife of Jacob Wender, Bobby’s grandfather, was investigated. The investigation would continue for almost a half century and produce some 750 pages of reports, costing the American taxpayers hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars, all ending with a whimper, nary a bang, since nothing definitive was ever found about any espionage activity on Regina’s part.
“My mother,” said Joan Fischer, “is a
professional protester.” Other than that, the FBI eventually considered Regina Fischer harmless to the security of the United States.

An ironic twist to this red-hunting saga developed when the FBI learned from an informer that
Regina had been “kicked out” of the Communist Party—if indeed she’d ever been a member; the informer claimed she’d been active from 1949 to 1951. Supposedly, she’d been ejected for failing to be a “faithful Party member.” If that was, in fact, the case, the Bureau reasoned that Regina might be eager to retaliate against the Communists, by being “cooperative and furnishing information regarding persons who were active in the Party and other current information she may possess.” If the Bureau had acted on this notion, Regina Fischer might have actually become a counteragent, a spy, for the U.S. government. It would have been a suitable career for her, considering her penchant for intrigue, politics, and travel. No approach to her was ever made, however.

Bobby kept telling his mother that he wanted to go to Russia to try his hand against the best players in the world. Besides his trip to Cuba and his participation in a tournament in Canada when he was twelve, he’d never been out of the country, and Regina, a peripatetic, almost obsessive traveler, was eager for her son to go abroad. But where was the travel money to come from?

She sent a letter directly to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, asking him to extend an invitation to Bobby for the World Youth Festival. While waiting for a reply, Bobby applied for a passport and then submitted an application for a visa to enter Russia. A year later the visa request was granted, and all that was needed was the money for air transportation and expenses. The idea was that Bobby would spend the summer, or part of it, in Russia so as to train before playing in the Interzonal, which was to be held in Yugoslavia.

Agents and informers continued to spy on the Fischers, and the idea that Big Brother could always be watching haunted Regina. Such continued suspicion on her part—which had a valid basis—greatly influenced her children.

She was worried that the FBI might come again, perhaps when she wasn’t at home, and begin questioning Bobby. If they were trying to build a case against her, any scrap of information that Bobby might give them could possibly be used against her. She began to train him as to what to say should the
investigators appear: “Bobby, if they come, and ask you
any
questions—even your age or where you go to school—just say, ‘
I have nothing to say to you.
’ Don’t change the words; do you understand? ‘
I have nothing to say to you.
’ ”

She made him repeat the phrase over and over again until she was sure he had it right. In retrospect, Bobby said that it was probable that she had learned the phrase from other people who had been investigated by the FBI, as the most effective tactic. “I think it was terrible that they might have questioned a little boy: I was only ten or twelve at the time.”
As it developed, Bobby was never questioned, but the fear had been implanted.

As a further protection for Bobby, Regina bought fairly expensive leather covers for his Russian chess books so that the titles could not be read by agents or possible informants and cause trouble for him as he was studying the books while traveling to and from Brooklyn on the subway.

One morning when Bobby was in geometry class, a student from the principal’s office appeared with a note for Bobby’s teacher. It said that Bobby had been invited to be a contestant on the television show
I’ve Got a Secret
at four-thirty that afternoon. It was the week after his fifteenth birthday. The show was a guessing game to determine a contestant’s “secret,” in this case not that Bobby or his mother might be a Communist, but that he was United States Chess Champion. On the broadcast, looking shy and fearful, he held up a mock newspaper specially printed by the show, with a headline that blared,
TEENAGER’S STRATEGY DEFEATS ALL COMERS
. When the emcee mentioned that his young guest, introduced as “Mister X,” was from Brooklyn, someone shouted “Hooray!” and Bobby beamed. When he was asked by a panel member whether what he did, as his secret, made people happy, he quipped: “It made
me
happy,” sparking appreciative laughter from the audience (who were in on the secret). Bobby stumped the panel.

Determined to get Bobby to Moscow, Regina had appealed to the producers to help her come up with a ticket not only for her son but also for his sister Joan to accompany him. Perhaps through their phone tap, the FBI learned about the Moscow trip. They dispatched a young-looking undercover agent, posing as a reporter for a college newspaper, to “interview” the public relations representatives at the Goodson-Todman Productions, producers of
I’ve Got a Secret
.
The agent remained throughout the broadcast but did not reveal his true identity.