On the night of March 26, 1958 Bobby Fischer appeared on ‘I’ve got a secret’, an NBC television program in which a group of panelists, a jury of presenters, had to find out what the secret was, the feat or skill of the guests. A few weeks earlier, at the Manhattan Chess Club in New York, Bobby had proclaimed himself, at just 14 years old, national chess champion, ahead of Samuel Reshevsky, the great favorite. Fischer did not lose a game and became the youngest chess player to win the overall US championship. That night, on the set, Bobby met actress Carol Lynley, NBA player Oscar Robertson and Canadian singer Paul Anka, who topped the charts with his hit ‘Diana’.
The presenter, Garry Moore, welcomed Fischer as “Mr. X” and asked him to show the newspaper headline he was holding to the camera. Fischer showed the cover close-up: “A teenager’s strategy defeats all his rivals.” That was the clue to discover his identity. Dick Clark, one of the panelists, asked, “Is that strategy related to finance?” Fisher denied. “Did you get any help?” Clark insisted. Same answer. “Did you do it alone? Did you make people happy?” With a slight arch of the eyebrows, Fischer replied, “It made me happy.” The public returned with laughter the occurrence of the boy. Clark continued with the questioning: “That’s a good start… Does what you do take place indoors?” “Yes,” Bobby replied. At that very moment, an acoustic signal sounded loudly on the set. “You’re over your time,” Garry Moore pointed out. “This guy’s name is Bobby Fischer, he’s 15 years old, and get this, he’s already the United States Chess Champion!” He spontaneous applause.
Next, Moore opened a pink envelope. He told the audience that Bobby had been invited to play other grandmasters in Moscow and Yugoslavia, and that it would be a shame if an American couldn’t attend due to lack of money. He then looked at Fischer and said: “Here are two return tickets, for you and your older sister, to travel on Sabena Airlines to Moscow.” We see Fischer agitated and beaming. He was so excited that, as he was leaving the stage, he tripped over Moore’s microphone cord. He didn’t fall to the ground by very little. Among the audience, which again applauded with real ardor, as if dismissing the utopian hero before he waged the great battle, an FBI agent was taking careful note of what was happening. The trip to Moscow was really a cause for suspicion.
a communist spy
Since 1942, the FBI had tightened its grip on Bobby’s mother, Regina Fischer. This circumstance was not discovered until 2002, thanks to the efforts of journalists Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson (husband and wife, by the way), who requested a report from Regina Fischer under the Freedom of Information Act. The surprise of the marriage was capital. The file they received from the FBI on Regina contained over 900 pages and a wealth of intimate details about the Fischer family. The chess player Shelby Lyman, a commentator on American television during the world title championship between Fischer and Spassky, spoke about this shady matter in the magnificent documentary ‘Bobby Fischer against the world’ (2011): «The FBI was obsessed with Regina, who was considered a communist spy.
The indications that motivated this obsession in the Department of Justice go back in time. Regina was born in Geneva in 1913, but when she was four months old her parents emigrated to New York. Her mother, Natalia Wender, was hospitalized for more than three years at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Center. She died a victim of mental illness. In 1919, Regina and her older brother, Max, were admitted to the Brooklyn Hebrew Asylum for Orphans. After a period in the orphanage, the brothers reunited in San Luis with their father, Jacob, already remarried. Academically, Regina was always a brilliant student. In 1932, she decided to travel to Berlin, where her brother Max was stationed in the Marine Corps. In Germany, Regina met the biologist Herman Muller, an eminent scientist—years later, she won the Nobel Prize—with whom she collaborated on various projects. Muller accepted an offer to work in Moscow, and Regina, without giving it much thought, went with him. In the Moscow capital, Regina studied medicine. At some point, she came into contact with another of Dr. Muller’s collaborators, a German biophysicist who worked at the Brain Institute. His name was so unpronounceable (Leiebscher), and he sounded so Jewish, that the biophysicist changed it to a more Germanic one: Hans Gerhardt Fischer. A few months later, Regina and Gerhardt were married. Therefore, it is accurate to say that the risky adventure of the Fischer family, paradoxically, starts and sinks its roots in the heart of the Soviet Union.
The FBI considered Regina Fischer a spy and kept a 900-page file with intimate details about the family
Bobby taught himself Russian to study the game of the Soviet champions
Historian Bill Wall summarizes as a story what happened from this point in the story. In 1938, the Fischers had a daughter, Joan, born in Moscow. The Stalinist anti-Semitism of those years motivated the couple to flee to Paris in search of a safer place. Later, Regina returned to the United States with little Joan. But Hans, a German national, “was not allowed” to enter, so he ended up settling in Chile. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, in their fantastic book ‘Bobby Fischer went to war’, rely on secret FBI reports to claim that Bobby Fischer’s biological father was not Hans, but a Hungarian physicist named Paul Nemenyi, with whom Regina Fischer began a relationship in 1942. I have marked in red some relevant milestones in the life of Paul Nemenyi. In Berlin, he was arrested by Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) due to his socialist affiliation. He arrived in the United States in 1938. He went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in search of Albert Einstein. He offered her his services. Eventually, he worked with Einstein’s son at Iowa State University. Remember that Bobby Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943. Official records list the name Hans Gerhardt Fischer as the father. But the FBI stamped in one of its records the name of Paul Felix Nemenyi. Then he added: “Father of Bobby Fischer.”
Reasonable similarities
Regina never told her son any of this. She argued that in 1942 she had traveled to Mexico and had reunited with her husband. She there she would have become pregnant. But Frank Brady, Bobby Fischer’s biographer, denies Regina’s version: “It seems that Paul Nemenyi was the real father.” In legal terms, it is not proof of charge, but if you look for an image of Nemenyi you will see the formidable physiognomic similarity that he has with Bobby Fischer. Furthermore, it is no coincidence that Paul Nemenyi helped Regina Fischer financially for years. Apparently he sent an envelope with twenty dollars every two or three weeks. On occasion, she even visited the Fischer family home. And she met Bobby, who was already a genius on the board by then.
Bobby’s genius was undoubtedly a hereditary trait. Regina spoke six languages (English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian) and her father, I mean Paul Nemenyi, was an expert in the field of hydraulic research. Fischer’s IQ, at age 15, was in the range 180-187 on the Stanford-Binet scale, a stratospheric score, higher than that of Albert Einstein. But, beyond the genetic predisposition, the truth is that Bobby Fischer worked his talent. He devoured books. He bought them at the Four Continents Book Store in Greenwich Village, the main distributor of Soviet literature in New York. Fischer could spend up to twelve or fourteen hours straight reading. He analyzed the games of the great Soviet champions and especially adored Mikhail Botvinnik’s style of play. Such was his passion for books that he learned Russian, self-taught, with the sole purpose that nothing escape his understanding. Deep down, and despite the distance, from the sleepless nights he spent in his humble Brooklyn apartment, we could say that Bobby Fischer belonged to the Soviet chess school.
I have nothing to tell you
The Four Continents Bookstore was another hot spot for the FBI. Anyone who entered or left the establishment became a potential communist. Regina, in a state of permanent alert, accumulated reasons to be worried. The home phone was tapped. Her bank account, audited. Two federal agents had wanted to question her. “Bobby, if they come and ask you questions,” she told her son one day, “even if it’s just to find out how old you are or what school you go to, just say, ‘I don’t have anything to tell them.’ Don’t change the words. You understand me? “I have nothing to tell you.”
For a time, the circle that the FBI drew around the Fischers lost a lot of strength, but in 1957 Regina contacted the Soviet embassy in the United States and, as expected, this move reactivated the monitoring protocol. Why are you communicating with the embassy?, they wondered in the Department of Justice. Regina just wanted to make Bobby’s dream come true, who insisted over and over again on his idea of traveling to Moscow to play against the best chess players. Months later, on January 7, 1958, Bobby Fischer became the youngest champion in American chess history. The feat was not in Regina’s script, at least not so soon, but he knew how to take advantage of it to play his game. When the NBC chain wanted to take Bobby to the set of ‘I’ve got a secret’, Regina put a single condition: two return tickets so that her son, once and for all, traveled to Moscow.
That’s how it all started.