reclusive is that issues with the united states government and re-emergence later in life as a man who championed conspiracy theories and suffered from paranoid. frank grady recalls life of bobby fischer at barnes and noble booksellers in new york city. this is 45 minutes. >> i would like to start off, this is not a reading. just simply talking and we will have a q&a but i would like to start if i may to read something from the book. i will set the scene in the 1960s when bobby fischer was going to go to argentina to play in a big international tournament. so here we go. a week before he left for

argentina, bobby and the author of this book had dinner at the cedar time in greenwich village hanging out with avant-garde artists and abstract expressionists and one of his favorite eating places. tonight we repaired jackson pollock and friends of mine were having a conversation at the bar and andy warhol and john page dined at a nearby table. not that bobby noticed. he just liked to puff food the restaurant served. was a shepherd's par kind of place and the anonymity that came from sitting among people who preferred gawking at celebrities rather than taking note of chess prodigies, we slid from the bar and ordered bottles of beer. heineken for me. the waitress didn't question bobby's age. he had just turned 17 and wasn't legally old enough to drink in new york state. some of you were old enough to remember 18 was the limit at

that time. but he looked like he was 18. bobby knew this election without looking at the menu. he tackled an enormous slab of roast prime rib which he consumed in a matter of minutes. if he were a heavyweight boxer enjoying his last meal before the big fight. he just received in the mail -- poor a lull in the conversation, that was typical when spending time with bobby since he didn't talk much and wasn't embarrassed by a long silence, i asked bobby, how are you going to prepare for this tournament? are always want to know how you did it? he seemed unusually chipper and became interested in my interest. i will show you, he said. he slid out of his side of the booth and crammed me into the

corner. set, all the little pieces lined up in their respective slot ready to go to war. i don't know if you remember seeing those but they are hardly larger than an index card. he looked from me to the set and back and forth at least at first and spat out a scholarly treatise on his method of preparation. he said first of all, i am only going to really prepare for david bronstein. he showed me the progression of his one and only game with david bronstein two years earlier. he took me through each move disparaging the david bronstein choice and awarding another and next. the variety of choices he worked for was dazzling and

overwhelming. because of the rapid analysis he discuss the ramifications of would be advisable or not. it was like watching a movie with a voice-over narration. with one great difference. he was manipulating the pieces and speaking so rapidly that it is difficult to connect the mood with his commentary. i couldn't follow the ideas behind the real and phantom attacks and shadow assaults. he couldn't play there since it would weaken -- i didn't think of this. was he kidding? a slot on his set was so worn and large from thousands of games that little half-inch pieces almost fell into the slots at his will. all of the images were worn off. then he went on and discussed david bronstein's style. at one point a piece said did

you read david bronstein's book? i said know. isn't it in russian? he looked annoyed and amazed at i didn't know the language. learn it! he said. a fantastic book! if you play for a win against me i am not playing for a draw. resetting the pieces in seconds he began almost without looking, he said it is hard to prepare because he can play any kind of game, positional or tactical or any kind of opening. he then began to show me from memory game after game. look like dozens focusing on the opening that david bronstein had played against bobby's various variations. multiple outcomes but he didn't just confine himself to david bronstein's efforts. he took me on a tour of games that lewis paulson had played in the 1800s and others

experimented with and others that were played weeks before and games he had gleaned from a russian newspaper. all-time bobby waived possibilities and suggest alternatives and selected the best lines and discriminated. it was a history lesson and dhs tutorial. mainly it was an amazing feat of memory. his eyes, slightly glazed, were fixed on the pocket set which he held open in his left hand talking to himself, totally unaware of my presence or that he was a restaurant. his intensity seem even greater than when he was playing in the tournament. his fingers sped by in a blur, his face showed the slightest smile as if he was in a referee. he whispered barely audibly. if he plays that i can play

bishop and then raising his voice so loud that some of the customer's third, he will play that! i began to weep quietly. in that time suspended moment i was in the presence of genius. [applause] thank you. okay. c-span is filming this for future broadcasted if you have a question don't yell it out. that the microphone get it picked up on the tv. okay? i was attempting to do a number of things when i began to write his biography of bobby fischer. let me tell you those of you here who do not know how to play

chess at all or are poor players you could read this book. this is not a chess book. it is a biography. of course it is great emphasis to chess players but you don't necessarily have to play the game very well or enjoy it. i had written a number of other biographies. from orson welles to aristotle. i approached bobby's life in the same way as a biographer, sort of a microscopic look at his life. i attempted to leave no fact behind. that is the way i approach all of my books. i want to know every fact. every trivial fact. i may not use it but it gives me confidence that i know my

subject and i may use it somewhere along the line. there was no library i visited, no archive or no research that was unexamined on my part. in addition to approaching this as a biographer/researcher, i was also an official witness and participant in bobby's career. i was the director of one of the first tournaments he ever played as a child in asbury park, new jersey at the monterey hotel that doesn't exist any more. on the boardwalk there. and bobby was 10 or 11 or whatever iwo's, and his mother was with him and i talked to bobby at that time but i noticed him. he was a magnet for people because he was so tiny. he was the youngest person in the tournament and everyone gathered around and watched him

and i noted that he would become what he became. i noted how serious he was. he really took his time and concentrated. we also played in some of the same tournaments together over the years. we never met in an official tournament game. we were light years away. he was in another universe in terms of ability. but we did play perhaps hundreds of speed games over the years. don't ask me who won. he was an incredible speed player by the way. very interesting to watch him play speed chess. it was like basketball. neighborhood or playground basketball. a lot of trash talk. what? you play that against me? how dare you! that kind of stuff.

you are a cockroach, i am an elephant, elephants step on cockroach. crunch! boon! absolutely the most incredible speed player in the world actually as it turned out. so i was there. i was also the arbiter of the u.s. championship where he won all of his games without draws but it had never been done before. it has not been done since. it may never be done again. i was right there at his board during the entire time. i had an opportunity to study him and observe him and i talk about that in the book of course. are also defended body when he got into a big contretemps when he was forfeited against samuel reshevsky and went to bat for him in print. it turned out to be a lawsuit

with fischer suing samuel reshevsky. because of my constant championing him i lost my job in chess life magazine which i had founded. so we bonded and i was in iceland with him for -- we match took two month. for three months i came early and left late. during the time he watched the championship. i also looked at this book, this biography through the eyes of a friend. i was his friend. we had a falling out -- filings out, whatever we had. we had arguments. there were times, many years

when we didn't speak so that was -- i did feel he was a friend. we dined together, played chess together of course, he came to my house and read chess magazines. he swiped a lot of those magazines, we went to parties together. i taught him how to play billiards. we were friends. so that was my focus. study bobby fischer as a biographer, as an official chess arbiter, as a director, as the player and as a friend. i could tell you when i go through this in the book, bobby had an extremely competitive personality. no matter what he did, not only chess, he was a good swimmer for

instance. going through high-school and grammar school and camp and summer he would swim and bobby, when they had races bobby would be in the water before anybody was in mid dive. he was just fast and wanted to win. and in his 20s when he went to the tacticals he would play tennis and beat everybody except the tennis pro. other than that he wanted to win into that and talk about his competitive personality. he also had a phenomenal memory. an incredible memory. when he was preparing for boris spassky there was a book of hundreds and hundreds of his games. and there were about 10,000 moves in that book.

almost as a parlor game he would send you the book and say pick out a game, tell me when it was played, when it was played and who boris spassky play against. 1978 he played against portugal. he would then rattle off all the rules. he had memorized 10,000 moves. that is just one of his memory feet. i could tell many other stories and i do in the book about how good he was. and he had a total focus on chess. many people as he was growing and when he got older said bobby is an idiot savant. he doesn't know anything about chess. i don't know if you read malcolm glad well's book of the out liars where he talks about how hours, like 1,000 hours a year for ten years in order to become

good at something, bobby spend more than that. he spent six or eight hour day. you might say so he didn't know anything else. have you ever talked to a musician? i don't have anything against musicians but they know music, don't they? i know psychiatrists. they know the mind. they know the interpretation of dreams. they know all kinds of things but many of them don't know about art or literature or music or life. they know how to analyze you and tell you what to do. i am not putting down any that i see in case there are psychologists in the audience. he spent the greater portion of his life studying chess. so what? he became the champion of the world. that was sort of interesting.

that is part of what i do in the book. i try to approach and confront some of these misconceptions about him. by the way, from the time he was in his 20s when he won the world championship until he died three years ago in reykjavik almost exactly three years ago, he studied constantly all kinds of books. this is not a defense of bobby and i will get to the bad parts. i want to let you know he was a voracious reader and he could talk about the discourses and the causes of war, he had become an intellectual in 40 years from the time he won the championship. stopped studying chess all that much and started studying other things. very interesting. my specific approach to the book

was to show very specifically how bobby became good. if you read this book will you become good too? i don't know about that. possibly it will help. it may inspire you. that is good. you won't learn the specific openings because there are none -- there are no games here. it may inspire you to become good like he did. i wanted to show that and i think i have. the hours of practice, how did it and so forth. are also showed the difficulties he had. he came from a poor family. i would not say his mother was a vagrant but when bobby was born she was homeless. and had to live in a hospice. than he had to live in a trailer and they moved to manhattan and finally brooklyn and a small

little walkup apartment, $56 a month. he never had government support like the soviets did. the soviets got their country retreat the gristle they got salaries and could do anything they wanted and spend all their time playing and studying chess. bobby didn't get that. he got zilch in terms of support. that embittered him by the way, a lot. so i go into that. and then of course i talk about his fall from grace and why did he refuse $10 million that he actually had from his attorney for sponsorship for entries into tournaments? he went off into the sea the section of los angeles and lived

there for 20 years as a recluse. he would not give an interview. wouldn't do anything. become anti-semitic? he was a jew. his mother was jewish completely. the father, the paternity is a drabs. could be one of two men. we are not positive who that man was. both of them were jewish. regina fischer married someone who was jewish again. he denied he ever received training and yet i have found evidence that he really did have a bar mitzvah which is sort of unusual. so why did that happen? you will have to read the book. we will get into it. i do get into it.

are our for speculation. you never know when you are writing a biography, how do you take someone's life and cram it inside the pages of a book? it is difficult to do. in any event it is there and i discussed it. it was rotten. he became anti-american and i became ballistic. i didn't want anything to do with him overall. then i started to thank. maybe he is like wagner. maybe if you are jewish, i am not buying his albums. i am not buying a volkswagen. it is possible that that is your point of view. what about bogan? he was a terrible person. frank sinatra. listen to the music of frank

sinatra. he was a rotten son of a bitch. can we indeed accept the art and divorce the man? can we honor the art and what was accomplished and divorced and man? if we can do that, then indeed i started to think of a philosophical counter -- confrontation with myself. ville should i write this book? i had gone many offers to write this. should i write it or should i not? i think i can split it. i think i can honor barbie's accomplishment while also denigrating his absolutely horrible and obscene comments about jews, about america. this book is not a memoir of

myself in any way, shape or form. i am practically invisible other than the piece where i met with him in the cedar tavern. i am hardly in the book. this is bobby's story. it is bobby's life. it is great honesty of what he went through, truly a rags to we ended up before he died, multi-billion air. it has shakespearean overtones and it is truly the stuff of greek legend. that is about all i have to say. let's have a q&a. [applause] remember, wait until the microphone comes around.

how are you today? >> at the end of his life where did he get his money? >> in 1992 he violated sanctions than the united states had against serbia. he played in montenegro and ended up, with a $5 billion match and he ended up winning $3.5 million and lived on that. >> wasn't most of it -- >> how are you? >> wasn't most of that swindled by the serbian banker -- >> absolutely not. there was a million dollars in television rights that bobby never got. but for tree$.5 million he definitely got it in cash. his sister flew to belgrade, stared at the continental hotel, she took the train to spitz and

and deposited in the bank of switch to a blend. he had money. >> was the government trying to take the money? >> yes and they still are. bobby violated those sanctions. he was fine $250,000. on top of that he stopped paying taxes in 1977. he was so anti-american. i don't know how much -- he wasn't making a lot in the 20 years that i call the wilderness years that he was living in l.a.. he had some royalties he was making on his books but wasn't a lot. he still had to pay taxes on that so they are trying to get a lot of this money and they may still do it. it is up for grabs right now. here is the microphone.

>> wondered if he made a will and where did his money go? >> he didn't make a will. the money still exists. he spent it over -- since 1992. he died in 2008. he has those expenses. he bought a house for his girlfriend. he bought her a condo in reykjavik and supposedly $2 million left. said or was he just being provocative? did he have friends in high school? when he was in high school? >> were you in high school with him? >> no. >> you are much too young. somebody here supposedly went to high school with bobby. are you still here wherever you

are? in any event -- [inaudible] >> i met him in a residence. he used to walk around the campus with his head down and a copy of the russian chess turtle in his back pocket. >> so you went -- [talking over each other] >> did he believe the things -- i believe he did. at the end of -- at the end of

his life -- even when he was younger whatever he said was. because he believed it. you either accept it or not and sometimes he seemed very irrational but indeed that is the way it was. so he believed it. >> for chess question. did bobby ever play blindfolded? >> yes. he rarely played blindfold chess but he did, on a trip from the duval street from key west to cuba when he played as a young man he play blindfolded chess.

not remembering the games. but to bobby in a sense he was always playing blindfold chess because he was going over games in his mind. >> what made him and i american? >> there was a story that appeared bleak originally series of stories in life magazine about bobby and the writer who is now dead wrote the stories with a contract from bobby that he would not write a book about them. a year-and-a-half or two years after the match was over he cannot with a book so bobby sued him in court for $100 million

and bobby always had problems lawyers and decided to handle the case himself so the brief was scribbled on a yellow paper and that kind of a and eventually -- he said there was no justice in the american jurisprudence system and therefore at that point he said i won't pay taxes anymore. i don't believe in america. it is corrupt government. >> i want to thank you for delivering to us the second book. the first when he rode anything you are saying right now. and i want to curse you and kept losing. and i enjoy your book and found it very interesting. and thank you for the second

part of it. >> thank you, thank you. let's get one over here and we will come back to you. >> were there ever any clinical, mental issues attributed to him given his statements that he made? >> no psychiatrist that i know ever said anything along those lines and i interviewed a number of psychiatrists who knew him the later being dr. magnus break effect who was with bobby in the last months of his life. you will find it in. he was disturbed, he was paranoid because he was not schizophrenic, he was not psychotic and he was an m.d. the

largest mental institution in iceland. he came from a troubled childhood and was mixed up. clinically he was not a paranoid schizophrenic. he had paranoid tendencies as most of us do to some extent. >> whar call the end game? >> it is the end of his life and the end of the game. thank you very much. thank you. any more? we are back to this man. brooklyn tech trader. >> how well would he have done in his prime against caspar of? >> how would dempsey have done against tyson?

it is a very difficult thing to compared. i think bobby fischer was the greatest chess player that ever lived. there may be other is coming down the line. japanese american player just won one of the strongest chess tournaments ever played. just a few days ago. he may surpass what fischer did but up until now he was the strongest player. he was away from the game for 20 years. if he had not been away for 20 years, i would say fisher -- fischer would win. of course kasparov would deny >> hi, professor brady.

>> a former student! [talking over each other] >> your name will come to me. it will come to me. we are talking about a long [talking over each other] [talking over each other] [talking over each other] >> very good. i was going to attend, and actually played with bobby fischer and the man hadn't chess club, he said at times bobby would play 15 people at one time and ten steps ahead of everyone. no one really won against him.

influence on him. really propelled him to save his fingers he said later on in life? >> his mother was a great influence on him. in many ways she helped his career. she was like a professional press agent almost, not a newspaper magazine or anything else in the city, pressed for bobby. did have fights? of course. they have fights. there is another misconception they tried to straight now. he wanted her to come back and she got her doctorate in hematology and medical history in later years. wanting to come back to the

united states. they loved each other, a professional protester, left professional protesting but as i say, upon doesn't stray far from the queen. she had a great influence on him. a couple more questions. a couple more? we have time. two more questions. >> must have been a unique experience to revisit a subject you had written about so many years earlier. i can to imagine when you were

writing "profile of a prodigy: the biography of bobby fischer" that you developed a familial bond with bobby. i am wondering how affected you over the years you touched on it and how effective you, change and degenerate over the years that what you feel ultimately was your relationship with bobby? >> has bought >> reporter: i changed. the relationship changed. when i wrote the first book i didn't have a doctorate. i sort of learned -- fussing about -- the thing about getting a ph.d. is you learn how to research and if you don't, have an forbid. i wrote many other books for this one. nine or ten other books.

i changed hands. i felt bad about his anti-american statements and -- i was horrified. . to get over that. no one else can tell the story than me. my obligation is to tell that story and i told it accurate and honest appraisal of his life. we got here, we got here. he lifted weights, he was a

physical person he was like a tennis player with a sweater. he was so used to this stuff, playing basketball, he was an athlete. there are times when he didn't do anything. he was also a water. he walked my legs of. he would think nothing of walking from the upper west side to the lower east side and back again in the course of an evening. miles and miles and miles. he was a fast walker. there was a wind as he walked so quickly. he was in terrific shape and really trained before each

match. one more question. >> wondering if you have any romantic relationships, was he ever married? >> he was never married. he was in prison and then the woman he was living with in japan came, quite honest in a gambit to get him out of prison so he became -- so he would be looked upon as a japanese citizen but he wasn't married to a japanese woman and they got married in prison toward the end of his life. he was in love with a 17-year-old girl when he was 49 years old. there were occasional romantic dalliances. i go into that in the book. thank you very much.

[applause] >> frank brady discussing the life of bobby fischer on booktv. to see this and other programs on line go to booktv.org. watch robert and data bear talk about the comedy routine online on booktv.org on march 11th. the authors are both former cia agents and are married. they tell the story of their experiences in the cia in washington d.c.. at noon on friday go to booktv.org and click the watch button above program information and the featured programs section of the page. >> we are talking with jessica hughes about her book revolt. tell us about it. >> it is a book i wrote as a team party activists to give a good lehmann's explanation for why freedom is always the best choice in economics and personal

liberty. i started out -- my problem is i had the secret service come to my house and i was not politically active until then. they came based on an anonymous complaint and i was kind of stunned. i was raised to believe america is a free place and they came questioning my thoughts and my feelings and it really disturbed me and so i started looking into what our founders thought of freedom and what did they expect we would have as a government? i was pretty sure it wasn't national police showing up at citizens' doors. i read the federalist papers and a lot of history and got very involved in economics through the university on line and what i wanted to do was share with other tea party years a way to explain why freedom works. not just this is my money i should keep it, but i was raised very poor so i know from experience that if you love for

people last thing you need is for the government to help them. communities and churches have been destroyed by intervention by the government. we don't need to know our neighbors anymore. we don't need to be friends with people any longer because we kind of have this nanny state that will take care of us. really is a layman's explanation of how our monetary system works, what our debt looks like, how regulations affect personal wealth and what really is true prosperity. i believe there's a perception on both sides of the aisle, you have the democrats' side that believes all of our problems are with businesses and on the republican side a belief that all of our problems are with government. what i try to show is our problem is a sort of corporatism where your big businesses are going to congress and asking them to pass all these regulations to keep little

people off. the tea party is focusing more on minority outreach and it is interesting because one of my favorite rags to riches stories is the story of madam walker who was born on a plantation. 14 she was married, 17 she had a child, 17 she was a widow. what does a single woman today face that compares with her obstacles? in her lifetime she developed -- she built a mansion next to john rockefeller employing about 3,000 women nationwide and in the caribbean and she was personally responsible for the harlem renaissance. today would stand in the way of people like i was, like many of our poor inner-city people, is the government. in texas we had someone shed down an illegal hair cutting operation. it was two guys with barber shares at the flea market.