Strategy, the mode of human thought that seeks effects instead of causes, provided the real drama of the past summer. Miami Beach, a perfect setting for the febrile maneuverings of politics, and Reykjavik, in its removed position from a great deal of ordinary human commerce, a well-chosen site for a chess confrontation, were the places in which the dramas took place. In both cases it was television that provided outlets to an audience and analyses of the happenings, so that the plans of professionals, whether floating down in abstract symbols from the north or rising in rhetoric and human images from Florida, could be grasped by an audience of interested amateurs. In the afternoon, on Channels 13 and 10 in New York, one could watch Fischer and Spassky thread their way through the challenges of a Sicilian Defense, and in the evenings, on the major networks, there were the attacks and parries of democratic political selection. It was a chance to study the human mind being, in turns, dramatically devious, brilliant, dull, fatally flawed, and courageously tenacious. Soon, if one followed these events closely, it became apparent that, whether one listened to an International Grandmaster or a political scientist, there were areas much too complicated for human thought to exhaust, and the dangers of a passed pawn, like the risks in an innovative plank in a party platform, can only be roughly calculated before events themselves bring a resolution to prior speculation.

At first glance, it might seem that chess and politics, even allowing for the intellectual caprice of seeing them in terms of dramatic forms, have only a superficial resemblance. It would be, I believe, as strained a comparison to liken Fischer to an anti-Establishment McGovernite as it is to see in chess a mirror for all human activity. The fact that conflict, sacrifice, and compromise are apparent in both enterprises means very little when one considers that in chess wooden figures are being manipulated as opposed to human beings in politics. An obvious difference certainly, but it is best to stop the enthusiastic analogist quickly. Pawns sacrificed in a gambit bear no grudges; this cannot be said, for instance, of the Daley delegation. Again, no one will blame Boris Spassky if he changes his views on the Alekhine Defense after having lost a pawn to Fischer in less than a dozen moves when it was played. However, McGovern’s abandonment of the $l,000-per-person gambit has already cost him at least this writer’s vote. In short, there is little to forgive a winner over the chess board; in politics, achieving office often means little more than a designated period of absolution

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to think of chess simply as a closet drama, a meaningless mental exercise that has nothing to do with the practicalities of life that so abound in politics. All of us, from patzer to Grandmaster, who followed the struggle between Fischer and Spassky, have in varying degrees come to understand not only the complexities of the game itself but also the complexities of mental response to the game’s problems. When the American, Paul Morphy, the first truly modern chess player, heard himself referred to as a “mere chess player,” he suffered the anguish any of us might feel at being termed frivolous and gave up playing. To the ordinary man who had never experienced the delight of a five-move combination or a surprising sacrifice, chess long remained a symbol of non-utility. If the politician was considered too much a part of the world’s realities, the chess player was thought to be a facile escapist, pouring energy into black and white squares, caught up in the quaint, otherworldly jargon of his game.

Well, the dramas of Miami and Reykjavik somewhat changed all that. As far as involvement with reality is concerned, it would be hard to compare most of the Democratic candidates favorably with Bobby Fischer. Indeed, weighing the Platform Committee debates against Fischer’s wranglings with the Icelandic Chess Federation, it would seem that chess is on the threshold of proving itself every bit as capable of consorting with base instincts as has politics. While experts around the world waited poised in front of analysis boards, Bobby resolutely continued to demand more and more worldly goods and comforts; while in Miami, Democrats seemed intent on proving that the old Realpolitik could be eschewed in favor of populist idealism. Of course, as the convention unfolded, it was evident that pragmatism and expediency had not been completely excised from the Democratic party, but for a time it did seem that the Democratic party was exiting from the world we know and that Bobby Fischer, being coaxed and cajoled by everyone from Henry Kissinger to Latvian chess teachers, was leading his long repressed profession very much into it.

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But moralizing about dramatic events is never good criticism. What struck me, a casual chess player and a committed citizen, as I sat in front of my television set through long afternoons and longer evenings, was that, for all the rich spectacle provided by a loose alliance of people intent on grappling with the issues of war, poverty, racism, economics, and the social destiny of women, it was the rigidly confined contest in Iceland that was usurping more and more of my interest. As I have said, I am not a fanatical chess player, and the nuances between the Slav and the Semi-Slav Defense are not what I would normally find gripping. Also, in my dramatic aesthetic, there is a fondness for rich, human detail, a fondness that no amount of expert analysis could make up for in settings that were thousands of miles away from the game’s champion and challenger. Add to this the point of view of self-interest, the fact that the resolution in Iceland was hardly going to affect my life at all, whereas what went on in Miami might result in extreme alterations in my social habits, and I had strong cause for wonder about my attitude.

Making certain allowances for mandarin tendencies in my personality, I discovered after a little thought that my reaction was not so difficult to understand. For one thing, the Democratic convention, for all its quotas and denunciations of the “old politics,” was too full of predictability to compel for an extended time. If those on the floor were the new representatives of a fresh constituency, they behaved very much like all those they sought to replace. The political mind was pulsating with plans for power that only a TV commentator could fail to grasp immediately. The “new faces” soon wore sleek, professional expressions, alternately smug when success seemed near and properly concerned for America’s fate when it seemed that a rules amendment they favored would be defeated. And everywhere those celebrities, from the worlds of politics and entertainment, who don’t seem to understand how tiring they can become or how their insights and anger can be grasped by a reasonably intelligent mind without constant reiteration.

Now certainly I don’t wish to imply that there is no intelligence within the Democratic party. But, watching its convention, I felt that the mind was again being constrained, that whatever adventures it was being allowed were lost to the main drama shown to the American audience. Here, after all, is supposed to be the largest concerted effort on the part of a democracy to define its moral attitudes and to prophesy how those attitudes will stand the test against all strains future events might lay on them. However, as one watched the doings in Miami, one had to feel that hardly any of even the most likely variations that the future might play against their pronouncements had been thought out. One looked and felt that events would overwhelm this gathering, even as they do you and me, not because it was tragically excessive, but because it was morally overconfident, certain that it would improvise its way through the darkest vagaries of the human spirit. Of course, it might be answered that this is the nature of democratic politics, that its form is dramatic because it is vague and superficial, allowing detail and conflict to be provided by the accidents of the popular will. This may be so, and this would make one more reason why I took refuge in the alternative method of planning provided by a game of chess.

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I have mentioned above that the real uses to which the political mind is put are seldom given much public scrutiny. Therefore, politics may be an exciting game to play, but it is tedious to watch, since only the most routine intellectual notions are ever dressed up for public display. In chess, the opposite obtains. Watching the chessmen being moved as Spassky and Fischer played, one felt that the very marrow of thought had been reached and one could almost feel the minds of the participants throb as a delicate position was probed or an opponent’s miscalculation was seized upon and exploited. In fact, one was inclined to wince every now and then at the nakedness of the thought involved, every blemish revealed and instantly annotated for the world to muse upon. So many times a blunder would change the course of a game, and, in a way, this evidence of frailty caused as much wonder as did the obvious examples of chess genius that appeared in every session. For a blunder in the chess world is something more than a mere mistake: it denotes an egregious error, a flaw that not only costs the perpetrator his chances to win a game, but reminds him, in his quest for perfection, that he is subject to the humblest mental infirmities. No rationalization can excuse it, for it is as palpable and as enduring as the chess player’s fame. The excitement when one of these lapses was teletyped to the studios where the experts had congregated was a result of mixed feelings. A hero had suffered a little death, and one didn’t know whether to rejoice or lament over yet one more proof that there is no such thing as human absolutism.

But if errors that must be lived with provided a tragic notion of fatalism to the chess procedings, calculation and creativeness imbued them with a balancing amount of exultation. Fischer’s unremitting accumulation of small advantages, his instinct for positional weaknesses that hardly anyone else could detect; Spassky’s tenacity and ingenuity in defense, and his will to fight after all the world’s experts pronounced him doomed—these qualities, substantiated by hundreds of moves during the period of twenty-one games, gradually created, even in the ignorant, an awe commensurate with the pity felt for the moments of weakness.

And then there was the unexpected, the twists in the old plots of each opening and defense. For example, Spassky’s underdevelopment of his knight the second time Fischer’s queen went marauding into territory forbidden her by chess theory. This was a move that occasioned disbelief on the part of the Masters and Grandmasters who analyzed for us on television. It was, at first, doubted that the move had been transmitted correctly, and yet, as Arthur Bisquier said later, it turned out to be a maneuver that “might very well toll the death knell” for a line of attack that Fischer had long favored. For in some dozen moves later, Fischer’s queen had been lost, an event that, to say the least, happens very rarely in Grandmaster chess. Generally, caught in romantic myth, we believe that one who breaks with tradition must be rewarded. Here, at least, was a concrete example to the contrary.

Finally, to the dramatic technique. Like most others with only a slight acquaintance with chess, I had believed this technique to be wholly logical and schematic, a product of mental oddity where victory went to the mind best equipped for analysis. This may well be true on the lower levels of chess playing, but once one reaches the stratum on which a Fischer or Spassky plays, another factor enters: intuition. Thus in a game that a priori we know must be dominated by deduction, even the greatest players must rely on hunches and, trusting to their instincts, leap into darkness. There is never time during a game for an exhaustive analysis of a complicated position. Even lifetimes would not be sufficient at present to prove conclusively that at a certain point in a game one move should be preferred to another, and so even in a world composed of only sixty-four squares, there are enough shadows to frighten the pure rationalist and add tantalizing ambiguity to dramatization.

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In the end, there is a compelling aura of mortality about the game itself, for no matter how one wishes that its variations were inexhaustible, it is not in the nature of things for them to be so. The great Cuban player, Capablanca, was premature when he said that the possibilities of chess had already been exhausted, but he was theoretically correct. Chess is a finite system, and it therefore implies no contradiction to say that the human mind will one day exhaust it. Of course, in its perversity, that same mind will then invent a more complicated challenge for itself. It might even turn fearlessly to the problems of politics so that it can be assured, barring universal obliteration, eons of unresolved analysis and untidy dramatics.

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