22 Volume 33, Issue 5 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER THE SKEPTICAL PSYCHOLOGIST I s it possible for someone to be ex- tremely intelligent and creative in a certain field and at the same time, in other respects, to be simple minded? The answer is yes. Consider Isaac Newton. He was cer- tainly a genius in the fields of mathe- matics and physics. On the other hand he devoted most of his life to studying the prophecies of the Bible, calculating the year in which God created the entire universe in six days, and deter- mining the probable year that Jesus would return! Consider Arthur Conan Doyle. He was a brilliant writer, creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, yet he firmly believed in the reality of fairies. He even wrote an entire book defending the authenticity of several crude photographs of the tiny winged fairies taken by two little girls. My third example is Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, certainly the best known. I have written elsewhere about Newton and Doyle. Here I will tell briefly the sad story of Fischer. Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943 the illegitimate son of Jewish parents. His Polish mother, Regina, was an active Communist and a great admirer of the Soviet Union. She had a brief affair with Bobby’s German father. Bobby grew up in Brooklyn. At age six he became captivated by chess. At fourteen he was the U.S. chess cham- pion. The following year he was declared a grandmaster. In 1972 he became world champion by defeating Boris Spassky at a tournament in Iceland. There is not the slightest doubt that Bobby was a genius, with a mind that could have made him a great mathematician had events in his childhood taken a different turn. Aside from chess, Fischer came close to being a moron. I once thought his refusal to play chess on Saturday was because he was Jewish. No, it was be- cause he had become a convert to the Worldwide Church of God, a strange sect founded by former Seventh-day Adventist Herbert W. Armstrong. Like the Adventists, Armstrong believed that Saturday is still the God- appointed Sabbath. In 1972 Bobby gave $61,000 to Armstrong, part of the prize money he had won by defeat- ing Spassky. The Worldwide Church of God was soon scandalized by the womaniz- ing of Herbert’s son Garner Ted. After being excommunicated by his father, Ted moved to Tyler, Texas, where he continued to preach his father’s doc- trines. Disenchanted by this rift in the Worldwide Church—and on one occasion physically assaulting a lady official of the church—Fischer left the fold to become an ardent admirer of Hitler and the Nazis! Fischer’s hatred of Jews turned para- noid. Pictures of Hitler decorated his lodgings. He denied the Holocaust. America, he was convinced, had fallen into the hands of “stinking Jews.” When the September 11, 2001, attacks oc- curred, he called it “wonderful news.” Wanted by the U.S. government for vio- lating an order not to play a return NOTES OF A FRINGE WATCHER MARTIN GARDNER Bobby Fischer: Genius and Idiot Chess legend Bobby Fischer, the former U.S. champion turned fugitive from U.S. authorities Martin Gardner is author of more than seventy books, most recently The Jinn from Hyperspace. His next, When You Were a Tadpole and I was a Fish, and Other Speculations About This and That, is forthcoming from Hill and Wang in October 2009. KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images