In the war in Vietnam the North launched the Tet Offensive which was a coordinated series of attacks on more than 100 cities and outposts in South Vietnam in an attempt to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its involvement in the Vietnam War. It worked. Despite heavy casualties, they achieved a strategic victory that marked the beginning of the slow, painful American withdrawal. It was also about this time that I began getting letters on a regular basis from the government asking me to reenlist along with the promise of a promotion if I did so. I had been out less than a year and they were looking for cannon fodder.
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| 1967 |
Along with the Tet offensive came one of the blackest marks against the US Army in history; the My Lai massacre. But, there was also a hero that day when a helicopter pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, and his crew took an incredible risk when Thompson intervened to stop the massacre.
In 1968, the Russians, along with 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks lead an invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush a brief period of liberalization in the country. The liberal reforms of First Secretary Alexander Dubcek were repealed and normalization began under his successor Gustav Husak.
Other major news stories were:
* Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated
* McDonald's Big Mac first went on sale for $0.49 ($3.53 in today's currency). Today they sell for $5.30.
* The Boeing 747 made its maiden flight
* Hong Kong Flu pandemic started
* The Poor Peoples March on Washington, DC took place
* Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated
* Aristotle Onassis and Jacky Kennedy got married
* The Winter Olympic Games were held in Grenoble, France during the month of February . These were the first Winter games to be broadcast in color on television. It was also the first time they did gender testing and doping tests during the winter games. It was also the first time that a country other than the Soviet Union won the most medals since the USSR's first games in 1956 with Norway taking home the most medals of the 37 competing nations.
Popular musicians were The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, Fleetwood Mac, The Grateful Dead, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Marvin Gaye and David Bowie.
On television people were watching Bonanza, Candid Camera, Gomer Pyle, Green Acres, Gunsmoke, Here's Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie, Mission Impossible, My Three Sons, Carol Burnett, Dean Martin, Ed Sullivan, Lawrence Welk, the Smothers Brothers and on late night TV it was The Johnny Carson Show.
Burt Hochberg (1933–2006) was the editor of Chess Life, Marshall Rohland was the President and Ed Edmondson was the Executive Director of the USCF. Bill Goichberg began the Continental Chess Association. In 1966 Goichberg was the first organizer to hold scholastic tournaments. Other organizers had been reluctant to do so because they believed scholastic players would balk at paying the $5 USCF dues.
Larry Evans edged out Robert Byrne by a half point for the US Championship. Other players were Samuel Reshevsky, Pal Benko, William Lombardy, Arthur Bisguier, Bernard Zuckerman, Anthony Saidy, Nicolas Rossolimo, Al Horowitz, Tibor Weinberger and Herbert Seidman.
Major international tournaments were the Olympiad held in Lugano, Switzerland. It was won by the Soviet Union (Petrosian, Spassky, Korchnoi, Geller, Polugaevsky and Smyslov ) followed by Yugoslavia (Gligoric, Ivkov, Matanovic, Matulovic, Parma, Ciric), Bulgaria (Bobotsov, Tringov, Padevsky, Kolarov, Radulov and Peev) and the US (Reshevsky, Evans, Benko, R. Byrne, Lombardy and D. Byrne).
Monte Carlo was won by Bent Larsen ahead of Botvinnik. At Hoogovens Korchnoi scored 12.0-3.0 to finish three points ahead of Hort, Tal and Portisch.
At Amsterdam Lubosh Kavalek edged David Bronstein by a half point. In the Capablanca Memorial held in Havana, Ratmir Kholmov of the Soviet Union edged countrymen Leonid Stein and Alexy Suetin by a half point to take first place.
On his way to the World Championship, Boris Spassky defeated Larsen and Korchnoi in matches to win the right to challenge Petrosian.
After Curacao in 1962, Bobby Fischer dropped out of competition for several years. Money was so scarce that he began living at a YMCA and when he couldn't afford that, he began mooching off friends and running up phone bills he couldn't pay.
Broke and alone, the twenty-five year old Fischer moved to California. There he studied chess and prowled the streets late at night slipping white supremacist literature under windshield wipers of parked cars.
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What I feared has come upon me;
what I dreaded has happened to me.
Job 3:25
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Besides chess he also studied anti-Semitic classics, collected Nazi memorabilia and became an admirer of Hitler. He once complained to Larry Evans that there were too many Jews in chess and they didn't dress so nicely.
Fischer was going to play in the 1968 Lugano Olympiad, but backed out at. Some say it was when he saw the poor playing conditions. Former World Champion Tigran Petrosian and George Koltanowski, the captain of the American team, felt Fischer was justified in not playing. According to William Lombardy, Fischer refused to play because Reshevsky wouldn't give up first board.
In the US Open held in Aspen, Colorado, Bent Larsen was undefeated and finished first with an impressive 11.0-1.0 sore. He yielded draws to only to Walter Browne and Robert Byrne.
Pal Benko and Walter Browne came a distant second with 9.5-2.5. Robert Byrne, Larry Kaufman and Dr. Anthony Saidy shared 4th-6th places with 9.0 points. Gregory DeFotis, James Sherwin, Norman Weinstein and Edward Formanek were next with 8.5.
The following game is a typical one from those down in the trenches. Senior Master Herbert Avram finished tied for places 11-23 with a score of 8.0-4.0.
His opponent, Edmond Nash was born on December 24, 1909 and died at the age of 96 on June 4, 2006. Nash, an Expert, was born as Adam Edmund Nasierawski in Montreal, Canada and became a naturalized US citizen in 1936.
Nash attended Alliance Junior college from 1927 to 1929, got a BA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1932 and an MA there in 1938. He was a division chief at the Bureau of Labor in statistics.
He beat Bobby Fischer in the 1956 US Amateur and his last rated event was the 2001 Eastern Open at the age of 91. He passed away in Chevy Chase, Maryland, but for many years lived in Washington, DC. In this tournament Nash finished tied for places 24-34 with a score of 7.5-4.5. The event drew 172 players.
What I like about this game, besides the clever finish, is that it shows how easily a strong master can defeat even an Expert (2000-2199).
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