From Volume 5, Issue Number 42 of EIR Online, Published Oct. 17, 2006

Latest From LaRouche

How Not To Play Chess

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

October 9, 2006

Out of the lesser true-to-life legends from the U.S.A. of World War II, came the story of the security guards at a war-time defense plant, who were perplexed by their failed attempts to discover what might be buried in that sand conveyed out through the plant gate by employees regularly pushing relevant wheelbarrows through the exit check-points.

The story runs: years later a former guard asked one of those employees: "Tell me, between you and me, what were you guys stealing?"

The answer came: "Wheelbarrows."

Déjà vu!

For me, who knew that generation of war-time defense-industry employees, and the rationing system of that time, the story of "wheelbarrows" had verisimilitude. But, consider another story with a similar point, for which I can account of my own direct knowledge, a story of my experience with the game of chess.

Anyone who knows the secret of the game of chess, would understand why the game became, eventually, too boring for me to play with zest any longer, He or she will therefore also understand what I see as the failing in strategic intelligence-skills shown in an otherwise worthwhile piece of current journalism by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the co-authors of Hubris.

I had been introduced to the game of chess by a memorably generous teacher, Lew Thistle, during my Junior year at Lynn English High School. My notorious lack of competitive spirit, then as now, meant that I was never the best across the board, but was able to excel on a relatively higher scale of performance in other ways, as in blindfold chess games, with fair performance at the Prussian game of Schachspiel, and with great success, relatively speaking, in dealing with up to eight tyros simultaneously, while I was blindfolded, but highly amused, in the course of a return voyage from abroad, on shipboard, at the close of my military service....

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