If French scandals are usually about money and British scandals about sex, American scandals tend to be about ethics. And every now and then, from the Black Sox of the 1919 World Series to the 1973 Soap Box Derby, some episode roils the popular culture and re-spoils our national innocence. Exactly 60 years ago, it was the television quiz show scandals, whose principal protagonist, Charles Van Doren, died last week, age 93.
Sometimes it’s hard to discern why such episodes resonate, but not here. When the scandal broke, television was a relatively new and increasingly pervasive element in American life and the 1950s were perceived as a tranquil domestic interlude after the Great Depression and World War II. Quiz shows, in which “ordinary” contestants matched wits and erudition for impressive sums, dominated network programming. Van Doren, the charming, good-looking, self-effacing Ivy League-certified son of a famous literary clan, comforted America when he won an unprecedented $129,000 (about a million in today’s dollars) on an NBC show called “Twenty-One.”
In some respects, Van Doren was an unlikely TV celebrity. The son of poet-critic Mark Van Doren and nephew of historian/biographer Carl Van Doren, he had served in the Army Air Forces during the war, had breezed through the Great Books curriculum at St. John’s College, and been a graduate student at Cambridge and the Sorbonne. Starting out as a mathematician, he switched to the family business when he earned a doctorate in literature at Columbia and was a promising instructor in English there when, in 1956, he was introduced to a pair of NBC producers.
The network had a problem. Part of the formula for “Twenty-One’s” success was the well-disguised fact that questions and answers were known in advance to contestants: The winners and losers — the anguished expressions, elation, and head-scratching — were deliberately orchestrated. But the show was suffering a ratings decline and the cause was believed to be its reigning champion, a rumpled autodidact City College student named Herb Stempel. NBC was looking for a physical and temperamental contrast to the unprepossessing Stempel and found it in the suave Van Doren. The fact that he bore some resemblance to another admired Van of the era — pianist Van Cliburn, who won the 1958 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow — did him no harm.
In fact, the producers were too successful. In the course of the 1956-57 season, Van Doren became something of a national phenomenon and parlayed his ratings and oversized paycheck into a regular berth on The Today Show. The idea of a Columbia English professor on daytime TV was considerably more exotic in the late 1950s than it might be today, but in any case, Stempel, the “Twenty-One” contestant who had been forced to give way to the show’s new favorite son, grew increasingly and dangerously resentful. Rumors and accusations of rigged television quiz shows and pay-for-play bribery on radio attracted the attention of New York prosecutors and, inevitably, Congress.
Initially, Van Doren denied the allegations in public. “It’s silly and distressing to think that people don’t have more faith in quiz shows,” he said. He denied it, too, in testimony before a Manhattan grand jury and went into hiding. But by the time a House subcommittee convened hearings on the matter in November 1959, Van Doren was forced to emerge and confess to Congress that “I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception” and offer a not-especially-persuasive defense: “The fact that I, too, was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception because I was its principal symbol.”
Then as now, retribution for the fallen hero was swift. Van Doren resigned from Columbia, was dismissed by NBC, convicted (but not imprisoned) for perjury, and, for a brief, instructive period, served as an object lesson in national cynicism. To his credit, Van Doren redeemed himself in the following decades, resuming his scholarly labors in genteel obscurity, teaching and editing and wisely refraining from involvement in the popular 1994 movie on the subject, “Quiz Show.” He had paid the price America exacts for breaking its heart.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
