A curious thing happened the other day. Someone in a forum I frequent asked for advice on improving his or her grammar and reading skills. Now, you may not be able to tell from reading my diaries here, but I am something of a grammarphile. So I rattled off a few books that I felt would be helpful to the poster: Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss; Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O'Conner; and How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, edited by Charles Van Doren. I headed over the Amazon.com to grab the links to the titles I had recommended, and was surprised to see that a new book from Charles Van Doren had recently been published.
Van Doren's new book is called The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World's Best Authors and Their Works. I was aware that Van Doren was alive and well, living in New England, but it has been over 15 years since he published a book, so I was surprised to see a new work from him. I decided to Google Van Doren and discovered that just over a week ago Van Doren broke his 40-year silence on the "Twenty-One" scandal.
Van Doren's account of the 1950s quiz show scandals, "All the Answers," appeared in the July 28th edition of The New Yorker. At any other time Van Doren's brief biography likely would have incited at least a little buzz. Unfortunately, though, his story hit in the wake of the Obama cover controversy and was utterly ignored.
Charles Van Doren's father, Mark Van Doren, and uncle, Carl Van Doren, were both Pulitzer prize winning authors and well-respected professors at Columbia University. In the 1950s the younger Van Doren was trying to live up to his name, and failing. While he was able to make a nepotistic leap into an instructorship at Columbia University, his writing career was going nowhere. But in the mid-1950s Van Doren got an opportunity to achieve his own kind of celebrity on a popular game show called "Twenty-One." There was just one problem, "Twenty-One" was fixed.
Van Doren's involvement with "Twenty-One" would ultimately lead to shame and criminal charges. In 1959 he pled guilty to 2nd degree perjury for lying to the Grand Jury during the course of an investigation into the quiz shows. He was fired from Columbia University and from a gig on NBC's "Today" that he had been given following his run on "Twenty-One."
In 1994 Robert Redford directed Quiz Show, a film about the "Twenty-One" controversy based on Richard Goodwin's book Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. Goodwin was the investigator from the subcommittee of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce who broke the case. He would go on to write speeches for John Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy.
Redford's film was captivating. His unique directing style took a subject that could have been boring and tedious and made it compelling and suspenseful. Richard Goodwin and Herb Stempel both acted as consultants during the production of the film, but Van Doren chose to remain his silence. For four decades Charles Van Doren maintained that silence, but now his silence is broken.
Van Doren's article doesn't offer anything new, but it does provide an interesting glimpse into his state of mind during this part of his life.
One question that has to be asked about the "Twenty-One" scandal is, why did the government care so much? Was the shame and humiliation that Van Doren was put through an appropriate punishment for his sin? And, would we care so much today? If Ken Jennings was discovered a fraud who had been fed answers, would we feel as betrayed as TV viewers did in the 1950s?