Everything about Charles Van Doren totally explained
Charles Lincoln Van Doren (born
February 12,
1926,
New York City), a noted
American intellectual, writer, and editor, is still remembered best for his involvement in television's
quiz show scandals of the
1950s. He confessed in a public forum before the
United States Congress that he'd been given the right answers by the producers of the hit show
Twenty One, whose producers used his on-screen appeal successfully to attract more viewers.
Background
The son of
Pulitzer Prize-winning
poet and literary critic/teacher
Mark Van Doren and
novelist and writer
Dorothy Van Doren, Charles Van Doren was a committed academic with an unusually broad range of interests. He earned a
B.A. degree in
Liberal Arts from
St. John's College in
Annapolis, Maryland, as well as a
master's degree in
astrophysics and a
doctorate in English, both at
Columbia University.
Quiz show star
Twenty One actually wasn't Van Doren's first interest. As several histories of the quiz scandals since have attested, and as Van Doren himself acknowledged when he eventually testified to the
United States Congress after the rigging scandal had been exposed, he approached producers
Dan Enright and Albert Freedman to appear on another game they produced,
Tic-Tac-Dough. But Enright and Freedman were impressed by Van Doren's polite style and telegenic appearance, thinking the youthful Columbia teacher might be just the man to defeat their incumbent
Twenty One champion,
Herb Stempel, and boost the show's slowing ratings as Stempel's reign continued.
In January 1957, Van Doren entered a winning streak that ultimately earned him more than $129,000 and made him famous in his own right, including an appearance on the cover of
TIME on
February 11 1957. His
Twenty One run ended on
March 11, when he lost to Vivienne Nearing, a lawyer whose husband Van Doren had previously beaten. But he was offered a three-year contract with
NBC News as a special "cultural correspondent" for
Today, as well as to make guest appearances on other NBC programs. He even served as
Today's substitute host when regular host
Dave Garroway took a brief vacation.
Quiz show scandal
When allegations of cheating were first raised, by Stempel and others, Van Doren denied any wrongdoing, saying "It's silly and distressing to think that people don't have more faith in quiz shows." But on
November 2,
1959, he
admitted
to the
House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, a
United States Congress subcommittee, chaired by Arkansas Democrat Oren Harris, that he'd been given questions and answers in advance of the show.
Film version
The story of the
quiz show scandal and Van Doren's role in it's depicted in the film
Quiz Show (
1994; he was portrayed by
British actor
Ralph Fiennes), produced and directed by
Robert Redford and written by
Paul Attanasio. A box-office hit, the film also earned several critiques questioning its use of dramatic license, its accuracy, and even the motivation behind its making.
The critics have included Joseph Stone, the
New York prosecutor who began the investigations in the first place; and, Jeffrey Hart, a Dartmouth College scholar, senior editor of
National Review, and old friend of Van Doren, who saw the film as falsely implying tension between Van Doren and his accomplished father, while suggesting also that Van Doren was a different kind of innocent.
In addition, in the movie, congressional investigator
Richard Goodwin is depicted as unraveling the scandal almost single-handedly. Virtually no mention is made of a major grand-jury investigation conducted by Manhattan district attorney
Frank Hogan. However, nothing that anyone did violated any law that was in effect at the time, so no one went to jail as a result of direct involvement in the quiz show scandals.
Aftermath
Van Doren was dropped from NBC and resigned from his post of assistant professor at
Columbia University. But his life after the scandal proved anything but broken; as television historian Robert Metz wrote (in
CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye), "Fortunately, ours is a forgiving society, and Van Doren proved strong in the face of adversity." He became an
editor at Praeger Books and a pseudonymous (at first) writer, before becoming an editor of the
Encyclopædia Britannica and the author of several books, of which the simplified text,
A History of Knowledge may be his best known. He also co-authored
How to Read a Book, with philosopher
Mortimer J. Adler.
Currently, Van Doren is an adjunct professor at the
University of Connecticut,
Torrington branch.
Van Doren still refuses interviews or public comment when the subject is the quiz show scandals. But in a 1985 interview on
The Today Show---his only appearance on the program since his dismissal in 1959, plugging his book
The Joy Of Reading---he answered a general question on how the scandal changed his life. He has revisited Columbia University only twice in the 40 years that followed his resignation: in 1984, when his son graduated; and, in 1999, at a reunion of Columbia's Class of 1959, which entered the university when Van Doren first became a teacher there in 1955.
During the latter appearance, Van Doren made one allusion to the quiz scandal without mentioning it by name:
Further Information
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