Van Doren & Beyond

As the red-eyed, haggard witness strode into the House Caucus room, two rows of standees in the rear strained forward to glimpse at the unwilling star of TV's dimmest hour. Charles Lincoln Van Doren folded himself uncomfortably into the witness chair, gulped some water, then stripped away the last layer of illusion separating him from the shills. "I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years," began Van Doren in a remarkable confession (see box).

The fraud had not been occasional, as his fans had hoped; it was not merely a matter of a few questions supplied to keep him going after he had reached the top on his own. It had been as carefully planned from the start as a well-organized stock swindle. He had lied again and again, first indignantly denying all, then thrusting up new lies containing partial admissions. Almost with relish, Van Doren testified that he had been foolish, naive, prideful, avaricious. To the hilt, he was the anguished soul torn by struggles of conscience--and when he finished, there was barely a dry eye among the Congressmen. In an outburst of Senator Claghorn sentimentality, most lauded his "fortitude" and "soul searching." After Van Doren thanked the committee and said he hoped that he would not do "that sort of thing again," Chairman Oren Harris said: "I think you have a great future ahead of you. God bless you." Only New York's Republican Steven B. Derounian (Nassau County) shattered the love feast. "I don't think," he said coldly, "that an adult of your intelligence ought to be commended for telling the truth."

"From My Own Hand." The Van Doren statement, stripped of its emotionalism, was, in fact, riddled not only with pomposity, self-pity and self-dramatization, but also with phony arguments. Item: Van Doren said that he repeatedly wanted to get off the show, but that Producer Albert Freedman would not free him. No Congressman bothered to ask why Van Doren did not retire, or, if he wanted to be more polite about it, did not intentionally muff a question to get out of the isolation booth. Item: Van Doren testified that he was making a clean breast of the whole sordid story for the benefit of his "millions" of friends--and particularly one unnamed woman whose letter had moved him. In fact, he was cornered by a subpoena from a congressional committee. Furthermore, the evidence of fraud was overwhelming, and Van Doren had already admitted that he had perjured himself in his testimony before the grand jury in New York.

Just before testifying last week, Charles made a last-ditch attempt to wangle favored treatment from newsmen. To the nation's top TV critics and commentators--NBC's Chet Huntley, the New York Times's Jack Gould, the New York Herald Tribune's John Crosby, et al.--he mailed copies of his prepared statement along with personal notes looking for sympathy. Wrote he to Critic Crosby: "I wanted you to have a copy of this complete from my own hand. It's not a pleasant story, but I tried to make it a true one at least. I'm sure I won't read anything you write so don't worry about that."

"I Came to Love Charles." Many of the nation's editorial writers were unmoved. The New York Post's Columnist William V. Shannon summed it up for the dissidents when he called Van Doren's testimony "a tasteless exercise in guile and unction. The basic problem seems to be his iron egotism. Can't we have a manly, straightforward admission of error without all this hokum about his 'responsibilities to my fellow men'? . . . I could not care less whether Charlie Van Doren made $10 or $129,000. But dignity, self-respect, restraint and detachment are civilized values that we should cherish. Van Doren affronted those values as much (before the subcommittee) as he ever did on Twenty One."

On the other hand, Van Doren's come-clean statement struck some highly sensitive and sympathetic nerves. When NBC sacked him from his $50,000 post, more than 700 letters poured into the network, 5 to 1 in favor of Van Doren. When Columbia University "accepted his resignation" as an assistant professor of English, hundreds of students held a rally for him. (But one leaned out of a dorm window and cried, "Hey, Charlie's going to be in the quad tomorrow to give out the answers to the Comparative Lit exam.") Officials of several colleges hinted that they would welcome his job applications. Among them: St. John's, the "great books" college in Annapolis, Md., where he took his B.A. In Manhattan, a new magazine called Leisure asked Van Doren to write a column titled "The Intellect at Leisure."

On his Today show, Dave Garroway wept. Said he: "I came to love Charles. He wronged himself, of course." Then Garroway broke down, left the show. Few viewers knew that the sequence was taped the afternoon before; NBC kept it in the can overnight, sobs and all, then put it on the air. It was quite a show, but NBC was missing a bet by not rerunning some of the old films of Van Doren in the Twenty One isolation booth, mopping his brow and muttering, "Let's skip that part of the question till later, please," and pretending to struggle for an answer that he had been handed, complete with acting script, a few hours before. Old Twenty One fans particularly remember one script, asking for the name of the character in Verdi's La Traviata who sings Sempre libera. "She sings it right at the end of a party given by . . ." whispered the sweating Van Doren at the time. "What's her name! Soprano. Her name is like . . . Violetta! Violetta!"

It would all make great viewing in 1959.

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