Fifties (109 page)

When it was over, a reporter asked Mark Van Doren if he was proud of his son and the old man said yes, he was. Are you proud of what he did on the quiz shows? another reporter asked, and Mark wavered for a moment and said no, he was not, but at least Charles could get back to what he ought to be doing—teaching. That was something, he added, that he was very good at. At that point one of the reporters told Mark Van Doren what he did not yet know: that the board of trustees at Columbia had voted that day to fire Charles Van Doren as an instructor. A friend noted that the decision must have been like an arrow through the heart of the old man.

Charles Van Doren wrote Dick Goodwin a poignant note the next day, thanking him for his kindnesses during the preceding few weeks. “The dinner was superb, the accommodations splendid, and the conversation even at times uncharged with passion and danger. What an extraordinary evening it was. I will of course never forget it.... Hunters,” he continued, “used to say that the stag loved the hunter who killed it ... thus the tears, which were the tears of gratitude and affection. Something like that
does
happen, I know. And Raskolnikov felt the same. Thus Gerry [his wife] and I do extend an invitation to you to come and wish you would come. There are a number of things I’d like to talk to you about—none of them having to do with quiz shows. I made the mistake of reading the papers. I should have taken your advice. I wish the next six months were already over. There have been many hard things. But I am trying to tell you that we will live and thrive, I think—I mean I know we will live and I think we will thrive—and that you must never, in any way, feel any regret for your part in this. Perhaps it is nonsense to say that, but I thought it might just be possible that you would. Charlie.”

It was a traumatic moment for the country as well. Charles Van Doren had become the symbol of the best America had to offer. Some commentators wrote of the quiz shows as the end of American innocence. Starting with World War Two, they said, America had been on the right side: Its politicians and generals did not lie, and the
Americans had trusted what was written in their newspapers and, later, broadcast over the airwaves. That it all ended abruptly because one unusually attractive young man was caught up in something seedy and outside his control was dubious. But some saw the beginning of the disintegration of the moral tissue of America, in all of this. Certainly, many Americans who would have rejected a role in being part of a rigged quiz show if the price was $64 would have had to think a long time if the price was $125,000. John Steinbeck was so outraged that he wrote an angry letter to Adlai Stevenson that was reprinted in
The New Republic
and caused a considerable stir at the time. Under the title “Have We Gone Soft?” he raged, “If I wanted to destroy a nation I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick ... on all levels, American society is rigged.... I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.”

The scandal illuminated some things about television in addition to its growing, addictive power: The first was the capacity of a virtual stranger, with the right manner, to project a kind of pseudo-intimacy and to become an old and trusted friend in a stunningly short time. That would have profound ramifications, as television increasingly became the prime instrument of politics. The other thing it showed, and this was to be perhaps its most powerful lesson, was that television
cast
everything it touched: politics, news shows, and sitcoms. The demands of entertainment and theater were at least as powerful as substance. Among the first to benefit from that new casting requirement was a young junior senator from Massachusetts, who, like Charles Van Doren, was young, attractive, upper-class, and diffident because he was cool on a medium that was hot. If Charles Van Doren was the major new star of television in the late fifties, then he was to be replaced by John Kennedy as the new decade started.

As for Charles Van Doren, he quickly dropped out of the public arena. He moved to Chicago with his young family and, drawing on a family connection with Mortimer Adler, the editor of the Great Books series, he worked for the Encyclopedia Britannica as an editor. His life in Chicago was largely private, and he was not often seen in that city’s journalistic and literary circles. He and his wife, Geraldine Bernstein Van Doren, whom he had first met when she had a job answering the mail prompted by his early success on
Twenty-One,
reared two children there. He never wrote or spoke about the quiz-show events. When, on different occasions, journalists telephoned, suggesting that they were working on an article about that period
and asked to speak with him, they were told that Mr. Van Doren was living a very happy life and did not need or want to get involved in their project. He was the editor of a number of important collections, including
The Great Treasury of Western Thought,
and
The Joy of Reading,
but his ability to promote the books, and thereby enhance both their sales and his own reputation, was limited by his wariness of going on television. He was aware that if he made a book tour, he was not likely to be asked about the history of Western thought, or about the relative influence of Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas on our lives, but rather about Freedman, Enright, and Revson.

In the late 1980s, a distinguished television documentary maker named Julian Krainan was looking for a narrator-editor for a thirteen-part public television series on the history of philosophy. Krainan had read Van Doren’s work, had loved
The Joy of Reading,
and was impressed by the powerful sweep of his intellect. Krainan, some fifteen years younger than Van Doren, had only the vaguest memory of the quiz-show scandals some thirty years after they had taken place. He contacted Van Doren, and gradually they began to agree on the outline of a public television series. They seemed to like each other and liked dealing with each other. Then Krainan’s project hit a wall. The top people at PBS were wary about dealing with Van Doren until he himself dealt publicly with the quiz-show issue. At that point Krainan suggested doing a documentary on the quiz-show scandals. It would clear the air, lance the boil, and prepare the way for the multipart show on philosophy. Krainan also pointed out that Van Doren himself, on a number of occasions when the subject came up, always said that he had nothing to hide and nothing to apologize for.

Van Doren and Krainan went back and forth about doing a quiz-show documentary matter a number of times until one day Van Doren suddenly announced, “I’m going to do it. I should have done this a long time ago.” But a few days later he called to say that he’d reconsidered. Krainan went ahead with his documentary, which was exceptionally well received and much praised for its fairness and sensitivity. Of the important players still living, only Charles Van Doren refused to participate.

FORTY-FOUR

T
HE MOST INDELIBLE IMAGES
of America that fall came from Little Rock, scenes captured by still photographers and, far more significantly, by movie cameramen working for network television news shows. The first and most jarring of these images was of angry mobs of white rednecks, pure hatred contorting their faces, as they assaulted the nine young black students who dared to integrate Little Rock Central High. The second and almost equally chilling image came a few weeks later, showing the same black children entering the same school under the protection of elite U.S. Army paratroopers. The anger and hatred that had been smoldering just beneath the surface in the South since the enactment of
Brown
v.
Board of Education
had finally exploded, and now because of television, the whole nation and soon the whole world could watch America at war with itself.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but no one thought it would happen in Little Rock. Arkansas was a moderate state, as much a Southwestern state as it was truly Southern. Its medical and law schools had been integrated a decade earlier, without even a court order. Orval Faubus, the governor, was considered a moderate and there was no feverish quality to his voice when he spoke about issues of race. He seemed to lack the terrible hatred that infected so many Southern politicians. In 1955, when
Brown II
was handed down, Faubus had said: “It appears that the Court left some degree of decision in these matters to the Federal District courts. I believe this will guarantee against any sudden dislocation.... Our reliance must be upon the good will that exists between the races—the good will that has long made Arkansas a model for other Southern states in all matters affecting the relationship between the races.”

In his successful 1956 campaign for reelection, Faubus barely mentioned the race issue, and the Little Rock plan for integration was so gradual that initially only nine black students were to attend a white school. The plan called for integrating at the high school level and working downward, one grade, one year at a time. Originally, Virgil Blossom, the school superintendent, wanted to do just the opposite—beginning at the lower levels and working upward, on the theory that younger children would have less learned prejudice. But he found that white parental fear in the lower grades was more intense: parents were less nervous about their teenagers than their first-graders.

Blossom wanted only the ablest and most mature black students. A list of eighty at the old Horace Mann School who were interested in transferring was drawn up. School officials quickly whittled the number down to thirty-two. That was easy: As Blossom explained to parents and children the pressures they would surely be subjected to, many dropped out. Blossom and his staff met with all thirty-two families—both parents and children. Some students were told they were not ready for either the social pressure or the schoolwork. A few good athletes were told they might be better off staying at Horace Man because at a white school they would have to face the possibility that other schools might cancel games as a result of their being on the teams. The list shrank to seventeen names, and then, as rumors and doubts continued, only nine. That pleased the white leadership. The entire process had been designed to minimize the emotional impact of integration on the whites. If the local black leadership was not entirely thrilled with the cautious approach, it had accepted it as law, for the Blossom plan clearly met the test of
the Supreme Court and had been approved by the federal district court. Virgil Blossom was an affable man, whom Harry Ashmore, the executive editor of the liberal
Arkansas Gazette,
thought of as a “natural-born Rotarian.” He was named Little Rock’s man of the year in 1955, and both newspapers, the
Gazette
and the
Democrat,
as well as the city council and the chamber of commerce, backed his plan. Everybody in the local establishment seemed to be on board.

Harry Ashmore was the liberal working editor of the liberal
Arkansas Gazette,
one of the South’s best newspapers and, as far as he was concerned, Little Rock reflected the gradual evolution taking place in much of the urban postwar South, with the ascendance of a more moderate generation of white leadership. These younger men, most of whom had fought in World War Two, and who had in some way been broadened by that experience, did not welcome integration, Ashmore thought. Most of them, in fact, probably preferred things the way they were. But unlike their parents, they were not violently opposed to integration. It was not as emotional an issue with them as it had once been. They were businessmen first and foremost, and they understood that the world had changed and that to fight to maintain white supremacy would be self-defeating—it was probably a lost cause. They accepted the idea of “social justice”—that is, a fairer legal and political deal for blacks—but they remained wary of what they considered “social equality”—which implied an integrated dance at a country club, for instance. That went against everything in their upbringing. At the heart of their position was a desire to do business as usual and an acceptance that when it came to the crunch, the presence of a white redneck mob in the street was a greater threat to tranquility and daily commerce than was the integration of a school system or other public facilities. Thus they accepted the law of the land because they saw it, in long-range business terms, as the path of least resistance.

A few days before the schools were to open, Benjamin Fine, the education editor of
The New York Times,
came to town to cover the event, and years later Ashmore was amused by Fine’s initial purpose: to find out why Little Rock was handling so sensitive a matter with such exceptional ease. Fine visited Ashmore in his office, and the local editor predicted that there would be little more than routine verbal protests at the coming desegregation. In fact, just about everyone locally expected a rather peaceful transition. But Orval Faubus had started playing his cards ever closer to his vest, Ashmore noted. Still, the worst he expected was that Faubus would refuse to back the local police officials, thereby preserving his ties to the segregationists
without overtly blocking the law of the land as mandated by the district court.

Little Rock authorities felt particularly comfortable with the Blossom plan because the nine black students were chosen not merely for their exceptional educational abilities but for their strength of character as well. They came from middle-class families, black middle-class to be sure, which meant smaller incomes than that of white middle-class families, but they all had a strong sense of home and family. Religion played an important part in most of their homes. Typical was Terrance Roberts, fifteen, the second of seven children. His father was a Navy veteran who worked as a dietician at the veterans’ hospital in north Little Rock, and his mother ran a catering service out of their home. Though it was part of the white mythology that the NAACP in New York pushed unwilling parents to sacrifice their children to its subversive aims, the real drive to integrate usually came from the children themselves. The parents were nervous about a possible confrontation, but the children felt it was time to get on with integration. The
Brown
decision had been handed down three years previously, when they were twelve or thirteen, and with the idealism of the young, they trusted in their country and its laws. As Terrance Roberts told a reporter who asked him in the early days whether he was doing this at the urging of the NAACP, “Nobody urged me to go. The school board asked if I wanted to go. I thought if I got in, some of the other children would be able to go ... and have more opportunities.”