Van Doren was the central figure in the TV game-show scandals of the late 1950s and eventually pleaded guilty to perjury for lying to a grand jury that investigated them
“It’s been hard to get away, partly because the man who cheated on ‘Twenty-One’ is still part of me,” he wrote in a 2008 New Yorker essay, his first public comment in years.in late 1956 and early ‘57, vanquishing 13 competitors and winning a then-record US$129,000. NBC hired him as a commentator.
“Just by being himself,” Time wrote, “he has enabled a giveaway show, the crassest of lowbrow entertainments, to whip up a doting mass audience for a new kind of TV idol – of all things, an egghead.” He retreated to his family’s home in rural West Cornwall, Conn., after telling a congressional committee in 1959 that he was coached before each segment of the show.
Mr. Van Doren broke his silence in 2008, writing an account of his downfall in The New Yorker and how he finally had publicly admitted a half-century earlier that he was “foolish, naive, prideful and avaricious.”
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