November 2, 1959: The Quiz Show Scandal

Charles Van Doren

November 2, 1959: The television "quiz show scandal" reaches its peak, with its biggest beneficiary confessing before Congress.

Television networks have always cared more about money, and therefore ratings, than integrity. So several TV game shows rigged their results in the 1950s, to let viewers see more attractive people win.

Twenty-One, hosted by Jack Barry, and produced by Barry and Dan Enright, premiered on NBC on September 12, 1956. As Enright himself said in an interview in 1991:

In fact, the first show of Twenty-One was not rigged, and the first show of Twenty-One was a dismal failure. It was just plain dull. Neither contestant was able to answer the questions, and the score remained at zero. It lacked all drama, it lacked all suspense.

And next morning, the sponsor called my partner, Jack Barry, and me, and told us in no uncertain terms that he never wanted to see a repeat of what happened the previous night. And from that moment on, we decided to rig Twenty-One.

Herb Stempel, a 29-year-old postal clerk and former U.S. Army intelligence officer from The Bronx, soon appeared as a contestant. Although a brilliant man whose IQ was measured at 170, Enright coached him on some answers, and he won, kept on winning. But Twenty-One wasn't doing as well as NBC's other big game show, The $64,000 Question.

($64,000 in 1956 would be worth about $700,000 in 2022. The show was so popular, rival CBS not only mentioned it twice on The Honeymooners, but parodied it, putting Jackie Gleason's character Ralph Kramden on a show titled The $99,000 Answer. $99,000 then would be worth about $1.08 million now.)

So, with Stempel still winning, they found Charles Van Doren. Then 30 and teaching at New York's Columbia University, he was the son of Mark Van Doren, also a professor at Columbia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. He was handsome, and Stempel looked like a stereotypical nerd (a word that was only beginning to catch on). He had an interesting job, and Stempel didn't. Stempel was already married, so that wasn't a story; Van Doren was engaged, so that was a story.

On December 5, 1956, after winning $69,500 (about $761,000 in 2022), Stempel, as they said in boxing parlance, took a dive: He was asked what film won the most recent Academy Award for Best Picture. He knew the answer was Marty, because he identified with the main character, played by Ernest Borgnine: Although he wasn't a butcher, he was a homely guy from The Bronx who nonetheless found true love. But, having been given wins he hadn't deserved, he was now told to lose, and he did: He answered with the previous year's Best Picture winner, On the Waterfront. Van Doren had become champion.

After his loss, Stempel overheard one backstage technician say to another, "At least, we finally have a clean-cut intellectual on this program, not a freak with a sponge memory." Van Doren ended up winning $129,000 (about $1.37 million in 2022), which he certainly didn't need, given his family's wealth. He was finally defeated on March 11, 1957, by Vivienne Nearing, a lawyer whose husband had previously been defeated by Van Doren.

Stempel began telling people that the show was rigged, but Enright insisted that Stempel was just jealous of Van Doren's success. It was Stempel's word against those of many others, until the Manhattan District Attorney's office found other contestants, on Twenty-One and other game shows, who said they were coached.

Van Doren was hired as a correspondent on NBC's Today Show. By 1959, enough evidence had been gathered that Frank Hogan, the Manhattan D.A., shared his evidence with Congress. Congress' lead investigator was Richard Goodwin, who later became a speechwriter for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and later married historian Doris Kearns.

Knowing that they had promoted Van Doren tremendously, and now could only minimize the damage, not prevent it, NBC convinced Van Doren to testify before the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight. On November 2, he did so:

I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception. The fact that I, too, was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol. There may be a kind of justice in that.

In his book The Fifties, journalist David Halberstam wrote:

Aware of Van Doren's great popularity, the committee members handled him gently and repeatedly praised him for his candor. Only Congressman Steve Derounian announced that he saw no particular point in praising someone of Van Doren's exceptional talents and intelligence for simply telling the truth. With that, the room suddenly exploded with applause, and Richard N. Goodwin knew at that moment ordinary people would not so easily forgive Van Doren.

Derounian was a Republican who represented a district on New York's Long Island from 1953 to 1965.

Goodwin was right: Van Doren was fired by NBC, and, knowing he would be fired if he didn't, he resigned his post at Columbia. Eventually, after making money by writing books under pen names so as not to prejudice them, he bounced back, and got a job as an editor with The Encyclopedia Britannica.

Stempel got a job with the New York City Department of Transportation. 

Barry and Enright also bounced back, creating new game shows, finally having another hit in 1972 with The Joker's Wild. Barry was still that show's host when he died in 1984. Enright followed in 1992, Derounian in 2007, Goodwin in 2018, Van Doren in 2019, Stempel in 2020.

The 1994 film Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford (who tended not to appear in the films he directed), starred John Turturro as Stempel, Ralph Fiennes as Van Doren, Christopher McDonald as Barry, David Paymer as Enright, and Rob Morrow as Goodwin.

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November 2, 1959 was a Monday. Baseball season was over. Football was in midweek: There would be no Monday Night Football for another 11 years. And no games were scheduled for the NBA or the NHL that night. So there were no scores on this historic day.