Word: doren
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...