The people arguing back and forth on these things have been doing very nicely without me, and I would not get into it at all, if it weren’t for one assumption the commentators on all sides seem to share, namely that the disclosure of the program’s rigging and of Van Doren’s complicity in it came as a terrible, disillusioning blow to all. Not to me, it didn’t. I couldn’t have been happier at the news, and I knew a lot of others who felt the same way. Far from being disillusioned, we variously felt vindicated, amused and redeemed. We were glad it was fake.

This was not merely because we were bratty young intellectual strivers at the time, although we were and that was surely part of it. But even brats have an occasional insight, and I think ours was valid. Put in stargazing terms we saw in the event two quite distinct constellations, Scam Minor and Scam Major. Scam Minor was the fact that the quiz show itself, with all its simulated sweating and suspense as the contestants allegedly wrestled within their brilliant minds to come up with the difficult answer, was a hoax, since they already had the answers. Scam Major, which, in our view, was really much bigger, was the fact that up until the blessed moment of its unmasking, this ridiculous exercise in what appeared to be memorization and total reference-book recall was being touted and widely accepted as having something, if not actually everything, to do with the life of the mind.

Quiz shows had been around for years, but they hadn’t always had such pretensions or generated them among broadcast audiences. Radio’s Dr. IQ-the “Mental Banker”-who would challenge contestants to repeat verbatim some doggerel he had just uttered for something like “twelve silver dollars,” as I recall, would unctuously offer them a box of Mars bars as a consolation prize when they failed, which they almost always did. “Truth or Consequences” punished contestants who got the answer wrongly making them do some silly stunt. Things were a little more upscale with “Information Please,” a small panel of critics and authors who awed listeners with their urbanity and erudition; and there was probably not a household in America in which parents did not at one point or another ask their own children why they weren’t as clever as the vaunted radio “Quiz Kids.” But all this was somewhere in the realm of harmless pastime, showbiz, play. There was even a much-beloved parody quiz show on the air for a while, a kind of three-panelist inversion of “Information Please” called “it Pays to Be Ignorant,” whose theme song went: “It pays to be ignorant, to be dumb, to be dense, to be ignorant. It pays to be ignorant just like me.” Its panelists never got anything right, only spectacularly and hilariously wrong.

I suppose that people wouldn’t have liked it at all if they had learned that the sages on “Information Please” had been fed the answers in advance or that the astounding tykes on the “Quiz Kids” had been prompted from offstage. But no one would have felt that the revelation was going to diminish the regard for intelligence in the society or impair the standing of scholarship or cause millions of impressionable people to revise their values once again and decide that dodos (whom they were said, in the ’50s, to have dropped in favor of Charles Van Doren) were the only suitable role models, after all. Even as the quiz shows crept along from the nuttiness of late ’30s and ’40s radio to the expanded and bigger-bucks televised prize shows that took hold in the ’50s, this dreadful, misbegotten gravity wasn’t much in evidence. It made its really important appearance with Van Doren and was cultivated not only by the broadcasters and the media, but also enthusiastically and shamelessly by him. Van Doren seemed to like to talk about what his success was doing to give intellectuality a good name.

The famous Time magazine cover story on Van Doren, which is mentioned in Robert Redford’s movie for the very big deal it was at the time, reflected the reigning confusion of the day. Van Doren had given parents hope because now their children admired him, not Elvis. He had made the “egghead” a hero. And, best of all, he didn’t seem like a “bookworm,” but more like a “well-rounded” guy. NEWSWEEK sang from the same songbook, quoting the quizmaster: “He’s a bookworm without appearing to be one. “And again: “learning has returned to fashion.” It was at once grandiose, tawdry and silly. Learning was seen not as a pursuit that brings satisfaction or joy, but rather as a practical road to celebrity (and, in this case, lots of money). It was not about reflection but about showing of. It was competitive. It was superficial in its concept of both what knowledge is and what thinking is about - one of the European offshoots of the American game show is wonderfully described in a NEWSWEEK of the period: “For the final part of his $1,000 question, Ulf was asked which fish had eyelids.” Maybe we bratty kids were too hard on all this. But I note that in the movie, anyway, Van Doren’s own professor father has pretty much the same attitude, telling his son at one point that cheating in a quiz show is like “plagiarizing a comic strip.” It wasn’t just intellectual snootiness that made many of us feel this way. Pretty much at the same time, as a consequence of the Soviets’ lofting of the first satellite I Sputnik, into orbit, there was a campaign to make scholarship more prestigious for the purpose of overtaking them in this race. I don’t doubt either that we needed more attention to science or that Sputnik was a pretty good excuse for getting more funds for education and was opportunistically used by many for this good purpose. But it all added up to such a misrepresentation and vulgarization and selling short of both the purpose and the satisfactions of learning that the finding of fraud on “Twenty-One” seemed to some of us, anyway, not a bummer but a reprieve, a win, not a loss for the the right way of looking at things.