In 1962, Adler’s young friend and acolyte Charles Van Doren had received a suspended sentence following his conviction in New York State for perjury in the investigation into the fixed television game shows of the late 1950s.
As a sign that he was looking to the future, Van Doren published a scholarly article, “The Idea of an Encyclopedia,” in the American Behavioral Scientist that same year. In the article, Van Doren argued that American encyclopedias should no longer be mere compilations of facts (a criticism of the 14th Edition). He said they should educate, as well as inform. He also argued against encyclopedias that classified information in artificial pigeonholes reflecting university politics, and spoke in favor of celebrating the natural interrelatedness of man’s knowledge:
It takes a brave man to master more than one discipline nowadays; bravery is not totally absent from our society, and so heroes can be found. But the man who attempts to find the principles which underlie two or more disciplines is considered not brave, but mad or subversive. Those whom graduate schools have put asunder, let no man join together!
Van Doren’s article on encyclopedic form was influential enough to be selected for inclusion along with Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic essay in the 1967 compilation, The Growth of Knowledge: Readings on Organization and Retrieval of Information. This book also took note of the theoretical work being done in automated text retrieval by Gerald Salton of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell.
When Adler moved back to Chicago to join Britannica, it is not surprising that he quickly found a place for Van Doren. Van Doren was a son of Adler’s old Columbia University teaching colleague and friend, poet Mark Van Doren, and Adler had known him since birth. As Charles Van Doren put it when he spoke at a 2001 memorial service following Adler’s death at age 98:
And then there came the time when I fell down, face down in the mud, and he picked me up, brushed me off and gave me a job. It was the best kind of job: As he described it, one you would do anyway if you did not need the money. First, we worked together making books for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then I, and many others, helped him to design and edit the greatest encyclopedia the world has ever seen.
The source of Van Doren’s infamy permeated the rest of his life, including his career as an editor at Britannica. At the same time I joined Britannica as General Counsel in 1986, Peter Norton succeeded Charles Swanson as President of the company. When I once asked Norton about Van Doren’s time at EB, he said a few times he had heard a mean-spirited person hum under their breath Dum, Dum, DUM! Dum, Dum, DUM! when Van Doren entered a room. This was the sound of the drums heard on the crooked Twenty-One television show when Van Doren had been feigning to struggle with an answer he’d been given in advance.
The appearance of Van Doren at his mentor Adler’s memorial service in 2001 was a rare public outing. In the years since his 1957 crowning as the new champion of the rigged TV game show, and his hiring shortly thereafter as a “cultural correspondent” on the popular nationwide NBC Today show, Van Doren had mostly avoided the limelight. The big exception to his falling out of public view of course, was his 1959 Congressional testimony before the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight. This abruptly made him a pariah for television and also foreclosed a return to the academy. His later career writing books with Adler and as Editorial Vice President of Britannica was notably out of the public eye. He had left EB in 1982, four years before I arrived.
As Executive Vice President of Britannica as well as General Counsel, from time to time I managed a number of relationships with the partners around the world who were publishing translations of the Encyclopædia Britannica into different languages. Usually this was when something in the relationship was going terribly wrong. So, when I began dealing with a copyright infringement of the Encyclopædia Britannica in Greek, I dove into the files to read the correspondence and contractual underpinnings of EB’s relationship with our Greek licensee. What I found was that I was walking in Van Doren’s footsteps. In the 1970s he had negotiated and concluded a very complicated agreement that had substantially benefitted both EB and its licensee over the intervening years.
With this background in mind, after Adler’s funeral service I had a chance to chat with Van Doren. As I had also worked with Adler over the years, I told him I thought he had captured the man nicely in his remarks. When I told him that the Greek language version of the Britannica he had nurtured was still going strong, his eyes lit up as he briefly and enthusiastically spoke about his EB career.
Apart from his comments at Adler’s memorial service, he was rarely heard from in all the years following his humiliating confession before Congress. One other exception was in 1999 when Columbia University’s Class of 1959 invited its former teacher back to speak at its 40th Reunion At that time, Van Doren told them:
Some of you read with me forty years ago a portion of Aristotle’s Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well. I remember better, because, despite the abrupt caesura in my academic career that occurred in 1959, I have gone on teaching the humanities almost continually to students of all kinds and ages.
In case you don’t remember, then, I remind you that according to Aristotle happiness is not a feeling or sensation but instead is the quality of a whole life. The emphasis is on “whole,” a life from beginning to end. Especially the end. The last part, the part you’re now approaching, was for Aristotle the most important for happiness. It makes sense, doesn’t it?
When Robert McHenry’s began his career as an EB editor working for Van Doren, he came to have a much more positive view of Van Doren than he held for Adler
Charles Van Doren was acknowledged by those who knew him to be perhaps the most naturally charming man of their acquaintance. Many were doubtless surprised to discover that he could be quite jovial and kindly. It was understood that one did not ask about or allude to the quiz-show affair.
Some 40 years after McHenry and Van Doren first met, when both were retired, McHenry stopped by Van Doren’s Connecticut home for a last visit with his longtime friend and mentor. The visit revealed another side of the man who was known around Britannica as “CVD.” McHenry recalls, “Quite unexpectedly, Van Doren made a point of apologizing to me for having insisted that his name appear also as co-editor of the first three books I had produced while working for him.”
