It hasn’t made much of a blip in the news cycle, but Charles Van Doren, the onetime Columbia professor notorious for having cheated on the 1950s quiz show Twenty-One, has broken his five-decade silence and penned a lengthy reminiscence of his role in the scandal for The New Yorker. And the whole article is finally on-line, here.

It’s definitely worth a read, even if you’ve read Goodwin’s book, seen the PBS doc, seen the Redford film, etc. I didn’t know, for example, that Van Doren served an ill-conceived term as an NBC White House correspondent following his game show run. (I guess I should count my blessings that this never happened to me.) And he details what happened when he tried to tell him eminent father about his complicity in the show-rigging, and it’s easily the equal of the great “chocolate cake” scene with Paul Scofield in Quiz Show.

I suspected for a while that something like this might be coming; Van Doren has been peeking out from under the radar for the past few years. He gave some kind of keynote address at a Columbia event not long ago, and last year, while being interviewed by some small county newspaper about his work or teaching or something, he even talked briefly about his Twenty-One memories.

When Brainiac was about to come out in 2006, I pitched a few magazines on an look back at the scandals, pegged to the then-upcoming fiftieth anniversary of Van Doren-Stempel. Esquire was sort of interested, but I couldn’t quite make the sale. One of the reasons I wanted to write the article was to meet the elusive Van Doren–I felt like he and I might have a quiz-show-notoriety bond, and maybe I could get him to talk. (I gather from others I’ve talked to that the two problems with reporting the quiz show scandal are (a) getting Van Doren to talk, and (b) getting Herb Stempel to stop talking.) But the New Yorker article makes me think I wouldn’t have had any luck; Van Doren only wanted to tell the story on his own terms.

I like the idea of Van Doren as this great morally-conflicted, tragic-flaw kind of hero, Ralph Fiennes in Quiz Show, but my game show experience has made me see his complicity as understandable–even inevitable. Rigging the programs to make them more exciting was contemptible, of course, but that was the producers’ fault. I know from experience that any non-industry person in their first blush of TV fame is nervous, completely out of their element, completely open to any kind of comforting guidance from The Powers That Be, even if it seems surprising or wrong. Susceptible to suggestion, like a hypnotism subject. They’re the producers, right? They must know what they’re doing. Better just to do what you’re told–you’re already panicky, after all, and it’s once less thing to worry about.

For one TV appearance, I was asked what I was going to do with all my game show winnings. I said I had some charitable donations in mind, and outlined them vaguely. A producer very sweetly told me that, instead of talking about philanthropy, I should say my wife wanted a new kitchen. That’s what people want to hear.

“America’s more interested in granite countertops than charity?” I said incredulously.

“Well, it’s ‘relatable.’” “Relatable!” I thought TV-speak like that only existed in the bitter, post-cancellation episodes of Arrested Development.

But you know what? When the cameras were on, I wimped out and dutifully reported how much my wife wanted a new kitchen. One less thing to worry about. Unleashing my inner, wimpy Van Doren.