The Rivalry
Chapter One
Chapter 1
1
ON THE NIGHT of November 7, 1959, people lined up on the sidewalks outside Boston’s North Station, a dingy yellow-brick building, and crowded along the bar at the Iron Horse, the old drinking-parlor inside. They stood in clusters on Causeway Street and Haverhill Street and Canal Street, their voices almost drowned out by the thundering traffic on the elevated highways and subway tracks that crossed above them on iron girders, and by the hiss and clang of the trains in the rail yards.
The citizens of Boston had much to debate that evening. In Washington, D.C., Charles Van Doren, the thirty-three-year-old Columbia University English professor, had just admitted to a congressional committee that the producers of Twenty-One, the television quiz show that had turned him into a national icon, had been secretly prepping him with the answers to questions. Senator John Kennedy, who had all but announced his intention to run for president the following year, had been touring California and Oregon the previous week, greeted by ecstatic crowds carrying signs saying “Viva Kennedy!” In Boston itself, a newspaper str ... read full excerpt from The Rivalry ebook
