Sonny Fox on
contestant Patty Duke
Well, Patty told me this at lunch one afternoon and I was absolutely appalled, because when Patty was on "[The] $64,000 Question," doing spelling, they coached her -- I know who it was from Patty but I will let Patty mention the name if she wants to -- coached her in the answers. That's when she was about twelve. Three years later she's about fifteen, she was summoned down to the Senate to testify in their investigation and she was coached again in how to lie to the U.S. Senate. And she went down and she testified and she lied until she was ready to step down when one of the Senators looked at her and said, "Now Patty, is everything you told us here today the truth." At which point she broke down and started to cry and said, "No." They put her back on the stand and then she told the whole story. To me the appalling enormity of this still strikes me. To coach a twelve-year-old into how to lie and then to coach a teenager into how to lie again to the U.S. Senate is to me the most poignant and startling demonstration of how widespread and deep this sort of corruption had led us. And it was a sort of -- I don't think it was immoral so much as amoral. I think that's what I would call it. It was the pursuit of ratings and success and wealth and anything that worked, worked. And the excuse was, heck this is just entertainment -- this is all it's all about. Well, maybe some people can convince themselves about that when they're putting on a television show. I don't know what the justification is when you're coaching a teenager to lie to the Senate to save your hide. I don't know, I don't know how you go about explaining that one away.
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