A Few Recollections of Andy Rooney

Of all the bon mots from Andy Rooney, few had more resonance for his fellow members of the OPC than this line from his last "60 Minutes" appearance. "A writer’s job is to tell the truth."


Rooney continued: "I believe that if all the truth were known about everything in the world, it would be a better place to live."


For 70 years as a writer, Andy Rooney’s genius was putting the thoughts and petty gripes and pet peeves of everyman into words. While centered on his CBS’ "60 Minutes" persona, Rooney’s vast body of work, including 16 books, shows he was much much more than a lucky curmudgeon who could write and talk on the box.


When I had the honor to bestow the President’s Award on Rooney in April 2010, he generously agreed to be interviewed on camera — behind that fabled desk of his own making — about his career as a foreign correspondent beginning with the U.S. Army’s 17th Field Artillery Division.


Even among our OPC crowd, not everyone was aware of Rooney’s early days when he quickly became the accomplished 25-year-old reporter among the giants of World War II correspondents based in Great Britain. An Albany, New York native, Rooney had been an aspiring football player at Colgate University when as a junior, he was drafted. Although he had never been a reporter, Rooney claimed he was and got a job with Stars & Stripes, the military newspaper that had millions of readers in the Army and was reprinted by U.S. newspapers. Rooney recalled going to battle with Allied Forces.


"They would let us know there was going to be a raid," Rooney remembered. "And Homer Bigart — a great New York Herald Tribune writer, Gladwin Hill — The New York Times, and Walter Cronkite (United Press) and I would get on a train. We would go out to First Army headquarters and they would take us to different bases. And we would each do a story from one of the bases. Then we would get together, come back into London, write our stories and they would be published the next day. It was great."


In those days, correspondents congregated at what Rooney remembered as "a great little spot off Fleet Street — the Lamb & the Lark…. There were always eight or 10 of us telling stories."


One of the first lessons Rooney learned as a rookie reporter was: "It was vitally important to say where someone was from. I learned that from a couple of good reporters who were editors at the Stars & Stripes. You always got the name of the hometown."


Throughout his career as an "essayist" which included 1,097 on-air commentaries for "60 Minutes," Rooney’s wartime experiences profoundly influenced his thinking. He was part of a group of about 25 correspondents assigned to the front with Allied Forces. "Each day we would go with a different division. We did not gang up much. As a division pushed forward, we moved with them."


Rooney was along for the ride during the D-Day Invasion of France; he was airborne for raids into Germany and he was one of the first U.S. reporters inside a German concentration camp.


"I was scared every day," said Rooney. "There was never a day when you could not have been killed. Yes, I was frightened to death. I think everyone was."


He remembered: "I saw a lot of bodies."


Listening to Rooney’s lament on CBS marking the 50th Anniversary of D-Day should be required for all journalism students. A snippet is in the OPC tribute in which Rooney talks about how there were no photographs taken on the beach that he was on that day. "All the pictures are in my memory," he said. About the corpses, "I remember their boots — all so much the same — on boys all so different."


"War," Rooney told us, "is unnecessary and foolish."


Rooney joined the OPC in 1947 when he went to work in New York as a writer for CBS. He attended OPC Christmas parties and in 1994, at a memorable luncheon marking D-Day, Rooney and Walter Cronkite told stories in the Grand Hyatt ballroom, right after Cronkite had stuffed himself into his World War II correspondent’s uniform.


His belief in the power of words and faith in journalism to influence the course of human events was steadfast. As he instructed us: "I think it important for reporters to be everywhere so they can see what things are really like…and if you are a reporter, going to the front is where you go to get the story… . There is nothing too gruesome to tell."