Rooney’s New Book Covers War Reporting Experiences
Andy Rooney has generated several news stories in recent weeks by bluntly criticizing his boss, CBS Chairman Laurence Tisch, and the network’s forced anchor marriage of Dan Rather and Connie Chung.
News it may be, but new it is not. Rooney, the popular commentator on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” has publicly vented his views about management, CBS News and sensitive topics such as homosexuality many times during his long career.
What is new is “My War” (Times Books), the former sergeant’s memoir of the three years he covered World War II for The Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper.
As a correspondent aboard a bombing run into Germany, he sees other American planes hit by fire from the ground. “The long, slow, death spiral of a bomber with its crew on board is a terrible thing to see,” he observes. One “exploded into fragments … and it was impossible to tell the parts of machinery from the bodies of men as they all tumbled toward earth.”
And then there were the tanks: “Walking the same road a day or so after a tank had passed through, I would often come upon the gruesome sight of the whole halves of four or five men, and four or five halves of what had been men, mashed into the dirt and mud by the grinding tracks of a 10-ton tank.”
He won a Bronze Star for reporting under fire at Saint-Lo in France. At the same time, Rooney is quick to express how lucky he and so many others were to be part of such an adventure, including the jubilant liberation of Paris and the somber entry into Buchenwald.
“You were so full of life, doing so many things and living at full speed,” he said. His work for The Stars and Stripes put him in touch with the prolific Ernie Pyle, a young wireservice reporter named Walter Cronkite and Ernest Hemingway, described in “My War” as an impossible blowhard.
“I so liked his books, and it was so disappointing to get to know him,” Rooney said with dismay. “I suppose we wouldn’t have liked Shakespeare.”
Rooney, who is 76 and recently signed a new, three-year contract with CBS, has sold hundreds of thousands of books through the years. Among his best sellers are collections that have gathered many of the wry and whimsical columns that he now syndicates to 150 newspapers around the country. Days after the release of “My War,” there reportedly are up to 80,000 copies in circulation after two printings.
In a publishing season loaded with histories pegged to the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, it will be interesting to see how the many fans of Rooney the curmudgeon respond to the Rooney they hardly knew until now.