A Tribute to Andy Rooney (another writer)

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7-13-2026

Honoring Andy Rooney

While reading, I found this article on Facebook (source identified in the photo), of the old newsman Andy Rooney, which is so impressive that I verified the information—any inaccuracy is not worth mentioning. It is worth reading.  

[begin article]

“He built his own desk. Walnut, hand-cut, assembled with his own two hands — because long before he was a face on television, Andy Rooney was a man who liked making things and saying things plainly.

But this story doesn't start at that desk. It starts seventeen thousand feet above Germany, in subzero air, aboard a bomber full of journalists who had no business being there.

In February 1943, a group of war correspondents stationed in England had grown uneasy. For months, they'd been writing about young bomber crews from the safety of the ground — meeting them at the airfield, then later walking into empty barracks past made beds and photographs of wives who didn't yet know they were widows. Writing about the war without ever risking anything themselves had started to feel dishonest.

So six of them volunteered to fly a combat mission themselves.

Andy Rooney, twenty-four years old, a former Colgate literary magazine editor who'd talked his way into a job at the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, was one of them. On February 26, 1943, he climbed aboard a B-17 named Banshee, bound for the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven.

The mission turned deadly fast. A shell tore through the Plexiglas nose of the plane, and the subzero air came pouring in. The bombardier panicked and froze his hands trying to plug the hole. Across from Rooney, the navigator's oxygen line had been severed — and at eighteen thousand feet, he collapsed.

Rooney pulled off his own oxygen mask, made his way through the cramped, wire-tangled fuselage to the back of the plane, and brought an oxygen bottle forward to revive him. He'd later say it gave him the best story of any correspondent that day.

Not everyone made it back. Robert Post of the New York Times, flying that same mission in a B-24, was shot down over Oldenburg. He never returned.

Rooney kept flying assignments after that. He covered D-Day, the liberation of Paris, and the capture of the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen — an event he'd later call one of the five most significant of the entire European war. He was also among the first American journalists to enter the Nazi concentration camps after their liberation.

That changed something in him permanently. He had gone into the war a pacifist, opposed to America's involvement in it. He came out of the camps ashamed he ever had been — and said he never again doubted that some wars were just.

By the war's end, Rooney had earned both the Bronze Star and the Air Medal for his reporting under fire — the only war correspondent to receive both during the conflict.

Then he came home and spent the next two decades as a writer almost nobody saw.

For over twenty years, Rooney worked behind the scenes at CBS — writing for radio host Arthur Godfrey, then for Garry Moore, then teaming up with correspondent Harry Reasoner on a run of televised essays unlike anything else on the air: An Essay on Doors. An Essay on Bridges. An Essay on Hotels. Rooney wrote every word. Reasoner read them on camera.

In 1968, Rooney wrote the script for a CBS documentary on race in America, Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed. It won him his first Emmy. He'd later call it the best work he ever did — and note that almost no one remembered it.

Two years after that, CBS gave him a different kind of problem. Rooney had written a piece called An Essay on War, a blunt condemnation of modern warfare shaped by everything he'd witnessed from Wilhelmshaven to the camps. CBS found it too pointed. They wanted it softened or shelved.

Rooney did neither.

He quit, bought the film back from CBS with his own money, and took it to PBS, where he read it himself on a program called The Great American Dream Machine — the first time in his career he'd appeared on camera as himself, instead of writing words for someone else to speak. The essay won him his third Writers Guild Award.

He returned to CBS in the early 1970s, producing a run of acclaimed specials under his own name. Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington won a Peabody Award in 1975, followed by Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner and Mr. Rooney Goes to Work.

Then came a quiet Sunday in the summer of 1978.

60 Minutes needed something to fill its closing segment while the regular feature, Point/Counterpoint, was on hiatus. Producers gave Rooney a trial run. On July 2, 1978, he sat down behind that handmade walnut desk and delivered three minutes on Fourth of July car accident statistics — arguing, contrarian as ever, that the holiday weekend was actually one of the safer times to be on the road, and that the media was scaring people with numbers stripped of context.

It was an odd way to launch a television career. It worked anyway.

What began as Three Minutes or So with Andy Rooney was meant to be temporary. By fall, it had permanently replaced Point/Counterpoint. The following season, 60 Minutes became the number one program in America for the first time.

For the next thirty-three years, Rooney closed out the most-watched news broadcast on television with a few minutes of whatever was on his mind — the price of groceries, the clutter in his desk drawer, wristwatches, bottled water, whether there was ever a real Mrs. Smith behind Mrs. Smith's Pies. (There wasn't.)

He also wrote, without much hesitation, about war, politics, and God — and opposed the Iraq War publicly and early.

It cost him sometimes. In 1990, CBS suspended him for three months over controversial remarks. Ratings dropped twenty percent within a month. CBS brought him back.

Through all of it, Rooney maintained he wasn't a television personality — just a writer who happened to read his own work on camera. He kept a syndicated newspaper column running for more than thirty years and published sixteen books.

His wife, Marguerite, died in 2004, after sixty-two years of marriage. His son Brian became a longtime ABC News correspondent. His daughter Emily became host of Greater Boston on PBS.

On October 2, 2011, at ninety-two years old, Andy Rooney delivered his 1,097th and final regular essay on 60 Minutes. He told viewers he'd lived a luckier life than most people get. He said he probably hadn't told them anything they didn't already know.

Then he said this: "That's what a writer does. A writer's job is to tell the truth."

One month later, on November 4, 2011, he died in New York City from complications following surgery.

Sixty-eight years after that flight over Wilhelmshaven, he was still doing the job he'd started with — telling the truth, on his own terms, whether people wanted to hear it or not.

He once told a colleague: "Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer."

He wasn't wrong."

[end article]

Another good article is on this: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rooney