Assignment to Hell (72 page)

“The fiendish quality of this aspect of genocide seems important to
know because it is, in part anyway, an answer to the mystery ‘How could they have done it?’” Rooney wrote decades later.
¹²

It’s a question that dogged all five correspondents. They had seen what happens when an independent press and people abdicate responsibility and cave in the face of ignorance and intolerance. Each came back determined in his own way to make American journalism better: more inquisitive, more worldly, more informed. Joe Liebling always called America’s press the “weak slat under the bed of democracy.” Following the war, the slat became more resilient, one of the traits that made the U.S. the envy of the world. But in recent years, the American media has sadly reverted to its prewar pettiness and greed. Cronkite, Rooney, Bigart, Boyle, and Liebling didn’t let us down; the generation that succeeded them did.

R
OONEY ALWAYS MAINTAINED THAT THE
war never consumed him the way it did other correspondents. Anyone who has read Andy’s lovely
My War
or his keen
The Fortunes of War
or been touched by his Memorial Day commentaries is entitled to reach a different conclusion.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wanted to make a movie of Rooney and Bud Hutton’s
The Story of the Stars and Stripes
; regrettably, the project ran out of money. As a freelance journalist and later a writer for
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
in the golden days of CBS television, Rooney went to great lengths to pay homage to World War II veterans. A piece of footage that survives from the old Godfrey show features the star saluting Rooney for Andy’s efforts on behalf of former GIs.

Not many TV writers from the ’50s got to dine with
New Yorker
legends E. B. White and James Thurber, but Rooney did. His friend and mentor Joe Liebling once invited Rooney to join the famous humorists for lunch. Rooney, who had idolized White since he was a kid, spent the entire meal pinching himself.
¹³
The two Andys, bemused, listened as Thurber and Liebling tried to one-up one another. Liebling’s idea of a perfect meal, Rooney concluded, was one in which Joe got to gorge himself and where everyone at the table fawned over his writing. But that was okay; in Rooney’s view, Liebling’s stuff was worth fawning over.

Rooney may have revered White and Liebling, but his own writing reflected more of the regular-guy sensibilities of Pyle and Boyle. When Rooney moved on to CBS News and its public affairs vehicle,
The 20th Century
, he was lead writer on a series of prime-time documentaries on World War II. Rooney took his research and turned it into
The Fortunes of War
—a superb examination of four pivotal battles: Stalingrad, Tarawa, Normandy, and the Bulge. To commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Rooney wrote the script for a CBS documentary called
FDR: The Man Who Changed America
. Rooney’s old man must have rolled over in his grave.

Ironically, Andy Rooney didn’t become an on-air commentator until he was almost sixty. In ’78, when
60 Minutes
’ debate segment, Point/Counterpoint with liberal Shana Alexander and conservative James J. Kilpatrick, took a summer respite, CBS looked for a replacement. Anchor Walter Cronkite urged the higher-ups to give his old crony a chance. A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney proved to be among the most popular commentary segments in television history, winning millions of new viewers for
60 Minutes
and becoming a staple for three decades. Rooney appeared in various fortieth- and fiftieth-anniversary World War II documentaries, even narrating a series on the air war, something he covered virtually every day from late 1942 to mid-1944.

Ever the curmudgeon, Rooney bristled (or at least pretended to) when journalist-historian Tom Brokaw labeled Andy and his World War II contemporaries “the greatest generation” any society has ever produced. Good-natured jousting went on between them for years. “I’ve joked I’m willing to put an asterisk by [Rooney’s] name, excluding him from the accolade,” Brokaw wrote in the foreword to the paperback edition of
My War
.
¹⁴

The pistol that Rooney took off his “prisoner” collected dust for the better part of three decades until Andy’s then-teenage son, Brian, hectored his dad about firing it. So while in upstate New York one weekend they grabbed an old clay planting pot, stuck it on top of a fence post, and moved a few yards away. Brian got the first shot with the .32 caliber. It misfired: nothing happened. Then it was Andy’s turn. Brian jokingly cowered behind his father as Andy took aim. There was a ferocious
bang
!; the kick was so
abrupt that it caused Andy to lurch into Brian. The two of them howled laughing for a good twenty seconds, then looked up. The clay pot was history; Andy had scored a bull’s-eye. All that Writing 69th training had finally paid off.

Rooney’s tender fealty to the people who shot guns for real and sacrificed their lives in the struggle against Fascism belied his protests. “They were all my age,” Rooney wrote. “I think of the good life I have lived and they never had a chance to live. They didn’t give their lives. Their lives were taken.”
¹⁵

H
AL
B
OYLE, TOO, DEVOTED MUCH
of his career to World War II remembrance. While still in Europe in early ’45, Boyle and Jack Thompson of the
Chicago Tribune
tried to solicit bids on a book called
Breakout
about the Allied sweep across France.
¹⁶
Sadly, nothing came of it, because there would have been some great stories—and some great storytelling. Nor did anything come of a proposed book that Boyle wanted to write in partnership with former
New York Times
editor and Columbia University and New York University journalism professor John Tebbel. The book was to be a compendium of Boyle’s wartime articles and letters to Mary Frances.
¹⁷

Boyle was such a big name that when he arrived home from Europe on June 3, 1945, aboard the troopship
Monticello
, reporters and photographers greeted him. He obliged the shutterbugs by tossing his duffel over a shoulder and flashing his Irish bartender’s grin.
¹⁸

Hal became AP’s globe-trotting columnist, writing under the banner Marco Polo. Before it was all said and done, the butcher’s kid from Kansas City had visited more than sixty countries.

When the Korean conflict erupted, Boyle reprised his grunts-in-the-foxholes column, joining old pal Don Whitehead in Seoul. Boyle’s writing in Korea was so good it earned him several awards, including a medal from the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The VFW prize meant as much to Boyle as his 1945 Pulitzer because it was presented by General Omar Bradley. “There are few men who understand the American soldier and how he feels as well as you,” Bradley told Boyle from the dais. “There are even fewer
who can write about him with such interest, such understanding, such compassion.”
¹⁹

Boyle came back to his apartment on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village and again became a daily columnist for AP. His column owed as much to Groucho Marx as it did to Walter Lippmann. Sometimes Boyle’s column addressed weighty foreign policy issues; more often, he wrote about the silliness and frustrations of everyday life.

Hal was fond of quoting Horace Greeley’s credo that “Journalism will kill you, but it keeps you alive while you’re at it.”
²⁰
His MO from the war never changed: He still hunched over his typewriter, bemoaning his fate while muttering to himself as he munched cheap cigars and candy bars. The one thing that had changed was the exposure Boyle’s column was getting. At its apex in the ’60s, his column ran in some eight hundred papers across the country—more than double his pickup from ’44 and ’45. Yet despite all his commercial success, the Boyle bank account remained slim, no doubt drained by his fondness for nightlife.

In late 1962 AP sent Boyle to Vietnam, hoping he could re-create his magic. Even in Vietnam’s early days, however, the war never lent itself to the kid-next-door salutation that made Boyle’s work so popular. Colleagues in Saigon and Da Nang would wager that Boyle could never sober up and meet his deadlines—but he almost always won the bet.
²¹

After a few frustrating months, Boyle realized it wasn’t meant to be. He returned to New York to resume his Manhattan pub crawling—Pat Moriarty’s place and Toots Shor’s joint were favorite haunts—and write columns about his crazed Irish family or the chatter being bandied about the office watercooler.

One night he was out barhopping to all hours. The next day his corevelers asked how Frances reacted when he finally got home. “I don’t know,” he deadpanned, “she hasn’t gotten to the verb yet.”
²²

On occasion the World War II press guys would get together to reminisce, usually at Bleeck’s saloon. Boyle, Rooney, and Bigart, who liked his gin martinis, were sometimes joined by Liebling and even Cronkite on occasion.
²³

Cronkite took care of his fellow Missourian, arranging for Boyle to pick
up extra cash by appearing on CBS News’ Sunday morning program
Face the Nation
. For three decades, Boyle had been the more accomplished of the Kansas City journalist boys who made good; now Cronkite was by far the bigger name, even though Boyle ended up earning more bylines than anyone in AP’s history.

Sadly, Frances died young after a short illness in 1968; Boyle’s drinking, never light, got heavier. When Boyle got the Irish guilts and felt the need to dry out, he would take a few days off and visit Don and Marie Whitehead, vowing not only to go on the wagon, but also to lose a few pounds while he was at it. Invariably, though, Hal would look heavier when Don drove him to the airport. Marie would later find candy bar wrappers stuffed in a pillowcase.
²⁴

In 1973 Boyle was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He faced his fate with typically buoyant humor. In his last column in February 1974, Boyle wrote:

Only two nice things can be said about [the disease]. It doesn’t affect the mind and it is more fatiguing and uncomfortable than painful.

The irony of it to me is that after surviving three wars without a scratch I come down with an ailment that on the average strikes only one out of every 100,000 people.

I guess this is the place to express my deeply felt thanks to all the readers who through all the years made the journey with me and shored up my spirits with kind letters of cheer, suggestion, and criticism.

See you later.
²⁵

They were the last words Hal Boyle wrote for publication. Two months later, three days after being given what
New Yorker
writer Calvin Trillin called “the rare Irish pleasure of attending his own wake,”
²⁶
Boyle died of a massive heart attack.

Besides Kansas City native and Boyle devotee Trillin, among those attending Hal’s premortem gathering was Boyle’s old war buddy Wes
Gallagher, who by then had graduated to become AP’s president and general manager. Boyle’s final column, Gallagher wrote in notes that accompanied the piece, “was low-keyed and self-deprecating, reflecting eloquently the inner strength and courage of one of the finest journalists of our time.”
²⁷

No shortage of encomiums came Boyle’s way. Right after the war, Indiana University, Pyle’s alma mater, appointed Hal its first Pyle lecturer. The Overseas Press Club of America named an annual reporting award after Boyle. Friends and colleagues, moreover, established a scholarship fund in his honor at Hal’s alma mater, the University of Missouri School of Journalism. They were wonderful tributes, but none could match the letter Boyle received in July of 1945 from Mrs. Cary Hart of Topeka, Kansas.

Dear Mr. Boyle:

I have wanted to write to you for a long time and thank you for the comfort and cheer your splendid articles gave me.

I have a son in the 137th Regt, Co. B. in Germany, and during the crossing of the Rhine and the terrible fighting through Germany, I never missed a word that you wrote, always looked for your article first in the K.C. Star.

To me, you are just as fine and tender a writer as Ernie Pyle. You will never know the good your writing did for me.

May God keep you safe in the Pacific, I will be waiting for your articles again. I have a son in Marseilles, France, who runs an M.R.U. (records) machine, so you know I am praying the War will soon be over.

Thank you again for the comfort you gave me.
²⁸

H
OMER
B
IGART’S WRITING DIDN’T APPEAL
to readers’ emotions so much as to their intellect. Bigart’s dispatches—whether filed from Palestine or the Greek civil war or the Korean conflict or the Cuban revolution—continued to challenge readers. In January 1951, as Bigart departed Korea,
Newsweek
called him “the best war correspondent of an embattled generation.”
²⁹
Harrison Salisbury, who never stopped admiring Bigart, said his future fellow
Times
man had an “eye as precise as Goya’s.”
³⁰