The recipient of this year’s Overseas Press Club President’s Award is Andy Rooney, CBS’s avuncular, and irascible, 60 Minutes commentator whose experience as a foreign correspondent dates back to his World War II job as a reporter for Stars and Stripes. Earlier this year his son, television correspondent Brian Rooney, gave a talk at a “roast” sponsored by friends and colleagues from both Andy and Brian’s alma mater, Colgate University. This tribute by Brian is adapted from that event.
My father just turned 91 years old. A lot of people say that’s a great feat. But when you think about it, it’s not something you do intentionally. You survive World War II, avoid fatal car crashes, and maybe you are blessed with good genes. I can tell you in my father’s case it is not the result of careful diet and exercise.
He’s really an amazing physical specimen, incredibly tough. On Christmas day a few years ago – he was 84 at the time – he was run over by a jeep on a snowy road, and he still made it home for dinner. The unbelievable part is that it was his Jeep and he was the driver. He got out to clear ice off the windshield wipers.
A lot of people have asked me if he is really like the man they see on television, and I can assure you he is. This is a man who will send the wine back to the kitchen in his own home.
Having a famous father did nothing for my romantic life. We ended up both working at the Republican convention in Dallas when Ronald Reagan was nominated. We’d go out together and hit the parties at night. I was roughly 30 at the time and about as handsome and eligible as I was ever going to be. The women were gorgeous and I was thinking, this is going to be really good.
They elbowed me out of the way to get to him.
He taught me how to cook and schooled me in the basic food groups: garlic, butter and ice cream. He taught me some of the basic skills of being a man: how to use an axe and a chainsaw. He taught me woodworking, how to use a chisel and a table saw.
When I was growing up he used to lay down these little laws of life that were something between philosophy and just rules of good order. Things like, “If you want to get the attention of the chef, you have to start by being mean to the busboy.”
He used to say, “The same things keep happening to the same people.” This was his notion of fate as determined by personality. Those bomber pilots in the war who brought the plane back all shot up later went on to become leaders in the civilian world. This one kept me awake at night when I was cast as “third elf” in my grade school Christmas play.
My favorite was his rule for civic involvement. We lived in a small town with a volunteer fire department. And whenever the whistle blew – in the middle of the night, whenever – he hustled us all into the station wagon and went to the fire.
He said, “When your neighbor’s house is on fire, you have an obligation to go and watch it burn.”
The big Andy Rooney rule is this: “If all the truth was known about everything, the world would be a better place.” This is how he has lived his professional and his personal life – not always, but more than most human beings. He thinks governments should not have secrets and there is no opinion or information that is too dangerous, or hurtful, to be told.
Good ideas and good people would rise in a world in which all the truths were known. In his personal life, he believes in blunt honesty, which he will deliver anywhere from the breakfast table to the boss’s office. Just about every one of my parents’ best friends went through a period when they were so mad at Dad they refused to speak to him.
On television, he doesn’t express an opinion because he thinks more people will watch, and he doesn’t avoid saying something even if he thinks people will turn him off. And there have been some difficult moments because of that. He had to quit his job a few times, and he nearly got fired.
The advantage I had growing up with my father is that I was raised by a man who was not out to make money. He believes you have to stand for something more than your own good, and just hope you get paid for it. And that’s what he stands for: If all the truth were known, the world would be a better place.