![]() ![]() A torrent of negative publicity followed, after which then-CBS News President David Burke suspended him for three months. ![]() In February 1990, the gay magazine The Advocate interviewed him after he associated the human choices of drugs, tobacco and gay sex with death in a CBS News special, “A Year With Andy Rooney: 1989.” The magazine printed racist remarks attributed to him from the interview, which he vehemently denied making. He hated racism: As a young soldier in the early 1940s, he had himself arrested in Florida by refusing to leave the seat he had chosen among blacks in the back of an Army bus.Īt the height of the AIDS crisis, Rooney had his biggest run-in with a group and it had dire consequences. The racism charge angered and hurt Rooney deeply. The racist essay was one of the many false Rooney quotes and essays bouncing around the internet. Many assumed he wrote the screed because Rooney’s longtime habit of writing or speaking plainly on sensitive topics had often left him open to attacks by activist groups. Over the next few years, it found its way into the e-mail boxes of untold thousands, causing Rooney to refute it in a 2005 60 MINUTES essay, and again, as it continued to proliferate, in a Associated Press article a year later. Rooney was also mistakenly connected to racism when a politically charged essay highly insensitive to minorities was written in his style and passed off as his on the internet in 2003. Comedian Joe Piscopo used it in a 1981 impersonation of him on “Saturday Night Live” and, from then on, it was erroneously linked to Rooney. Rooney asked thousands of questions in his essays over the years, none, however, began with “Did you ever…?”, a phrase often associated with him. In typical themes, Rooney questioned labels on packages, products that didn’t seem to work and curious human behavior, such as why people don’t talk in elevators. “I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn’t realize they thought,” Rooney told the Associated Press in 1998. Mainly, his essays struck a cord in viewers by pointing out life’s unspoken truths or more often complaining about its subtle lies, earning him the “curmudgeon” status he wore like a uniform. “Are they going to take us seriously as an enemy if they think we eat Cap’n Crunch for breakfast?” In an early 60 MINUTES essay that won him the third of his four Emmy Awards, he reacted to the grain embargo against the Soviet Union by suggesting the U.S. He often weighed in on major news topics, sometimes seriously and often humorously. The topics ranged from the contents of that desk’s drawer to whether God existed. Ratings for the broadcast rose steadily over its time period, peaking at a few minutes before the end of the hour, precisely when he delivered his essays, which could generate thousands of response letters.Įach Sunday, Rooney delivered one of his 60 MINUTES essays from behind a desk that he, an expert woodworker, hewed himself. For 33 years, Rooney had the last word on the most watched television program in history. Baltimore Sun eNewspaper Home Page Close Menuīut it is his television role as the inquisitive and cranky commentator on 60 MINUTES that made him a cultural icon.
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