Assignment to Hell Read Free Page B

Nevertheless, the
Trib
tried him out as a spot reporter at $25 a week.
    Early on, he managed to screw up the unscrew-up-able when he was sent to Penn Station to cover the inauguration of a new New York–to-Miami line. He somehow ended up at the wrong track; worse, his article singled out the wrong outfit, angering a large advertiser. Bigart’s gaffe earned a personal knuckle rapping from Helen Rogers Reid, the domineering wife of the
Trib
’s publisher.
    But Bigart survived and, slowly but surely, began showing a gift for what Kluger called “sardonic observation.” In March 1940, Bigart’s front-page take on the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade included this sparkling passage: “The snow lay an inch deep in the folds of the Mayor’s large black felt hat by the time the County Kerry boys went by singing, ‘The hat me dear old father wore.’” 21
    Moreover, by his early thirties, he’d figured out how to “use” his stutter. He perfected what became universally known as “Homer’s All-American Dummy Act.” Recognizing that people misconstrued his impediment as ignorance, Bigart would put on a theatrical stammer and ask the same basic questions over and over again. “And then w-w-what happened?” was a typical Bigart query, usually delivered from behind a Lucky Strike spilling ashes.
    It drove colleagues and competitors to distraction, but interviewees tended to take pity on Bigart, often sharing information they had no business sharing because they felt sorry for him. In truth, Bigart was always two steps ahead of the competition because he’d done his homework.
    “Homer didn’t know anything—like a fox,” his acolyte Andy Rooney chuckled a half century later. 22

    U NLIKE HIS MENTORS L IEBLING AND Bigart, Rooney never came up through the ranks of workaday journalism. He didn’t have the chance: the pug-nosed kid, all of five-foot-eight with bushy brown hair and bushier brown eyebrows, was still a junior at Colgate University when he was conscripted into service.
    Like a lot of college students in the ’30s, Rooney, appalled by the Great War’s hypocrisy, flirted with pacifism and conscientious objection. An iconoclastic economics professor, a Quaker, preached something that Rooney and his Colgate friends took to heart: “Any peace is better than any war.” 23 It was a maxim Rooney would come to regret in April 1945 when he walked through the gates of Buchenwald.
    But Rooney the undergrad paid a lot more attention to Colgate’s nationally prominent football squad than he did to the spread of European Fascism. He was an undersized and scrappy mule who—in a prelude to the rest of his life—wasn’t afraid to stick his nose into bigger guys.
    He’d grown up in a comfortable upper-middle-class home, the son of a Williams College graduate who abhorred FDR. His dad was a successful enough salesman with the Albany Felt Company to send his son to private school and afford a vacation cabin on nearby Lake George.
    Young Rooney showed some promise as a writer at the academy, crafting funny essays that caught an English teacher’s fancy. 24 But his only brush with journalism was a brief apprenticeship as an intern/copyboy at the
Knickerbocker News
and a couple of letters—one advocating pacifism—published in upstate New York papers. 25
    Rooney always pooh-poohed his academic performance at Colgate, but he was more than a jock: He became a protégé of noted English professor Porter Perrin, a contributing editor of the student magazine, a member of the debate team, a faithful reader of E. B. White and the
New Yorker
, and a good enough after-dinner speaker to win an undergraduate competition two years running.
    “Andy was a word man,” his roommate Bob Ruthman remembered. “He enjoyed reading, writing, speaking, and conversing. His subjects werewhatever he thought worth talking about. He never used profanities, slang, or told off-color jokes.” 26
    Belying his later image of Everyman,