“The Stars and
Stripes, from the day it began publication as an eight-page weekly in
London, was mad, unreasonable, implausible of behavior in the midst of an army's
orderliness, a refuge for eccentrics.
“But at the same time it was a well-written,
well-edited, colorful, accurate, professional newspaper with (whether or no you
wanted to admit it) higher editorial and moral standards than a great many
civilian papers.
“It was, on the authority of the army's high
command, ‘the most important single factor’ affecting the morale of the men who
smashed and conquered Axis Europe.”—Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney, The Story of the Stars and Stripes (1946)
The armed-forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had actually been around, in other incarnations,
dating back to the Civil War. But when it was revived on this date in 1942, its
reappearance was stunning. The tabloid was announcing to Europe—many of whose
countries still fell under the dark shadow of totalitarianism—that one of the
freedoms for which the American soldier was fighting was embodied in the
product they read.
In many ways, working on Stars and Stripes was the formative experience of future CBS
veteran Andy Rooney. It wasn’t only that, as a 22-year-old sergeant assigned to
this unit, he learned his trade in proximity to pros such as Homer Bigart,
Ernie Pyle and Walter Cronkite, but that he came by attitudes that informed
much of the rest of his life. He found Ernest Hemingway and General George
Patton, for instance, to be poseurs—and resented the latter, in particular, for
trying to make the newspaper into a mere mouthpiece of the military. The future
60 Minutes curmudgeon-at-large was in embryo.
On the other hand, while many American intellectuals
of the Fifties unfavorably compared Dwight Eisenhower to their favorite, Adlai
Stevenson, as an out-of-touch figurehead addicted to wandering prose, Rooney
remembered gratefully the commander who allowed him and his compatriots to
report honestly and largely without censorship on the conflict that broke the backs of
Fascism and liberated a continent.
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