Rooney, in spite of his decades as a “60 Minutes” fixture, is a writer, not a talking head. Words, not vamping for the camera, have been his forebear in profession since his outset “60 Minutes” article in 1978, just as words were for more than 30 years before that. But on Sunday’s print run of “60 Minutes,” Rooney had his rearmost words. The disseminate patent his settled commentary in his longtime responsibility as weekly pundit.
CBS says it was his 1,097th for the program. Tick, tick, tick, tick …. News that he is stepping down was released abruptly earlier this week.
Even so, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Rooney is 92 and sure recognizes this truth: Words may hold out forever but not the child who crafts them. Rooney has been a advocate of words on TV ever since he joined CBS in 1949 as a paragraphist for the red-hot “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” Within a few years, he was also calligraphy for CBS News public-affairs shows such as “The Twentieth Century” and “Calendar.” A World War II long-serving who reported for the martial newspaper Stars and Stripes, he came from an ink-on-dead-trees mark of journalism that he never renounced. (During his CBS career, he had a syndicated newspaper column and published 16 books.) So it was coherent that he would weld “60 Minutes” with its inception in 1968.
After all, the great founder of “60 Minutes,” Don Hewitt, is well-remembered for insisting that, even on the visual route of TV, the words should come ahead and the pictures should follow. A decade later, Rooney was 59. At an discretion when many subjects might be pondering retirement, he took his place before the camera to turn over his from the start “60 Minutes” essay.
Beetle-browed and rumpled, he wasn’t telegenic by well-known standards. Nobody minded, or even noticed. Viewers listened to his words, and he caught on.
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