'60 Minutes' commentator Andy Rooney dies

Andy Rooney, the irascible "60 Minutes" humorist whose long career spanned books, newspaper columns and reportage dating to World War II, has died. He was 92.

Rooney died Friday night in New York of complications after undergoing surgery for what CBS had described as a minor procedure.

Bob Schieffer, moderator of "Face the Nation," said Saturday in a phone interview: "Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, and Andy really examined life. He had great insights into what's important and what's not important [and] in this age of texting and instant popping off, he still reminded us that the English language is a powerful weapon, and one of our most precious assets. Andy knew how to make words work."

In a recent interview, Tom Brokaw described his longtime friend Rooney as a pioneer of broadcast journalism.

"If anyone qualifies as an American journalistic icon, he's the one," Brokaw said. "His career began in World War II and included friendships with Edward R. Murrow, [Walter] Cronkite, Mike Wallace and all the great legends of broadcast journalism and -- in fact -- he helped invent the form because he was right beside them."

Jeff Fager, CBS News chairman and "60 Minutes" executive producer, said "it's hard to imagine not having Andy around. He loved his life and he lived it on his own terms. We will miss him very much."

Rooney stepped down from his commentary role at "60 Minutes" in September after a 33-year run with a final piece -- his 1,097th -- that began, "I've done a lot of complaining here, but of all the things I've complained about, I can't complain about my life."

Not, of course, that he refrained at various other times: His classic two-minute pieces were a litany of gripes about life's minor and major inconveniences, from pill bottles to cleaning products to e-books (he was a proud Luddite).

Foremost, he considered himself a writer, and almost begrudgingly a TV performer, or as he explained in his final piece, "I'm a writer who reads what he's written." Over his career, he produced a dozen books, hundreds of columns and thousands of letters, but he was perhaps proudest of his field reporting for Army newspaper Stars and Stripes during World War II.

His reportage later yielded a pair of recollections, including 1995's "My War," in which he wrote: "For three of my four years in the Army, I saw the fighting from close up.I can't forget much of what I saw, [but] once you've put something down on paper you can dismiss it from your mind. Having told it, I'll be able to forget it."

Criticism, suspension

Rooney's almost compulsive need to write what he saw -- then promptly offer a critical assessment -- occasionally got him in trouble. Usually willing to speak to reporters who called him at his small office on West 57th Street, he spoke to a gay-oriented magazine, the Advocate, which said he criticized gays while mentioning something about the "watered-down genes" of African-Americans.

Rooney denied he had made the comment, but it earned him a brief suspension in 1990 after a vigorous disagreement with the then-president of CBS News, David Burke, who was angered after Rooney had taken up his own defense. That was a bit in character: Rarely one to kowtow to his employer, Rooneyhad occasionally criticized CBS and quit in 1970 after it declined to air his antiwar essay.

Born to a well-to-do family in Albany, Rooney went to Colgate and was drafted out of university into the Army's 17th Field Artillery. He applied to Stars and Stripes, and during the war -- where he reported from Utah Beach three days after D-Day and flew bombing raids over Germany -- met Edward R. Murrow, Don Hewitt, and Walter Cronkite.

He first joined CBS in 1949 as a writer for radio and TV impresario Arthur Godfrey and wrote for others as well. But the break that would later define his TV style came in 1962.

Observing the ordinary

That year, Rooney pitched an essay on doors, to be narrated by Harry Reasoner, a friend and close ally. He explained to the skeptical CBS News producer: "My intention is to make it apparent that the most ordinary objects around us -- doors in this case -- hold extraordinary interest when viewed from a good angle or from a sufficient number of different angles. There is something basically dramatic about a door because our attitude toward one is markedly different if we are outside, wanting to get in, than it is if we are inside, wanting to get out.

"This isn't very convincing, is it? Find it in your heart to trust me."

The executive did, and so began a long, colorful history of essays on calendars, the IRS, God, used cars and pretty much any ordinary object that in his estimation was extraordinary, absurd or simply unpleasant.

He first appeared on "60 Minutes" as one of two silhouetted figures called "Ipso" and "Facto." It didn't last. He later quit the network after it refused his essay on war, returned a year later to produce pieces for various broadcasts, and then, on July 4 weekend, 1978, launched "Three Minutes With Andy Rooney" -- later called "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney" -- as a summer replacement for "Point/Counterpoint," a popular segment that pitted author Shana Alexander against James J. Kilpatrick.

In the essay, he probed the dangers of July 4 weekend on the road, questioning the media's long-standing assertion that the holiday was the most dangerous of the year. He probed the statistics, weighed them, then declared: "Considering the number of cars on the road, it's one of the safest" holidays of the year.

A glorious career of counter-intuition and his own personal battle against conventional wisdom thus began.

"Andy always said he wanted to work until the day he died, and he managed to do it, save the last few weeks in the hospital," said correspondent Steve Kroft, his "60 Minutes" colleague.Rooney and his wife, Marguerite, were married for 62 years; she died of heart failure in 2004. They lived in New York, with homes in Norwalk, Conn., and upstate New York.

Rooney's survivors include his four children: Emily Rooney is a former executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight," Brian Rooney was a longtime ABC News correspondent, Ellen Rooney is a photographer and Martha Fishel is chief of the public service division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Services will be private, and it's anticipated CBS News will hold a public memorial later, Brian Rooney said Saturday.

With AP