Assignment to Hell (74 page)

Perhaps most memorably, Cronkite paid his respects to Captain Don Stockton and other fallen airmen at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the beautiful grounds donated to the U.S. by a grateful Cambridge University. Cronkite held it together at Stockton’s gravesite, beaming at the memory of his old friend killed by a cruelly random cannon shot. At the Tablets of the Missing, though, the monument to the hundreds of American fliers lost forever, the imperturbable Walter Cronkite broke down. The microphone picked up the ninety-year-old murmuring, between sobs, about the unfairness and tragedy of it all.
⁴⁴

Andy Rooney was supposed to be among the eulogists at Cronkite’s memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s Church in July of 2009. Using a cane, Rooney hobbled to the lectern.

“You get to know someone pretty well in a war,” Rooney began, his voice choked with emotion. “I just feel so terrible about Walter’s death that I can hardly say anything. He was such a good friend. Please excuse me—I can’t.” Trembling, Rooney was helped back to his pew.

There were a lot of Cronkite intimates at St. Bartholomew’s, some dating back several decades. But even those old friends viewed Cronkite the way most Americans did: as the broadcaster who defined television journalism.

Rooney was the only one who knew Walter Cronkite before he became
Walter Cronkite
. When he thought of his friend, Rooney saw himself: a
twentysomething kid scared witless about climbing aboard a bomber or shadowing an infantry patrol but doing it anyway, because it was his duty—and because it paled in comparison to what soldiers did, day after day.

In his mind’s eye, Rooney could see what no one else could: the young Cronkite staring out a train window on the ride back from East Anglia. Cronkite had been just like Rooney was, lonely for his wife and heartsick about the young men he’d chatted with that morning who hadn’t returned from the Reich that afternoon.

J
OE
L
IEBLING NEVER DID FIND
another D-Day. “The times were full of certainties,” Liebling reminisced in the early ’60s in the foreword to
Mollie and Other War Pieces
. “We could be certain we were right—and we were—and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right, too. I have seldom been sure I was right since.”
⁴⁵

Sometimes Liebling felt ashamed that he harbored a “deplorable nostalgia” for the war. He went back several times to visit old haunts in London, Normandy, and Paris. Joe was fortunate to get to Vouilly in time to share some calvados with Mme. Hamel before she passed on.

Of all his brilliant postwar writing, few things equaled his tributes to Omar Bradley, both in the pages of the
New Yorker
and in the introduction to Bradley’s 1951 autobiography,
A Soldier’s Story
. No Manhattan-centric essayist ever resented the parochialism of Middle America more than Liebling. Yet Bradley, the archetypal small-town provincial, was Joe’s hero for life.

Prizefighting—the obsession that made Liebling so popular aboard LCI(L)-88 at the Weymouth Pier in early June of ’44—continued to fascinate him. His anthology of boxing pieces,
The Sweet Science
, has long been ranked at the top of American sports books. Writer Pete Hamill, who edited 2008’s
Liebling: World War II Writings
, met Joe only once, at a Floyd Patterson bout. Hamill was greeted with a chuckle and a big fleshy handshake.

By then Liebling had become a hero to the New Journalists, among them Hamill, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe. In gauging the impact of Liebling’s writing in a 2011 interview, Hamill quoted Ezra Pound’s conviction
that “literature is news that stays news.”
⁴⁶
By Pound’s standard, then, virtually everything Liebling touched from 1935 on was literature.

At the Rome Olympics in 1960, Liebling helped introduce to the world a young boxer named Cassius Clay. Many journalists at the time were put off by Clay’s racial defiance and brashness, but Liebling saw a kindred spirit and a genius.

Through his monthly Wayward Press essays, Liebling picked up postwar where he left off pre-, skewering money-hungry and narrow-minded media moguls. “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” he famously wrote. He was particularly scornful of the publishers and columnists who contributed to the anti-Communist hysteria. There’s no record that he punched out any of them at Bleeck’s—but no doubt he wanted to.

He finally divorced Ann, who later made good on her tragic threat to commit suicide. His second marriage was bumpy, too, ending in divorce. But his third marriage, to Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer Jean Stafford, proved happy. They traveled widely, often to London and Paris to relive Joe’s younger days.

Liebling never got control of his gluttony, nor did he try very hard. He died young, not yet sixty, but a bit too old to have achieved the goal he shared with Andy Rooney in Cherbourg in ’44: expiring while at the peak of his obituary value.

Joe didn’t know it, but the
Mollie
collection was his World War II valedictory. Before 1963 ended, he would be dead. Among the last things Joe wrote on the war was the book’s dedication. It was inimitable Liebling, lithe and sharp:

To many men who would now be in their forties.
⁴⁷

“Most people like to live in a good neighborhood,” Liebling once mused. “I like to live in a good age.”

He did. So did his four friends.

It was said of Joe Liebling that he took history personally. My Georgetown University buddies—Kevin Clark, Jerry McAndrews, Jim Smith, Tom Davis, and Jerry Towle—take history personally, too. When political figures or cultural icons pass from the scene, our e-mail exchanges tend to be so personal, in fact, that they border on the, well, snarky. But when Walter Cronkite passed away in July 2009, our comments were reverential. Therein lay the genesis for this book. I figured if our gang felt that way about Cronkite and his generation of journalists, then at least a few other people did, too.

As I was finishing the manuscript, it occurred to me that we respect Cronkite the way ETO correspondents venerated General Omar Bradley—and for essentially the same reason. There was a fundamental Missouri decency about both men. Hal Boyle and Harry Truman had it, too. They made us feel good about being Americans.

It takes a village to write a book. Two other Hoyas, Jim Clark and Ed Towle, provided literary counsel and encouragement. So did old friends and fellow writers Bill Scheft, Larry Tye, Paul Dickson, and Tim Wendel.
Esteemed World War II historians John McManus and Don Miller also generously gave of their time early in the process.

As always, David Kelly at the Library of Congress was invaluable, plus he put me in touch with the Library’s military history specialist Ron Katz. Jeff Flannery in the Library’s Manuscripts Division helped, too. The folks in the Library’s Newspaper and Current Periodical Room were, as always, terrific, as were the people who run the Library’s
Stars and Stripes
collection.

The same holds true of the professionals at the National Archives’ College Park facility, the Newseum in Washington, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, and the Harry S Truman Library and Museum in Independence. Jean Prescott at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Savannah, and Terry Foster at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, were great, too. Ninety-six-year-old Roy Wilder, Jr., the legendary PRO dubbed “Chitlin’,” told wonderful stories about Joe Liebling, Hal Boyle, and Andy Rooney.

Special acknowledgment goes out to Don Carleton, Ashley Adair, and the rest of the staff of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, the home of the papers of both Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney. The same goes for Harry Miller and the other archivists at the Wisconsin Historical Society on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the home of the papers of Hal Boyle and Homer Bigart. Ditto for Ana Guimaraes, the head of reference services at the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, and the rest of the staff at Kroch Library at Cornell University, the home of A. J. Liebling’s papers.

The folks at the four branches of the Fairfax County (Virginia) Public Library that I visited in the course of researching the book were helpful, too. So were the Brits at the Churchill War Rooms, the Wellington Barracks, and the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as the Imperial War Museum at Duxford in East Anglia. Huge thanks go out to Arthur Brookes at the Cambridge American Cemetery, my impromptu photographer; Anthony Lewis at the Normandy American Cemetery, my “John Murphy” researcher; and Frances Peel, the proprietress of the Cross Keys tavern in Molesworth, where I hoisted a couple of John Smith Bitters to the
memories of Walter and Homer. The beautiful little museum in Ste.-Mère-Église is one of my favorite places in Normandy, as is the now-bed-and-breakfast Château de Vouilly, where James Hamel and Gilbert Gallez were wonderful hosts and conscientious correspondents.

“Helpful” doesn’t begin to describe the friends and families of the five principals. The Cronkites, Nancy, Kate, and Walter III (Chip) and Chip’s son (and soon-to-be, with his Hamilton College professor Maurice Isserman, chronicler of his grandfather) Walter IV, were supportive every step of the way. Chip went above and beyond the call of duty in helping me track down people and things, including a rare copy of UP president Hugh Baillie’s WWII memoirs, not to mention the 1964 CBS News documentary
D-Day Plus 20 Years
, which I loved as a kid and is even better as an adult. Cronkite family friends and former CBS News colleagues Sandy Sokolow and Marlene Adler could not have been more generous with their time and observations. British documentary maker Alastair Layzell and his lovely wife and coproducer, Anne, were insightful, too.

The same is true, of course, of Mr. Rooney himself, who, in his early nineties and still sharp as a tack, sat down with me twice for extended interviews. Mr. Rooney sadly passed away in November of 2011, just as I was finishing the manuscript. Sure, he was crotchety but he was also wickedly funny and incisive. His deputy Susie Bieber dug up all kinds of information and allowed me the run of Mr. Rooney’s WWII files and photographs. Andy’s daughter Emily and son, Brian, were also terrific, as was Andy’s college roommate, former CBS colleague and friend for life, Bob Ruthman. Mr. Ruthman was hospitalized at Mr. Rooney’s memorial service and tragically died a few weeks later.

If there’s a most valuable player award for research on this project it goes to Ed Boyle, Hal’s nephew. Ed packaged up one of the Boyle family’s treasures, the scrapbook that his mother, Monica, kept during the war of Hal’s articles in the
Kansas City Star
, and allowed me to use it for a year. It was an invaluable resource; I’m indebted to the Boyle family for entrusting me with it. Hal’s daughter Tracy also spent time with me on the phone early in the project. Former AP–Kansas City reporter Paul Stevens generously
compiled a batch of clips and background information on Boyle. AP-NYC archivist Valerie Komor was great at tracking down leads and gave me the run of her operation.

Betsy Wade and her husband, Jim Boylan, great friends of Homer Bigart, were gracious hosts twice in New York. A decade ago, Betsy pulled together some of Bigart’s best war correspondence in the deftly titled
Forward Positions
. She helped unearth a lot of information about Homer and provided marvelous insights. So did Homer’s old colleague from Vietnam, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and historian Neil Sheehan.

Pete Hamill performed a great service three years ago when he compiled and edited A. J. Liebling’s World War II writings for the Library of America. Pete generously gave of his time via phone and e-mail.

One regret is that my old friend and longtime boss Jody Powell, President Carter’s distinguished press secretary, never got a chance to read this book. Now
there
was a guy who took history personally. He once chewed me out for not appreciating the geographic nuances of the North African campaign.

The sweetest thing about researching the book was coming in contact with the family members of the war heroes that the five reporters saluted. Colleen Sheets and Sally Sheets Wiggins, the widow and daughter of pilot Bob Sheets, were wonderful. So was Brenda Weaver, the daughter-in-law of Andy Rooney’s hero, the one-armed miracle, Sergeant Tyre Weaver. So were Sunny Smith and Lester Trott, the Annapolis Yacht Club friends of Bunny Rigg that my old friend, sailing buff Brian Sailer, helped to locate.

Friends and neighbors Pat and Mike McNamee performed much-appreciated research. Mike almost sprained his wrist operating microfilm machines in tracking down Bigart’s
Herald Tribune
clips.

Brent Howard, my editor at New American Library, exhibited the patience of Job. He and his team were a delight to work with.

The final thanks for this project, though, go to Elizabeth and our beautiful Triple As: Allyson, Andrew, and Abigail. Having the chance to walk Omaha Beach with them made it all worthwhile.