Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [11]
NAZIS TAKE BREST-LITOVSK
TURKS MASS ON SYRIAN BORDER
I couldn’t have told you what country Brest-Litovsk was in nor did I have any idea what disagreement the Turks had with the Syrians.
It still was ten years before Senator Joseph McCarthy aroused the moderate and liberal population to protest his demagogic effort to expose and make jobless any American who ever had a conciliatory thought about socialism or communism. Before the war the isolationist Congressman Martin Dies Jr. of Texas had already formed an Un-American Activities Committee that was McCarthy’s forerunner. Isolationism was a popular movement, and outside the House it was organized as a group with the populist name “America First.”
I participated in a debating society contest and the issue of the argument was “Resolved, that the American Press should be under the control of a Federal Press Commission.” I’m pleased to be able to report that I was on the right side of that argument although I think the sides were chosen by a flip of a coin. We won the debate, but the fact that it could have been proposed as a subject for debate says something about the times—and we didn’t have any easy time winning. The proposition would not be seriously considered today.
I didn’t want to go to Europe to fight and die for what seemed to me to be someone else’s cause. I hear the faint, far-away-and-long-ago echo of my own voice every time a congressman proclaims that “we shouldn’t sacrifice the life of a single American boy” when the question comes up about our moving in to save a few hundred thousand poor souls being slaughtered in some foreign land. I decided I must be a Conscientious Objector. It was always capitalized because it was a formally recognized category of draft resisters.
This was when “Doc” Armstrong ended up forcing my hand, although he couldn’t have known it since I’d never spoken with him. I had no idea that “Doc,” the friendly, homespun tradesman with the goldrimmed spectacles, was the head of the draft board. If “Doc” was around today, he could step into a role as the druggist in any pharmaceutical company’s television commercial. His was the first drugstore I’d ever seen that didn’t have a soda fountain, and that should have made me realize that “Doc” was a no-nonsense guy. There was something else I didn’t know about “Doc” that I learned later. He was commander of the Madison County chapter of the American Legion and thought that every red-blooded American boy should serve his country—as he had in World War I—and right now.
He was not impressed by my attempt to delay enlisting by registering in Hamilton instead of Albany. It seemed to me as though I’d been hit by a truck the day I got the draft notice, sometime in May, a few weeks before the end of my junior year, stating I was to report for duty in the United States Army.
I had long, sophomoric, philosophical discussions with my friends about resisting the draft. A young man I’d been in school with at The Albany Academy, Allen Winslow, had already refused to serve and was the first person to go to prison for that offense during World War II. I admired him.
Unwilling as I was, over the few months I had between the time I was drafted and the day I had to report, I wisely concluded that I probably wasn’t smart enough to be a Conscientious Objector even though I
As a young Stars and Stripes reporter in England
agreed with those who were. All the Conscientious Objectors I knew, like Boulding, seemed bright, deep, introspective, and a little strange. I liked those traits in a person even though I didn’t have them myself.
One of my dominating characteristics has always been that I’m not strange. I’m average in so many ways that it eliminates any chance I ever had of being considered a brooding, introspective intellectual.
When Boulding died in 1993, several people wrote me