The Press: Damned Good Pro

Before the Southern Governors' Conference in 1951, a bushy-haired, boyish-looking newsman stood up and spoke unpalatable truths. Said he: "We cannot turn our backs upon injustice simply because a black man is its victim. Nor can we find a safe retreat in the sort of legalistic buck-passing that recognizes the existence of an evil but insists it is somebody else's responsibility."

Six years later, Harry Scott Ashmore's words came home to roost—right on his own shoulders. In his post as executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette, he stood out last week as the strong voice for principle and reason in Little Rock and a central figure in the integration crisis.

Public Enemy No. I. Day after day, rumpled, greying Harry Ashmore, 41, turned out some of the most eloquent editorials of his distinguished career, supplied guidance and a stream of wisecracks for impatient newsmen from all over the world, briefed Government official on critical developments. Twice he scurried up to Manhattan to give TViewers a memorable glimpse of good will that was still at work in the South.

Through the turmoil. Harry Ashmore's telephone shrilled around the clock with threatening calls from agitators, who were fired by Governor Faubus' cry that Editor Ashmore was the worst of all possible culprits, "an ardent integrationist." Little Rock's white-supremacist Capital Citizens' Council (annual dues: $5) dubbed Ashmore "Public Enemy No. i." Eagerly abetted by some less scrupulous competitors, a statewide boycott against "that nigger-lovin' paper" had cost the 137-year-old Gazette (circ. 99,573) 3,000 subscribers by week's end.

Bar Raillery. With the solid support of J. (for John) N. Heiskell, 84-year-old president of the sturdily Democratic Gazette, Editor Ashmore emphasized from the day of the Supreme Court's school-integration ruling in 1954 that there could be "no choice between compliance and defiance." Far from urging integration, the Gazette, which had helped elect Orval Faubus in two gubernatorial campaigns, backed his efforts to postpone desegregation by "moderate," legal means. But when Faubus switched last month from legalistic buck-passing to outright defiance, Harry Ashmore's conscience-pricking editorials (more than 40 so far) repeatedly warned of the tragic consequences. When the mobs moved into the streets around Central High School, it was to Democratic Editor Ashmore that U.S. Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers telephoned for a precise estimate of the strength of the forces of moderation. "I told him," drawled Ashmore. "that about all our side had left was a broken-down editor, a lame-duck mayor and a former governor who has no public office."