Peacetime Departure

"I am not, as I have been branded, an integrationist," said South Carolina-born Harry Scott Ashmore, executive editor of Little Rock's Arkansas Gazette, during the city's 1957 segregationist riots. "I call myself an upholder of law and order." While Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus worked tirelessly against both law and order in his campaign to keep the city's schools lily-white, Editor Ashmore became a rallying point for Southern moderates, won a Pulitzer Prize for his calm editorial voice. Last week, surveying Little Rock's now-peaceful school scene, Harry Ashmore, 43, announced that he is leaving to take on a new job as consultant to the Fund for the Republic's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Both Ashmore and Gazette Publisher John N. ("Ned") Heiskell made it clear that the departure was no retreat. "I'm a vindicated prophet without the grace to die," said Ashmore, taking note of this fall's token integration in Little Rock high schools. Said Heiskell: "His decision to accept the position actually was delayed on his own motion for more than a year because of the school situation here." Long associated with Fund for Republic programs, Ashmore in his new job will join a group of scholars and experts, e.g., former Assistant Secretary of State A. A. Berle Jr., Columbia University's famed physicist I. Rabi, in a search for ways to improve the performance of mass means of communication.

Orval Faubus could not resist a parting sneer at his old foe. Said he: "Ashmore has received a promotion to use his brainwashing talents on a far wider scale."

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