"HARRY JOHNSTON'S death diminishes the South." Thus one of the nation's leading editors, Eugene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution, saluted Reporter Harry Johnston, who died at 48, of emphysema and pneumonia, in his fourth year as chief of Time's Atlanta bureau.

Editor Patterson published his warm tribute to Johnston in the Constitution, and since it says so much so well about the problems confronting a conscientious craftsman reporting on the troubled South, we quote from it here as a shared salute to the memory of a colleague: "He was no angry liberal in the ideological sense. He was in fact a pretty conservative fellow. But he did not like to see little people pushed around. It was that simple with him. He didn't care what color the little people were. He held in utter contempt those political poses designed to conceal social brutalities in a region that deserved better leadership, and he didn't scare."

Another one of Harry's admirers on the Constitution, Publisher Ralph McGill, said: "He covered the South honestly and well. There is too little reporting of the type he did. We here miss him as a friend and a reporter of the first rank."

Harry was born in Texas and worked on the Houston Post from 1938 to 1954, with three years out for Army duty in World War II. A combat correspondent with the rank of Staff Sergeant, he covered the campaigns in The Netherlands and Germany with the 84th Infantry Division and won the Bronze Star. He was City Editor of the Post when he joined Time as a correspondent in the Washington bureau 13 years ago.

From 1957 to 1959, he put in his first tour of duty in Atlanta. His other positions on the magazine included bureau chief in Ottawa, deskman in New York and Deputy Chief of the Time-Life News Service.

"It was good for the South," Patterson wrote, "that he ran Time's Atlanta bureau, because here was a man who had an affectionate understanding of the Southern people and an implacable determination not to temporize with their misleaders.

"It never bothered Harry that the Southern people did not yet understand the worth of what he was trying to do for them. He was one of the band of native news writers who had both sense and guts, and who devoted their lives to the hard business of drawing the picture clear in the South. Softhearted, hard-nosed and levelheaded, Harry Johnston served us all in his too-brief years."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.