Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that 73-year old Baron Kijuro Shidehara, one of Japan's best known liberals, had been named Premier to succeed Premier Higashi-Kuni. The new Premier stated that he hoped to make the Japanese Government truly liberal. He had opposed the militarist expansionism in 1931 into Manchuria and had been then forced into retirement. He reappointed, as Foreign Minister, Shigeru Yoshida, who had resigned with Premier Higashi-Kuni.

General MacArthur, who presumably had been consulted on the appointment, had no comment.

A photograph appears of another Japanese official, this one being relieved as the head of police at Uraga Village, losing his face. If you are squeamish, don't look.

In Paris, Pierre Laval's trial for treason was suspended following the defendant's expulsion from the courtroom for the second time in three days, this time for refusing to answer a question posed by the bench. He then refused to resume his defense when allowed back into the courtroom. After the first expulsion, one of the jurors had risen and shouted that Laval was not receiving justice. The judge was overheard to say at that time that Laval was right in demanding the ability to make an opening statement, after his attorneys had refused to participate further in the trial.

The judge had plainly asked a leading question, objectionable under American evidentiary rules, at least in those jurisdictions which follow the written rules of evidence. In any event, it did not deter this cracker on the French bench.

Laval was no lovely, but still was entitled to a fair and just trial, not the kangaroo court evident thus far, an international disgrace in fact.

At Lueneberg, Germany, at the close of the prosecution case against 45 SS men, Joseph Kramer, the "Beast of Belsen", admitted sending Jewish prisoners to their death at Natzweiler Concentration Camp. He stated that he was acting pursuant to direct orders issued by Heinrich Himmler. He also admitted awareness of the gas chamber at Oswiecim, contradicting an earlier statement.

In Warsaw, it was reported that Paul Hoffman, German commander of the Maidenak concentration camp where two million prisoners had died, was captured and would stand trial for war crimes.

A meeting between Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach and John L. Lewis of the UMW proved without fruit in resolving the coal strike, now having closed 500 mines in six states.

It was still unclear whether the oil refinery workers would respond to the union's back-to-work order following Government seizure of the refineries in fifteen states. Initial indications were that the workers wanted to lend their full support to the striking coal miners.

The telephone workers nationwide gave notice of a strike vote to be held within fifteen days, following the end of their four-hour strike on Friday. The workers would likely join the auto workers and oil refinery workers in demanding a 30 percent increase in wages, to keep pace with war wages which had been at overtime rates stretching to 48 hours per week. The nation's communications had largely come to an abrupt stop on Friday to give a taste of what a strike could do.

Gort had landed in Washington.

Scientists in Chicago who had worked on the Manhattan Project disputed the claims of Larry Crosby of the Crosby Research Foundation as being so much ba-ba-ba-voom, that no defense existed to the gadget and certainly not one, as claimed by Mr. Crosby, which could detonate from afar atom bombs without knowing their whereabouts, causing some degree of havoc. The scientists stated that the claim was as preposterous as the Foundation's contention of having set off an atomic explosion with material the size of a goober. The scientists volunteered to work at their laboratory desks on the fissionable material while Mr. Crosby and his scientists sought to explode them.

In the fourth game of the World Series at Wrigley Field in Chicago, the Detroit Tigers jumped out to a 4-0 lead in the fourth inning against the Cubs. The Tigers would go on to win 4-1, tying the Series at two games apiece.

On the editorial page, we note first a change on the masthead, that Burke Davis had been replaced as Associate Editor by Harry S. Ashmore. Mr. Davis, author of many books, known for his books on the Civil War, who just passed away in 2006, had been the Associate Editor since June, 1942, had been the acting Editor in the absence of J.E. Dowd who, as a member of the Naval Reserve, volunteered for active duty, and was gone from late December, 1942 through August, 1944.

There is no mention made of the change thus far. Perhaps, next week.

Mr. Ashmore was the third Associate Editor after W. J. Cash left the newspaper for his ill-fated journey to Mexico City in the closing days of May of 1941. Stuart Rabb of the Winston-Salem Journal picked up the baton for a year.

As we know from having daily proceeded on this project in real time for five years, synchronized with the daily schedule of The News since April 1, 1941, and obviously without the actual encroaching events and pressures on society from a terrible war impacting everyone and every activity of life just outside the window, it was not an easy task, not nearly so easy as it might appear. One can literally get dizzy by the end of an average week, with a head full of print swirling about and flying out the window into the streets.

We shall see if Mr. Ashmore changes the editorial direction at all of the column, bearing in mind that the Associate Editor shared some of the editorial writing responsibilities with J.E. Dowd and with other contributors on occasion from the staff. The Associate Editor had heretofore handled most of the writing responsibilities.

By V-J. Day the men and women had already started returning to civilian life, and with them came the newcomer who had been a lieutenant-colonel in the Army. He was Harry S. Ashmore, a Greenville, S.C., newspaperman before he entered service, a young man who had attracted the attention of The News with his his astuteness in observing South Carolina politics. Ashmore's editorial writing for The News focused national attention on him, and he eventually left to become executive editor of The Little Rock, Ark., Gazette. He was succeeded by W. M. Reddig, who had served on The Kansas City Star for years.

He had been mentioned twice before in the column during the Cash years, on July 13, 1938, and on December 20, 1940.

Mr. Ashmore, 29 when he came aboard The News, grew up in Greenville, graduated from Clemson in 1937, was a Nieman Fellow to Harvard in 1941, joined the Gazette in 1947, and during his tenure until 1959, took a leave of absence to work for a year on the second presidential campaign of Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1955-56.

During the Civil Rights era in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954-55, ordering the desegregation of public schools "with all deliberate speed", he led the paper in taking strong editorial stands against segregationist Governor Orval Faubus, and specifically in September, 1957, actively protested the Governor's refusal to integrate the Little Rock Central High School, resulting in President Eisenhower federalizing the National Guard and deploying the Army to secure the entry of the nine students who sought admission to the all-white school, having been selected by the school board to be the first such students for their academic prowess.

The Gazette won a Pulitzer in 1958 which read: "For demonstrating the highest qualities of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility and moral courage in the face of great public tension during the school integration crisis of 1957. The newspaper's fearless and completely objective news coverage, plus its reasoned and moderate policy, did much to restore calmness and order to an overwrought community, reflecting great credit on its editors and its management." Mr. Ashmore, interviewed by Mike Wallace in June, 1958, won a Pulitzer for "the forcefulness, dispassionate analysis and clarity of his editorials on the school integration conflict in Little Rock." Boycotts of the newspaper by local racists during this period caused circulation to drop by ten percent.

In 1959, Mr. Ashmore left Little Rock to join the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, where he remained until his death at age 81 on January 20, 1998. He served as president of the Center from 1969 to 1974. He also received the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for 1995-96.

In 1959, the Arkansas General Assembly passed a resolution to rename Toad Suck Ferry to Ashmore Landing. Governor Faubus, however, vetoed the resolution, contending that the change would defame a well known landing.

For our money, they could change the name to Orval Toad Suck Ferry.

Two weeks following the 1958 interview of Mr. Ashmore, incidentally, Mr. Wallace interviewed Dr. Henry Kissinger, then an obscure academic. On the intervening week, as he remarks at the end of the interview of Mr. Ashmore, he would interview Charles Percy of Illinois, future moderate to liberal contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, at the time in 1958, chairman of Bell & Howell—the company which, by dint of circumstance, manufactured the camera which Abraham Zapruder used on that fateful Friday in Dallas. Mr. Percy became Senator from Illinois in 1967.

As also explained in the 60th Anniversary Edition of The News, Burke Davis moved on to the Baltimore Evening Sun. The photograph to which he refers of the new staff members in 1937 appeared on November 7.

In the column of this date, "Obligation" comments on the report to the White House on the condition of Jews in occupied Germany having been the basis for President Truman's effort to improve the conditions under which they were forced to live. The report, called the Harrison report, had been questioned, however, by a group of journalists visiting Feldaving Camp in Bavaria, one of the reported trouble spots which helped to cause General Patton to lose his command of the Third Army. But the journalists reported that conditions were not nearly so bad as the report made them out to be, that they were certainly not nearly as bad as under the Nazis, a charge made by the Harrison report.

President Truman had enunciated his desire to have Palestine opened to Jewish immigration and that the Army undertake transportation. He did not favor a Jewish state in Palestine but believed it should be shared by all three of the predominating religious groups, including Moslem and Christian. The British, however, had yet to approve the plan, believing there would be extensive violence. As Drew Pearson had pointed out on September 26, the British, however, had been providing the rifles to King Saud, with which to enable engaging in such violence.

The piece, however, questions how many Jews would want to go to Palestine from their home land of Germany, with their rights now fully assured, at least in theory.

"Honest Reporting" finds accuracy in the charge made in Collier's by Philip Murray, head of the CIO, that labor had received an unfair shake from journalists regarding strikes and supposed demands for high wages. Much of the reportage was inaccurate and the editorialization worse, the latter laboring under the suspicion that organized labor was controlled by Communists.

"First Failure" indicates that the Truman Administration's inability to resolve the oil refinery strike without first seizing the refineries suggested some tough times ahead in labor relations unless a decision were made to accommodate management and industry by removing price controls. While increased post-war production might be expected to absorb some of the increased costs associated with a wage hike, it could not likely absorb the demanded 30 percent hike, or even, apparently, the 15 percent raise which the Government had sought as an arbitration goal, one which labor, but not the company owners, had accepted in the oil refinery strike.

"For the Nurses" applauds the move by the wife of the Army Surgeon General, Mrs. Norman Kirk, to establish a two-million dollar Nurse's National Memorial for those 80,000 nurses who had served during the war, providing for them temporary residence upon return to the United States. The nurses, unlike the WAC's, WAVE's, Marines, and Spars, who remained well behind enemy lines, with Navy personnel remaining stateside, went into combat zones. Despite the risk, the pay initially to nurses had been lower than males of the same rank. That inequity was corrected but the nurses still did not receive promotion as rapidly as females in other branches.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi trying to begin his 30-day filibuster to block passage of a bill abolishing Federal rate priorities on land-grant railroads.

Drew Pearson reports that General Eisenhower had known since at least late August of General Patton's flouting of his order to de-Nazify and his maintaining instead Nazis as local leaders in Bavaria for the sake of efficiency. In a meeting in late August with General Lucius Clay and General Eisenhower, Patton had openly resisted the order, saying that without Nazis as burgomeisters, the military occupation force would be, "Hell's bells", "up the creek without a paddle". General Clay told him that the mission was to get the Nazis out, not govern efficiently, but General Patton continued nevertheless the same policy he had been following.

Finally, he points out that Life had printed an account on former Secretaries of State, with pictures of each, except for Edward Stettinius, who had been in office from November though the end of June and, most notably, had presided over the American delegation to the U.N. Conference in San Francisco, would be the first American representative to the U.N. Organization.

Marquis Childs continues to review responses by members of Congress to his inquiries regarding their positions on international aid, on which he had initially reported each of the previous two days. He stresses this date those Senators and Congressmen who had responded affirmatively but with conditions. Most of these members would support immediate relief under the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration, as long as there were assurances of its efficiency, while a broader study was undertaken by the Administration to determine the precise needs of the countries in Europe. But some had reservations about the independence of UNRRA and whether it had been brought too much under the domination of Russia in Eastern Europe, a feeling enhanced by the recent failure of the London Conference of Foreign Ministers.

A letter writer encloses a letter from her son, part of the occupation force in Germany, who complained that he had read of some draft boards in North Carolina quitting and refusing to induct men any further. He wonders who in hell they thought they were, that by doing so, they left the men who had fought the war to police the occupied countries indefinitely, without respite or relief.

The fifth in the series of reports by the State Planning Board looks at soybeans and the failure of the state to take advantage of the means to produce them. In 1914, it had been determined that Eastern North Carolina was growing more soybeans than any other area, as World War I had brought the necessity to import soybean oil to relieve the shortage in fats and oils.

Then the report cites a blizzard of statistics.

What somebody needed to whisper in the ears of the Board and the farmers, rather than concern over statistics, was to go to see Henry Ford, with his grammar school education, and sell him on the concept of soybean automobile bodies, which could withstand sledgehammer blows, and, voila! A ready crop base for the new Ford body, lower insurance rates with fewer accidents necessitating repairs, auto body men being able then to go to work on soybean farms or, as they pleased, at Ford, producing the new bodies, and a perfect system then being the result.

But nobody wanted to think too much beyond tobacco and hogs, the way things had always been done, and the result is plainly obvious to this day, including the heavy cancer toll and the health care mess behind it.

Sorry, but it's not Bing, this time.