JACKSON - Back in 1955, then-rookie reporter David Halberstam was summarily fired by the editor of the West Point Daily Times-Leader in Northeast Mississippi for being too journalistically independent.
Forty-eight years later, Halberstam, with a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in Vietnam and 14 nationally acclaimed best-seller books in his resume, was summoned back to Mississippi.
This time it was to honor William Winter, the state's former governor and elder statesman, and to keynote a ceremony dedicating the elegant new five-story state historical repository named for him.
An admitted non-admirer of most politicians, the nationally acclaimed journalist/historian called Winter a shining exception. "You're my favorite politician, my personal hero," Halberstam declared.
Halberstam, who has often popped back into Mississippi in the years since his ignominious departure four decades ago, has developed a special interest in the state's people and their struggle to deal with age-old racial and economic problems.
"I believed for a long time that America would not be whole until Mississippi became part of it," he told an audience of 800 on a chilly day outside the sparkling new William F. Winter Archives and History Building.
He couched his remarks with the assertion that Mississippi "has always struck me as the state where the weight of the past is greatest … it was here the tragic burden of race - the slave trade - was heaviest."
Significantly, he spent the week of the Nov. 4 elections in the state, visiting his daughter Julia, who for three years has been an Americorps-sponsored kindergarten teacher in Greenville, and to speak at a testimonial for former big league pitching great Dave "Boo" Ferris.
Obviously, Halberstam, whose keen insights into America's contemporary scene have established him as an authoritative voice on numerous TV documentaries, had picked up on the racial overtones of the Mississippi election.
Although he made no specific reference to how the Nov. 4 state elections unfolded, Halberstam observed that the seminal test for racial healing is in the political process.
"Nothing tests our political system," he declared, "not just here in Mississippi, but nationally, not just overtly but covertly - for we've become very good at coding our prejudices - as race."
Paraphrasing Lincoln's admonition, he said politicians need to be judged on whether or not "they speak to the better or the lesser angels of our nature."
Winter's appeal to the "nobility" of Mississippi's citizenry, Halberstam declared, is where William Winter made his greatest contribution to his state and the nation.
"We are all aware, especially in this state," Halberstam said, "of politicians who can play to the darker side of our nature."
He added: "What made you (Winter) special as a politician was you had faith in the nobility of ordinary people and that if spoken to with candor and decency, they can rise to the occasion."
Winter, the state's governor from 1980 to 1984, is especially revered in state history as the "father" of the Mississippi Education Reform Act of 1982, which raised public education standards to a higher level and launched the state's first public kindergarten system.
Nationally, Winter is noted for serving as a member of President Clinton's Commission on Racial Reconciliation. He is a former chairman of the prestigious Kettering Foundation, a major player in improving education and human development. He also chaired the National Commission on State and Local Public Service sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The 80-year-old Winter is constantly in demand by civic and cultural organizations in Mississippi to speak or take part in their functions, and, over entreaties of his wife, Elise, and his close friends, rarely turns one down.
But one weekly ritual remains closest to his heart, when he gets into his car and drives to the campus of Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena to spend several hours talking to students about Mississippi history and public affairs.
The Legislature four years ago had enacted legislation designating the state's new $30.5 million archives and history building for him, in large part because of his 46-year tenure as a trustee for the state Board of Archives and History and the board's president since 1969.
Winter told the gathering in front of the William F. Winter Archives and History Building, society "must be instructed by history but not imprisoned by it … ."
That's been Winter's credo through his more than 50 years as public servant and public citizen, during some of Mississippi's most turbulent and sometimes shameful times of social and political change.
Much of the state's history during those times will be housed, preserved or displayed for both Mississippians and others who use the building that now bears Winter's name.
As Halberstam the historian describes it, the Winter Building "holds, if we use it properly, a road map, an imperfect one to be sure, but a road map nonetheless to a future otherwise only dimly seen."
