Ex-N.C. Publisher Wallace Carroll Dies

By: (AP) Wallace Carroll, a former World War II correspondent and longtime editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, has died. He was 95.

Carroll died Sunday at a retirement community in Winston-Salem.

Under his guidance, the staff won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1971 for environmental stories about strip mining in North Carolina.

"I thought it was wonderful that a newspaper like the Journal and a city like Winston-Salem had a man like Wally here," said Ed Wilson, a former provost at Wake Forest University. "He brought all this experience that one didn't often find in a community like ours in the South."

Carroll, who was born in Milwaukee and graduated from Marquette University, worked his way up from cub reporter to become a foreign correspondent with United Press. When World War II broke out, his dispatches from Europe told of the devastation of the Nazi air assaults and of the hidden power of Russian ground forces.

After Pearl Harbor, Carroll joined the government and became director of the U.S. Office of War Information in London and an adviser on psychological warfare to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Carroll came to Winston-Salem in 1949.

The Journal's owner, Gordon Gray, was secretary of the Army and had heard of Carroll through a friend and was looking for an executive editor.

"I knew he had been a great reporter and that lent plausibility to everything he said and did," said Tom Wicker, a Journal reporter who became a reporter and columnist for The New York Times.

Carroll left in 1955 to be news editor of the Washington bureau of the Times, where he spent eight years. He returned to Winston-Salem in 1963 as publisher of the Journal and Sentinel.

An editorial Carroll wrote in March 1968 questioned the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and the newspaper was flooded with reprint requests.

Carroll sent a copy to friend and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was an adviser to President Johnson. Days later, Johnson announced he would seek peace with North Vietnam and wouldn't run for re-election.

Later, Acheson said Carroll's editorial reflected his own views and he told the president so.

Carroll retired in 1973. He was a lecturer at Wake Forest and continued to write.

Carroll's wife, Margaret, died last year.

Survivors include a son, John, editor of the Los Angeles Times; and three daughters: Margaret, a former editor at Congressional Quarterly and the National Journal, and former executive director of Investor Responsibility Research Center; Rosamond, and Patricia.