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     FRESNO - Joseph Kingsbury-Smith, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and former national editor of Hearst Newspapers, died last month at the age of 90 years.
     As a journalist, Mr. Kingsbury-Smith interviewed many notables, including some of the world's great leaders. His correspondence with Russian Premier Joseph Stalin was headlined all over the globe in 1949.
     But, on October 1, 1946 Mr. Kingsbury-Smith was the lone American news man in the press pool in Nuremburg a particular Nazi war criminal was executed.
     Julius Streicher, the anti-Semitic propagandist was Adolf Hitler's close friend and confidant. On that day, Strricher was set for execution along with 10 other Nazis.
     Including Streicher, it would have been an even dozen, but Hermann Goering, committed suicide in his prison cell just hours before his sentence could be carried out.
     The military style gallows was placed in a gymnasium in the jail yard, a few feet from the prison where the Nazi war criminals awaited their fate.
      Mr. Kingsbury-Smith was an eyewitness the executions. There was Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, and Security Chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and the true-believer Alfred Rosenberg, Poland's under-Führer Hans Frank, Hitler's Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, slave labor coordinator Fritz Sauckel, Army General Alfred Jodl, Holland's under-Führer Arthur Seyss-Inquart and the propagandist publisher of ther fiercely anti-semitic berlin newspaper Der Stürmer Julius Streicher.
     Mr. Kingsbury-Smith wote that Von Ribbentrop, "...spent his last words on a plea for peace in the world."
     Keitel, was reported as making a claim that he was, "...only following Hitler's orders. I follow now my sons."
      But a foul-up in the Streicher execution was not reported in Mr. Kingsbury-Smith's story. He later recounted the event, to his journalist counterparts at the San Francisco Examiner. In explaining, he said that Streicher's hanging was bungled, and at the last moment Streicher screamed out the Nazi salute Heil Hitler. And at the same instant the trap-door opened and Streicher went down kicking and twisting at the end of the hangman's rope.
     As the rope snapped Streicher was groaning for several seconds. Just then, the hangman, lifted the black covering the lower portion of the gallows and went inside. Suddenly Streicher's voice was still, silenced forever.