Anyone who watched the vividly and powerfully told “The War,” the latest from historical documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, has gotten to know a small-town newspaper editor named Al MacIntosh. He is a fellow with whom any contemporary journalist would love to savor a leisurely cup of coffee, relishing the stories he gathered from his front-row seat on the small-town American scene.

Mr. Burns has said in interviews that Mr. MacIntosh’s columns, which ran on the front page of the Rock County Star Herald of Luverne, Minn., during the World War II years, provide a sort of Greek chorus in his film. “The War” is told not through the words of generals, admirals and presidents, but through the eyewitness accounts of front-line soldiers, sailors and airmen, and through the collective eyes of four small American cities: Sacramento, Calif., Mobile, Ala., Waterbury, Conn., and Mr. MacIntosh’s hometown, Luverne.

One might expect the 1940s writings of a small-town newspaper publisher and editor to be provincial, limited in scope to the talk around the cracker barrel at the general store. The columns are certainly locally grounded, but are anything but small-minded.

The selections read on the film – by actor Tom Hanks – describe in plain-spoken eloquence the incursions the war had on small-town life, with an evident fondness and empathy for the community: mothers at the train station, saying goodbye to their soldier sons; children with their noses pressed to the window, waiting for Dad to come home on leave; the uncharacteristic quiet of the Fourth of July, when everyone is thinking of “the boys” instead of celebrating.

Mr. MacIntosh’s take on learning of the D-Day invasion gives a glimpse of his work at its best:

“When we stumbled sleepily down the hall to answer the ringing telephone, we made a mental note that it was shortly before 3 a.m. We picked up the receiver, thinking it was Sheriff Roberts calling to say there had been an accident. Instead, it was Mrs. Lloyd Long, playing the feminine counterpart of Paul Revere, saying, ‘Get up, Al, and listen to the radio. The invasion has started.’ We sat by the radio for over an hour, listening to the breathtaking announcement. And then we went to bed, to lie there for a long time, wide-eyed and in the darkness, thinking, ‘What Rock County boys are landing on French soil tonight?'”

Editor & Publisher magazine writes that Mr. MacIntosh apparently became a bit of a grumpy old man by the mid-1960s, and wrote a widely reprinted column decrying sit-ins, “lax morality” and anti-Americanism. But during the World War II years, he did what all journalists aspire to do – hold up a mirror to the community, guided by the sensitivity and affection of one who chooses to live there.