On September 4, 1957, while covering the attempt at desegregation at Little Rock Central High School, Fine famously sat down beside a lonely and scared Elizabeth Eckford and sympathetically said "don't let them see you cry."
[1][2] During his tenure as editor at the Times, he was implicated by Winston Burdett's 1955 testimony about Communists in the media before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
Fine cooperated with the Senate panel calling his one-year membership in the Communist Party from 1935 to 1936 while he was a student at Columbia University's Teachers College.
He told the subcommittee that his advice to young people today would be "keep away from anyone who talks the Communist line to you on the campus."
In 1962 Fine took a job as headmaster of Sands Point Country Day School, in Long Island, where he stayed until 1971.
It was in 1971 that he founded Horizon School for Gifted Children in Key Biscayne, Florida; the job he left Sands Point for.