MARGUERITE HIGGINS, EQUALITY FOR WAR JOURNALISTS

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Marguerite Higgins Hall, the American reporter and war correspondent, who was born on a day like today on 1920.

Marguerite Higgins Hall (September 3, 1920-January 3, 1966) was an American reporter and war correspondent.

Higgins covered World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and in the process advanced the cause of equal access for female war correspondents. 

She had a long career with the New York Herald Tribune (1942-1963), and later, as a syndicated columnist for Newsday (1963-1965). 

She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Correspondence awarded in 1951 for her coverage of the Korean War.

Higgins was born on September 3, 1920, in Hong Kong, where her father, Lawrence Higgins, was working at a shipping company. Her father, an Irish-American, met his future wife and Higgins' mother, Marguerite de Godard Higgins (who was of French aristocratic descent) in WWI Paris. Shortly afterward, they moved to Hong Kong, where their daughter was born.

The family moved back to the United States three years later and settled in Oakland.

Higgins started at the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1937 where she was a member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority and wrote for The Daily Californian, serving as an editor in 1940.

She walked into the New York Herald Tribune city office after arriving in New York in August 1941. She met with the city editor at the time, L.L. Engel Engelking, and showed him her clippings. While he didn't offer her a job at the time, he told her to come back in a month and maybe he'd have a position for her. She decided to stay in New York and studied at Columbia.

More information: We Are The Mighty

Eager to become a war correspondent, Higgins persuaded the management of the New York Herald Tribune to send her to Europe in 1944, after working for the paper for two years. After being stationed in London and Paris, she was reassigned to Germany in March 1945. She witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945 and received a U.S. Army campaign ribbon for her assistance during the surrender by its S.S. guards. She later covered the Nuremberg war trials and the Soviet Union's blockade of Berlin.

In 1947, she became the Chief of the Tribune's bureau in Berlin.

In 1950, Higgins was named chief of the Tribune's Tokyo bureau, and she received a cold welcome by her colleagues in Tokyo. She later learned that a recently published novel by her colleague in Berlin had created a hostile impression. The novel, Shriek With Pleasure, depicted a female reporter in Berlin who stole stories and slept with sources.

As a result of her reporting from Korea, Higgins received the 1950 George Polk Memorial Award from the Overseas Press Club. She contributed along with other major journalistic and political figures to the Collier's magazine collaborative special issue Preview of the War We Do Not Want, with an article entitled Women of Russia.

Higgins continued to cover foreign affairs throughout the rest of her life, interviewing world leaders such as Francisco Franco, Nikita Khrushchev, and Jawaharlal Nehru. 

In 1955, she established and became chief of the Tribune's Moscow bureau and was the first American correspondent allowed back into the Soviet Union after Stalin's death.

In 1963, she joined Newsday and was assigned to cover Vietnam, where she visited hundreds of villages, interviewed most of the major figures, and wrote a book entitled Our Vietnam Nightmare. While in Vietnam, another feud developed between Higgins and David Halberstam, a New York Times correspondent who was assigned to replace Bigart. Her battle was not for scoops or headlines this time. Instead, it was based on the ideological differences and ego between an experienced correspondent, Higgins, and a young Halberstam.

When Higgins was six months old, she came down with malaria. A doctor told the family to take her to a mountain resort in present-day Vietnam to recover, which she did. Decades later, Higgins returned from assignment in South Vietnam in November 1965, where Higgins contracted leishmaniasis, a disease that led to her death on January 3, 1966, aged 45, in Washington, D.C. She is interred at Arlington National Cemetery with her husband.

More information: Wednesdays Women

I thought then how much more matter-of-fact
the actuality of war is than any of its projections in literature.
The wounded seldom cry
-there’s no one with time and emotion to listen.

Marguerite Higgins