Marguerite Higgins

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.

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's 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's father lost his job during the 1929 stock market crash, which promoted anxiety for the family.

In her autobiography, News Is a Singular Thing, Higgins wrote that it was the worst day of her childhood:

"It was on that day that I began worrying about how I'd earn a living when I grew up. I was then eight years old. Like millions of others brought up in the thirties, I was haunted by the fear that there might be no place for me in our society."

Regardless, the family managed to get by.

Higgins's father eventually got a job at a bank and her mother was able to get Higgins a scholarship to the Anna Head School in Berkeley, in exchange for taking a position as a French teacher.

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.

After graduating from Berkeley in 1941 with a B.A. in French, she headed to New York with a single suitcase and seven dollars in her pocket with the intent of getting a newspaper job.

She planned to give herself a year to find a job, and if that failed, she would return to California to be a French teacher.

Having arrived in late summer, she applied to the master's program at the Columbia University School of Journalism.

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.

She had to fight her way into Columbia.

Having tried to get in just days before the program began, the university said that all the slots allotted to women were filled.

After multiple pleadings and meetings, the university said they would consider her if she was able to get all her transcripts and five letters of recommendations from her previous professors.

Instantly, she got on the phone to call her father to arrange for all the materials from Berkeley to be sent to Columbia.

A student dropped out of the program right before the first day and Higgins was in.

Upset that the coveted campus correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune had been filled by her classmate Murray Morgan, she did her best to outdo her classmates, most of them men.

According to one of her professors, John Tebbel, her beauty matched her brains, being one of the best of her class:

"Even in a class full of stars, she stood out. Maggie was positively dazzling, with a blonde beauty that hardly concealed her equally dazzling intelligence. She was all hard-edged ambition. In those days women had to be tougher to succeed in journalism, a male-dominated and essentially chauvinistic business, and Maggie carried toughness to the outer edge, propelled by driving ambition, which was soon apparent to us all."

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

In 1942, Higgins replaced her classmate as the campus correspondent for the Tribune, which led to a full-time reporting position.

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.

The gossip at the time speculated that the novelist, Toni Howard, based the main character on Higgins, raising suspicion and hostility among Tokyo staffers.

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

She subsequently won Long Island University's George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting for articles from behind enemy lines in Korea and other nations in 1952.