Marguerite Higgins

Born September 3, 1920
Hong Kong
Died January 3, 1966
Washington, D.C.

American journalist and war correspondent

It is difficult to find a history of the Korean War (1950–53) that does not feature Marguerite Higgins, the only female war correspondent reporting on combat in that war. Her presence at the battlefront caused a national sensation. In the 1950s, when many Americans were uncomfortable with women filling what were then considered strictly men's roles, Higgins was forced to prove herself at every step of the difficult path she had chosen. Young, attractive, and very determined, she made waves wherever she went. Her struggle against gender bias captured the American public's attention while she was bravely and skillfully carrying out her journalistic duties and winning a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Korea.

A childhood of glamor, adventure, and isolation

Marguerite Higgins was born on September 3, 1920, in Hong Kong, to Lawrence Daniel Higgins and Marguerite de Goddard. Her parents met in Paris during World War I (1914–18). Her father, a law student in California, was a natural adventurer and joined the French army as an ambulance driver when the war broke out. Higgins's mother was living in the French countryside and went to Paris looking for work. One day when the shelling in the city was intense, Lawrence and Marguerite both took cover in a metro (underground train) station. They fell in love and married. Lawrence took a job with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and the couple moved to Hong Kong, then a British colony in China. There Marguerite or "Maggie," their only child, was born. For five years the family lived a happy life in Hong Kong. They moved to California in 1925.

Settling down to a suburban life was not easy for the Higgins. Lawrence became a stockbroker, but hard times settled over the country during the Great Depression, and they were not well off. Higgins's mother got a job teaching French at a very exclusive girls' school in exchange for her daughter's scholarship. It is likely that both parents pressed their daughter to achieve the adventure and glamor in her life they had left behind. With her parents pushing her to excel, Higgins grew up to be an outstanding athlete and student, but she was poor and Catholic in a rich and Protestant school and never felt she fit in.

Higgins decided by the time she was sixteen that she wanted to be a journalist and never veered from this career choice. In 1937, she began her freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley and quickly joined the staff of the Daily Californian, a highly acclaimed school newspaper run entirely by students. Higgins was an extremely dynamic young woman by this time. She liked to be the leader of anything she undertook and made things exciting for the people around her. Toward the end of her college days she took up leftist politics and began speaking at protest demonstrations. ("Leftists" generally hold radical political views seeking change and reform, usually including more freedom, more equality, and better conditions for common people.) Most of her colleagues of these days said she was very manipulative (scheming) and did not get close to other people. She was so competitive that she was often accused of stealing stories from other reporters on the paper.

A journalist in New York

Higgins graduated from the University of California with honors. She packed one suitcase and went to New York City with a reported $7 in her pocket. In New York, she tirelessly applied to every newspaper for work, but none were willing to hire her. Undaunted, she enrolled at the Columbia School of Journalism for the master's program. Her classmates there remember her as intelligent and beautiful, but unusually competitive and ambitious. While she was in school she landed a part-time job with the New York Herald Tribune. In June 1942, she managed to get an interview with the elusive Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the wife of the Nationalist leader of China. This accomplishment led to Higgins becoming the sec ond woman ever to be hired as a news reporter at the Tribune.

World War II (1939–45) was in full swing when Higgins got her master's degree with honors. She married Stanley Moore, a handsome, intelligent, and politically radical philosophy student from an aristocratic background. Moore joined the air force and left for Europe soon after the marriage. Higgins continued to work for the Tribune as a member of its city staff. In 1944, she covered the story of a circus tent fire in Hart ford, Connecticut, in which 186 people, most of them children, burned to death. The horror on the scene was felt deeply by the most hardened journalists and fire teams. One of Higgins's coworkers remembered with amazement how hard Higgins had worked to help out and to cover the story. It was good preparation for what was to come.

Overseas correspondent

Higgins had always wanted to be assigned to an overseas position. In 1944 she got her wish, when her paper sent her to London, England. By chance, her husband was stationed there as well, and the couple lived together for the first time in the midst of heavy bombing. Higgins reported on the bombings, on the British prime minister, Winston Churchill (1874–1965), the king, women in the war, and many other things. Her stories were very successful, but her marriage was not. She and her husband permanently separated by the end of the year and later divorced.

In February 1945, after recovering from a serious illness, Higgins was sent to Paris, France, as overseas correspondent for the Tribune because she spoke fluent French. There were few correspondents left in Paris and Higgins started out by handling all nonmilitary stories. She worked night and day, competing with the old hands, and churned out many key stories on war-torn France. Still, she longed to be at the battlefront, in the seat of the action.

War correspondent in Germany, 1945

In March 1945, Higgins joined the U.S. Seventh Army and went to Germany, where she witnessed, participated in, and reported on the last weeks of the war. Starting in Frankfurt, she reported on the recently released slave laborers from Poland, France, and Russia, freed from German labor camps by the Americans. She then hitched a ride on a cargo plane and made her way to Buchenwald, the concentration camp, only hours after it had been liberated by the American army. Her stories in the Tribune communicated the horrors she encountered at Buchenwald: the terrible suffering of the thousands of dead and dying prisoners she witnessed herself as well as the stories told to her by the survivors.

Higgins then met up with Peter First of the army newspaper Stars and Stripes. Prior to meeting First, Higgins had been excluded from the company of other journalists because of her gender. But First was an adventurer like herself. The two of them shared his jeep and traveled the towns of the German countryside at the same time as, and sometimes before, the Allies (the United States, the British Commonwealth, the Soviet Union, and some other European nations) reached them. When they arrived at the Dachau concentration camp, Higgins's courage and spirit greatly impressed those around her. According to a Time reporter, "while some correspondents dodged SS [secret police] bullets," Higgins and First "jeeped blithely past and were the first reporters inside the central enclosure." According to her biographer, Antoinette May, Higgins entered the camp and demanded that the guards put down their arms and surrender. She then announced to the prisoners in three languages that they were free. The prisoners crowded around her in joy. For her courageous efforts at Dachau, the army awarded her a campaign ribbon "for outstanding and conspicuous service with the armed forces under difficult and hazardous conditions." She also won the New York Women's Club award for the best correspondence. In all, Higgins was only a World War II war correspondent for about six weeks, but it had been an impressive start.

From Berlin to Tokyo

In 1945, after the war, Higgins was made the New York Herald Tribune's assistant bureau chief in Berlin, Germany. At the time, Berlin was occupied by four nations. The Soviet Union occupied East Berlin, and West Berlin was controlled by the British, French, and Americans. For Higgins, it was the perfect place to observe the beginnings of the cold war, the rising political tensions and military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that persisted for decades after the war. She covered many central stories in the next couple of years, from the Nuremberg Trials for war crimes to an interview with Nazi (German) leader Adolf Hitler's (1889–1945) personal servant. She also witnessed the erupting political turmoil in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Despite her early allegiance to left-wing politics, Higgins strongly denounced the communist Soviet Union for its violent repression of democracy in Poland. (Some people who hold left-leaning beliefs also adhere to communism, a political theory and economic practice that advocates the elimination of private property. It is a system in which goods are owned by the community as a whole rather than by specific individuals and are available to all as needed. The Soviet Union existed as a communist country made up of fifteen republics from 1922 to 1991. Though its political ideology [set of beliefs] was attractive to many reformminded people, its government practices were often brutal.)

In 1947, Higgins was promoted to bureau chief in Berlin, a highly unusual accomplishment for a twenty-seven-year-old woman. She was happy there, living in a villa, working long, hard days, and enjoying an active social life as well. In 1948, the Russians set up a blockade around West Berlin (the city, as well as the country, was divided), stopping all supplies from entering by land and water in the hope that the Allies would abandon their section of the city. Instead, the American army began a huge airlift, bringing in food to feed more than two million people. The Berlin Airlift began on June 15, 1948, and did not end until May 12, 1949. Major General William Hall was in charge of the airlift, and although he was married, he and Higgins began a romantic involvement. They would later marry.

In April 1950, Higgins was transferred to Tokyo, Japan, as bureau chief there; she was not happy with the assignment. She shared an office there with Keyes Beech, a well-known Far East correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Korea was part of her territory, but it was of little interest to her until June 25, 1950, when the North Koreans, backed by the Communist Chinese, invaded South Korea, backed by the United Nations forces, including the American military. Within two days Higgins was on her way to the front, where she would become as famous as she had always dreamed as the only woman war correspondent in the Korean War.

Early days at the front in Korea

After much difficulty, Higgins and three other correspondents from Tokyo arrived at Kimpo Airport at the Korean capital, Seoul. The advancing North Koreans were positioned only a few miles north of the city when Higgins arrived. Staying at the Military Government headquarters, she was awakened her first night as the North Koreans invaded Seoul. Fleeing the city, she marched along with thousands of refugees toward the city of Suwon. On the way, Higgins saw what was to become a very familiar sight: soldiers fleeing in disorderly retreats.

The next day, after filing her story in Japan and then returning to Korea, Higgins was typing a story at an airstrip in

Korea. General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964; see entry), the commander of the United Nations (UN) Far East forces, saw her as he returned from the front. He invited her to fly back to Tokyo with him. MacArthur told Higgins that the South Korean Army just needed a little help from the United States. "Give me two American divisions and I can hold Korea," he told her, in one of his famous underestimations of the enemy, as quoted in Higgins's book, War in Korea: TheReport of a Woman Combat Correspondent. Higgins was accused of using her feminine appeal to gain access to the general.

Battle of sexes at battlefront

For days before the United States sent its troops to Korea, Higgins and her colleagues were caught up in the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army's rapid retreat to Taejon, constantly besieged by the advancing North Koreans and always in great danger. Along with covering the battles, Higgins was hit with another bomb. Her paper, the New York Herald Tribune, sent over its star war correspondent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Homer Bigart, to cover the war. Bigart told Higgins to go home, saying she would be fired if she stayed in Korea. Higgins was dejected, but after thinking it over, simply stayed on, ignoring Bigart when she ran into him on the front.

Higgins was in the midst of intense combat as the city of Taejon fell to the enemy, when an officer delivered a message to her that she was under orders of the U.S. Army to leave the Korean theater of war at once. Lieutenant General Walton H. "Johnnie" Walker (1889–1950; see entry), commander of the Eighth Army, had issued the order because Higgins was a woman, and he believed Korea to be no place for women. With this second order to leave, Higgins felt she was being unfairly targeted, as she described in War in Korea:

I had already been with the troops three weeks… . Realizing that as a female I was an obvious target for comment, I had taken great pains not to ask for anything that could possibly be construed as a special favor. Like the rest of the correspondents, when not sleeping on the ground at the front with an individual unit, I usually occupied a table top in the big, sprawling room at Taejon from which we telephoned. The custom was to come back from the front, bang out your story, and stretch out on the table top. You would try to sleep, despite the noise of other stories being shouted into the phone, till your turn came to read your story to Tokyo. Then, no matter what the hour, you would probably start out again because the front lines were changing so fast you would not risk staying away any longer than necessary.

After the fall of Taejon in July, Higgins made her way to Taegu in order to argue her point with General Walker at the new Eighth Army headquarters. Instead, she was unceremoniously put on a plane for Tokyo. Fortunately, when she arrived she learned that MacArthur had overturned Walker's order. According to Antionette May's biography, MacArthur had written a message to the president of the Herald Tribune that read: "Ban on women in Korea being lifted. Marguerite Higgins held in highest professional esteem by everyone."

Pusan Perimeter

Higgins returned to Korea as Walker was bringing his forces into the concentrated defensive position in the Pusan Perimeter in the south and MacArthur was preparing the marines for the landing at the enemy-held Inchon to the north. Higgins was one of the few correspondents to cover the first fighting in the perimeter at Chindong-ni with the famous Twenty-seventh (Wolfhound) Regiment under Colonel John "Mike" Michaelis. After getting a story one day, she spent the night at the schoolhouse where the unit was temporarily stationed. The next morning as she ate breakfast with the officers and another correspondent, gunfire poured into the schoolhouse. Machine gun bursts ripped through the room, and grenades went off in several places. During the night the North Korean soldiers had snuck past the front lines and surrounded the unit. Diving out a window into the courtyard, Higgins learned that the enemy was massing all around them. In her memoirs, she described her brief, and rare, encounter with fear: "Then, suddenly, for the first time in the war, I experienced the cold, awful certainty that there was no escape. My reactions were trite. As with most people who suddenly accept death as inevitable and imminent, I was simply filled with surprise that this was finally going to happen to me. Then, as the conviction grew, I became hard inside and comparatively calm."

Michaelis regrouped his troops and Higgins helped out the busy medics, administering plasma to the many casualties that poured in while dodging enemy bullets. Michaelis later wrote a letter to the editors of the Herald Tribune praising Higgins for fearlessly volunteering to help in the desperate battle: "The Regimental Combat Team considers Miss Higgins' actions on that day as heroic, but even more important is the gratitude felt by members of this command towards the selfless devotion of Miss Higgins in saving the lives of many grievously wounded men."

Inchon, Chosin, and more

Higgins traveled by ship to the UN command's amphibious attack (involving land, sea, and air forces) on the port city of Inchon on September 15, 1950, landing on the shores with the first waves of troops. In early December, she was north of the 38th parallel (the dividing line between North and South Korea, at 38 degrees north latitude) at Hagaru, getting the stories from the surviving marines who were retreating from the unexpected assault by the Chinese in the Chosin (Changjin) Reservoir.

For many of her travels in Korea, Higgins teamed up with Chicago Daily News correspondent Keyes Beech, who had managed to find a jeep. They were in Seoul when it fell in June, then again in September, and when it fell the third time in January 1951. Although they fought with each other, Beech would later betray a reluctant admiration for her in his memoirs.

Out of Korea

Higgins returned to the United States in 1951. She married William Hall and the couple had two children. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1951 (along with Keyes Beech and Homer Bigart). She also wrote her book, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent, which quickly became a bestseller. Higgins continued her journalism career. She went to Vietnam ten times between 1953 and 1965. In 1954, she reported on the defeat of the French army by communist forces at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam.

In 1955, Higgins traveled throughout the Soviet Union. On her return she wrote her book Red Plush and Black Bread. She next wrote a book about journalism, News Is a Singular Thing, in 1955. She then traveled to Africa to cover the civil war in the Congo.

In 1962, Higgins wrote about Cuban military activity, warning of the problems that were, in fact, about to surface between the United States and Cuba, which was an ally of the Soviet Union. In 1965, she reported on the American policy on Vietnam, and wrote the book Our Vietnam Nightmare. She took a last trip to Vietnam in 1965 to report on the combat. While there, she contracted leishmaniasis, a tropical disease. She died of the disease on January 3, 1966, at the age of forty-five. In honor of her war reporting, Higgins was buried at Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington, D.C.

In the year 2001, Fox 2000 was at work on a romantic biographical movie called Higgins and Beech, about the relationship between the two correspondents in Korea.

Where to Learn More

Beech, Keyes. Tokyo and Points North. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954.

Higgins, Marguerite. War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951.

"Letter from Colonel John H. Michaelis." New York Herald Tribune, October 29, 1950, p. 67.

Life, October 2, 1950.

May, Antoinette. Witness to War: A Biography of Marguerite Higgins. New York: Beaufort Books, 1954.

Time, September 25, 1950.

Words to Know

cold war: the struggle for power, authority, and prestige between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist Western powers of Europe and the United States from 1945 until 1991.

concentration camp: a camp where groups of people, such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, or refugees, are confined.

gender bias: sexual stereotyping; assuming someone will only perform certain functions because of his or her gender.

Great Depression: a decrease in economic activity and time of high unemployment that started with the stock market crash in 1929 and whose effects were felt throughout the 1930s.

leftists: people who advocate change and reform, usually in the interest of gaining greater freedoms and equality for average citizens and the poor; some leftist groups aspire to overthrow the government; others seek to change from within.

war correspondent: someone who provides news stories to a newspaper or television or radio news program from the battlefront or on location in a war.