Bigart, Homer William

(b. 27 October 1907 in Hawley, Pennsylvania; d. 16 April 1991 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire), one of the most admired and honored reporters in American journalism, considered by his peers to be the outstanding war correspondent of his generation. His precise, understated, and often witty prose twice won him the Pulitzer Prize.

Bigart was the son of Anna Schardt, a homemaker, and Homer S. Bigart, a sweater manufacturer in the Pocono Mountains of castern Pennsylvania. Like his two sisters, he attended the local public schools and, following his graduation from Hawley High School in 1925, entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to become an architect. The faculty soon learned that he could not draw, he said, “and invited me to find another school.” In the autumn of 1927, he enrolled at New York University, taking courses during the day and working as a copy boy on the Herald Tribune at night. He left school without a degree during the Great Depression in 1929 to pursue his newspaper career.

For a time it appeared as if that career would never materialize. A painfully slow writer, Bigart agonized over every word. Even as a seasoned prizewinner with a reputation for crisp, elegant prose, he pecked out his articles one word at a time, taking long pauses between pecks as he struggled to find the precise language he wanted. He also had a pronounced stammer that worsened under stress, so he found it virtually impossible to phone in stories to the rewrite desk. Over time he transformed this weakness into an art form— “the Bigart Big Dummy Act,” his colleagues called it—that misled officials into believing he was not too bright, and in an attempt to help him, they responded to his persistent questioning with details and insights they initially intended to keep hidden. His editors believed one secret of his success was his willingness to dig more deeply for facts than anyone else.

His early editors allowed him to write an occasional obituary and report on Sunday sermons, but after five years at the Tribune he had risen only to the lowly rank of head copy boy. He later said that the only thing that kept him from being the oldest copy boy in the history of journalism was his 1934 appointment to a general reporting job which, over the next several years, took him through a series of out-of-town assignments in St. Louis, New Orleans, and the coal fields of Pennsylvania to the Tribune’s metropolitan desk. In 1942 he departed for the war in Europe.

This was the beginning of Bigart’s storied career. He initially reported from London on the Allies’ massive air assault on Nazi Germany as one of the first correspondents to fly on a nighttime raid in February 1943. Sent to Italy, he reported on the Seventh Army in Sicily in July 1943 and in Salerno in September. He landed with the Fifth Army at Anzio on the first day of fighting, 22 January 1944, and covered the Eighth Army’s mountain campaign north of Naples in the spring. He was one of three journalists to enter Cassino on the afternoon it finally fell to the British on 19 May 1944. By then he had become notorious among the press corps for his insistence on being close to the fighting and taking any risk to be first with a story. In a semi-serious warning, his Tribune colleague Tex O’Reilly told a newcomer to the front, “Keep away from Homer. He’s always trying to build his reputation at the cannon’s mouth.”

After covering the U.S. invasion of southern France and the liberation of Marseilles in August and September, Bigart was sent to the Pacific for the final months of the war, beginning with General Douglas A. MacArthur’s triumphant return to Leyte in the Philippines in October 1944 and Corregidor, Philippines, early in the new year. He landed with the Marines on Iwo Jima in February 1945 and again with the Tenth Army on Okinawa from April to June. He returned from a B-29 run over Kumagaya, Japan, on 15 August 1945 to file what is believed to be World War II’s last eyewitness combat report. (’The radio tells us that the war is over,” Bigart wrote, “but from where I sit it looks suspiciously like a rumor.”) On 2 September 1945, he reported the Japanese capitulation on board the Missouri. (“Japan,” he wrote, “paying for her desperate throw of the dice at Pearl Harbor, passed from the ranks of the major powers at 9:05 A.M. today when Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the document of unconditional surrender.”) Among the first correspondents to enter Hiroshima to survey the damage from the first atomic bomb, Bigart received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his Pacific reporting.

In the postwar period the Tribune sent him on a roving assignment through Europe, first in Germany; then in Prague, Czechoslovakia; and finally in Warsaw, Poland, where he was branded a “reactionary” because of his reporting on communist terrorism. He spent much of 1946 and 1947 in Palestine, getting “in the hair of the British” while reporting sympathetically on the Jewish independence movement.

Bigart covered the 1948 Greek civil war, where his criticism of American officials disbursing aid and his dispatches on the Greek government’s mass executions led to accusations that his reporting was distorted and untrue. The controversy opened the way to Bigart’s most spectacular scoop: an exclusive interview with the Greek partisan leader General Markos (Markos Vafiades), the result of a dangerous mission that was accomplished in secret and at great personal risk. George Polk, a CBS correspondent, had been murdered just a few weeks earlier in attempting to contact Markos; whether he was killed by the partisans or by the Greek army remains one of journalism’s unsolved mysteries. After an arduous, 200-mile, overland journey on foot from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to a small village in the Pindus range of Greece, Bigart got his story, which earned him the first George Polk Memorial Prize and, at the direction of the American secretary of state, protection by a twenty-four hour security guard until he left Athens.

Bigart won his rare second Pulitzer Prize in 1951—an award shared with other combat correspondents that year—for his dispatches from the Korean War, where Mac-Arthur publicly reproached him for “biased reporting” after he criticized the general for miscalculating the readiness of China to enter the war once American forces approached the Yalu River. Bigart was perhaps as famous among his fellow correspondents for his months-long slanging match with his Tribune colleague in Korea, Marguerite Higgins, whom he actively disliked, in part because he believed the war zone was no place for a woman.

In 1955, as the financial health of the Herald Tribune worsened, Bigart jumped to the New York Times, which sent him to the Middle East to cover events in Iran and Israel, most notably the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in 1961. The next year he went to Vietnam. Within weeks of his posting, he came to hate the assignment, and early on—some say he was the first reporter to do so—he wrote that the burgeoning war, in spite of the Pentagon’s contrary assertions, was a tragedy and a mistake. Saying that he had had enough of battlefield death, he returned home in June 1962 for a decade of domestic reporting, covering such stories as the civil rights movement in the South, poverty and hunger in the United States, and the 1971 trial of William Calley, an army lieutenant charged with ordering a massacre at Mai Lai in Vietnam. Bigart retired from the New York Times in 1972 to West Nottingham, New Hampshire.

A tall, portly man, Bigart was a notable and witty raconteur in reporters’ bars wherever he went, but he was also shy and intensely private, revealing little or nothing about himself. He married Alice Kirkwood Veit, a Herald Tribune staffer, on 15 March 1951; they divorced before her death in 1959. His second wife, Alice Weel, whom he married on 6 July 1963, died in 1969. On 3 October 1970, he married Else Holmelund Minarik, a writer of children’s books, who brought a daughter to the marriage. He had no children of his own.

Bigart’s life revolved around the two papers for which he worked, and of the two his greater love was the Herald Tribune, which, he told the managing editor of the New York Times, always sent him first class; the Times, he added, was run by bureaucrats. Having been barred or expelled from eight countries for alleged “biased reporting” and frequently at odds with American officials wherever he was posted, he professed a profound dislike for authority in general and editors in particular, once referring to them as “pallid clerks who are in charge of my destiny.” In a celebrated story, a young Times reporter was talking with Bigart from a phone booth in Harlem during the 1966 riots when angry protestors began shaking the booth. Bigart, who was in the Times’s midtown building and apparently at that moment locked in some office struggle with an editor, listened to the young man express his fears and told him not to worry. “At least,” he said, “you’re dealing with sane people.”

In 1991 Bigart died of cancer at the Edgewood Center in Portsmouth where he had been hospitalized for two months. In keeping with his wishes, there was no funeral.

Bigart wrote no books, composed no memoirs, and produced fewer than ten magazine articles or book reviews in his long career. He said that because writing came so hard for him, he needed the daily deadlines that only newspapers provided. When the writing was done, a fellow war correspondent once said, “Nine times out often you could count on his being the best.” He won nearly every major prize or award the profession offered.

Bigart’s papers (1932-1972) are in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. They include his press clippings, his World War II correspondence (1943-1945), and letters to his family from Belgrade, Madrid, Paris, and Saigon (1946–1962). His reporting is available in the microfilm editions of the New York Herald Tribune and New York Times. The Times’s edition is indexed; the Tribune’s is not. A selection of his wartime dispatches is in Forward Positions: The War Correspondence of Homer Bigart, compiled and edited by Betsy Wade (1992). Some of his dispatches are included in Library of America, Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938-1946, 2 vols. (1995) and Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975, 2 vols. (1998). There is no biography, but see Harrison E. Salisbury’s “Foreword,” Betsy Wade’s “Introduction,” and the “Appendix” in Forward Positions. Salisbury’s profile of Bigart is also in Heroes of My Time (1993). Other useful sources are Editor and Publisher, 12 March 1949; Newsweek, 2 October 1944, and 22 January 1951; Keyes Beech, Tokyo and Points East (1954); Antionette May, Witness to War: A Biography of Marguerite Higgins (1983); Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (1986); and William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles (1995). An obituary is in the New York Time 07 April. 1991).

Allan L. Damon