Marguerite Higgins
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marguerite Higgins Hall maiden name Marguerite Higgins (September 3, 1920 - January 3, 1966), American reporter and war correspondent. Higgins covered World War II, the Korean War and the war in Vietnam, and in the process advanced the cause of equal access for female war correspondents.
Born in Hong Kong while her father, Lawrence Higgins, was working at a shipping company. The family moved back to the United States three years later. She worked for The Daily Californian, the University of California, Berkeley newspaper, her freshman year at college. After graduating from Berkeley in 1941 with a B.A. in French [1] she received a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Eager to become a war correspondent, Higgins persuaded the management of the New York Herald Tribune to send her to Europe, after working for them for two years, in 1944. After being stationed in London and Paris, she was reassigned to Germany in March 1945. There 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 SS guards' surrender. She later covered the Nuremberg war trials and the Soviet Union's blockade of Berlin.
In 1950 Higgins was named chief of the Tribune's Tokyo bureau. Shortly after her arrival in Japan war broke out in Korea. One of the first reporters on the spot, she was quickly ordered out of the country by a U.S. military commander who argued that women did not belong at the front. An appeal was made to General Douglas MacArthur, who reversed the orders, which was a major breakthrough for all female war correspondents. As a result of her reporting from Korea, Higgins was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1951, for international reporting, sharing the award with five male war correspondents.
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 was chief of the Tribune's Moscow bureau. In 1963 she joined Newsday and was assigned to cover Vietnam. While on assignment in late 1965, Higgins contracted leishmaniasis, a tropical disease that led to her death on January 3, 1966, at age 45 in Washington D.C.. She is interred at Arlington National Cemetery, with her husband Lieutenant General William E. Hall.
