THE GREATEST FEMALE WAR CORRESPONDENT

I go way back with Marguerite.  My favorite Korean War reading assignment was one of her stories about a North Korean attack on an American unit that she was embedded with.  I also used to tell an anecdote about her (see below) which got me called into the principal’s office. I never told the anecdote again.  By the way, the Spartacus article has some primary sources.

                Marguerite Higgins was born on Sept. 3, 1920.  She decided early that she wanted to go into journalism.  She got her masters from the Columbia School of Journalism.  She knew making it as a female reporter meant she had to be competitive. At Columbia, when a professor gave an assignment, she would rush to the library and check out all the sources.  In 1942, she went to work for the N.Y. Herald Tribune. In 1944, she convinced it to send her to Europe.  She was at the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald.  She was given a US Army campaign ribbon for assisting in the surrender of SS guards.  (I assume she helped keep them alive.)  She covered the Nuremberg Trials and the Berlin Blockade.  Along the way, she developed a reputation for using her sex appeal to get stories and interviews.  She was purported to the inspiration for journalist Toni Howard’s “Shriek With Pleasure” about a female reporter who stole stories and slept around.  Male journalists assumed the book was about her and she faced increased animosity from male reporters.  When the Korean War broke out, she went there.  Gen. Walker ordered her to leave because he didn’t want to bother with a female reporter.  Higgins contacted his boss Gen. MacArthur who told Walker to allow all female reporter to do their jobs.  The story made Higgins a national celebrity and almost cost her life.  She was on the wrong side of the Han River when the Hangang Bridge was prematurely blown up. She had to cross the river on a raft.  She came ashore at Inchon and interviewed Marines during the Chosin Reservoir campaign.  She suffered through the same below zero temperatures and was worse off when it came to one action.  When she asked a Marine what was the hardest thing he had to do, he responded:  “Getting four inches of penis out of eight inches of clothing”.  (I may have gotten the inches wrong, but that’s the gist of the anecdote, as I recall.)  The fact that she suffered like the soldiers did gained their respect.  She also reported on the plight of refugees.  She received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1951.  She shared it with some male reporters who hated her.  She was the first woman to receive the award.  Her book “War in Korea” was a best-seller.  After the war, she interviewed world figures like Franco, Khrushchev, and Nehru.  She was at the siege of Dien Bien Phu and was walking with Robert Capra when he stepped on a land mine.  She reported from Vietnam and wrote a book entitled “Our Vietnam Nightmare”.  She was an anti-communist, which put her at odds with the mainly liberal male correspondents, like David Halberstam.  She died in 1966 after contracting a tropical disease.  She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Higgins

https://spartacus-educational.com/USAhigginsM.htm

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/guest-bloggers/she-eats-sleeps-and-fights-like-rest.html?firefox=1