(1920-1966)
First woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for war correspondence. Marguerite Higgins was born in Hong Kong, but her family returned to the United States when she was three. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated from Columbia University with a master’s degree in journalism. Hall reported from the fronts of World War II and those of the cold war and from Korea, the Congo, and Vietnam. Although the New York Tribune hired her in 1942 to report the war in Europe, her editor would not send her overseas to London until 1944. In 1945, she moved to mainland Europe, reporting the war from France and later from Germany, and she accompanied the U.S. 7th Army when it entered the Nazi extermination camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. When World War II ended, Hig-gins covered the Nuremberg War Trials and the cold war tensions between the West and the Soviet Union. In 1947, the New York Tribune promoted her to bureau chief in Berlin.
In 1950, the Tribune assigned her to Japan and promoted her to Far East bureau chief. When the Korean War broke out, Higgins moved to South Korea, where she reported the fall of its capital, Seoul, to the North Korean army. At this point, the Tribune sent Homer Bigart, its top war reporter, to South Korea and ordered Higgins to return to Tokyo because all women reporters were banned from the front line. Refusing to leave, she kept competing with Bigart to get the best stories, a competition for readers that she won because the U.S. public liked her more personal style of reporting. Eventually she persuaded General Douglas MacArthur to allow her to continue her frontline reporting. Marguerite Higgins was with the marines when they landed in Inchon, 200 miles behind the North Korean lines on September 15, 1950.
Higgins wrote a book called War in Korea, and it became a best-seller in 1951. She also won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting that year, and the Associated Press news organization voted her Woman of the Year. In 1952, she married air force Lieutenant General William Hall, and then in 1953, Higgins went to Vietnam to report on the French army’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu. During this tour of duty, she narrowly escaped injury while walking alongside photographer Robert Capra. He stepped on a land mine and was killed. In 1955, she published her book Red Plush and Black Bread, based on her extensive travels in the Soviet Union. She also covered the civil war in the Congo.
In 1965, Higgins published her book Our Vietnam Nightmare in which she used her extensive knowledge of Vietnam to document her concerns about U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. While she was on this Vietnam tour, she contracted leishmaniasis, a tropical disease, and returned to the United States. She died on January 3, 1966. She is buried in Section 2 of Arlington National Cemetery in recognition of her record as an outstanding war correspondent.
