Higgins, Marguerite (1920-1966), was an American journalist and war correspondent. She shared the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for her work in Korea during the Korean War (1950-1953).
Higgins was born in Hong Kong, then a British colony, on Sept. 3, 1920, to an American father and French mother. She and her family moved to the United States when she was a young child. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York City. While at Columbia, she began reporting as a campus correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and she continued to work for the paper after her graduation in 1942.
Higgins worked hard to persuade the Herald Tribune management to send her to Europe to cover World War II (1939-1945). In 1944, the paper sent her to its London bureau. In 1945, she was transferred to Paris and then to Germany. She wrote about the liberation of German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau in that same year. After the war, she stayed in Europe, reporting on such events as the Nuremberg Trials of suspected Nazi war criminals and the Soviet blockade of West Berlin.
In 1950, Higgins became chief of the _Herald Tribun_e’s Tokyo bureau, placing her in Asia at the outbreak of the Korean War. Soon after she arrived in Korea, a U.S. military commander banned women from the front. She appealed to General Douglas MacArthur, who headed the United Nations military force sent to defend South Korea, and he overturned the ruling. That Higgins was allowed to report from the front was a major victory for women journalists. At that time, women were often assigned to write cooking or society columns, and war reporting was largely seen as a job for men.
After the Korean War, Higgins received permission to travel in the Soviet Union, and there she reopened the Herald Tribune’s Moscow bureau. About this time, she joined the paper’s bureau in Washington, D.C. In 1963, she accepted a position as a syndicated columnist with Newsday and began reporting on the Vietnam War (1957-1975). She contracted the tropical disease leishmaniasis in 1965, most likely in Vietnam. She returned to the United States for treatment and died in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 3, 1966.
