Marguerite Higgins (1920–1966)

Marguerite Higgins was born in Hong Kong, then a British colony in China. Her American father Lawrence Daniel Higgins and French mother Marguerite de Goddard had met and married in Paris during World War I. Her father took a job with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and the couple moved to Hong Kong, where Marguerite, their only child, was born. In 1925, the family moved to California, where they struggled with poverty during the Great Depression. Marguerite decided as a teenager that she wanted to become a journalist. In 1937, she entered the University of California at Berkeley and quickly joined the staff of the Daily Californian, the student-run newspaper. After graduating with honors with a degree in French, she moved to New York City determined to work for a newspaper but could not get a job. Instead, she enrolled in a master's degree program at the Columbia University School of Journalism. In 1942, after she snagged an interview with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Nationalist leader of China, Marguerite became only the second woman to be hired as a news reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. That year, she married her first husband, Stanley Moore, a philosophy professor at Harvard. When the USA entered World War II, Marguerite was eager to become a war correspondent. In 1944, after she completed her degree with honors, she persuaded the Tribune to send her to Europe. After being stationed in London and Paris, in 1945 she was assigned to Germany, where she witnessed the liberation of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Marguerite was made assistant chief of the Tribune's Berlin bureau. She covered the Nuremberg war crimes trials and the Soviet Union's blockade of West Berlin at the start of the Cold War. It was there that she met her second husband, Air Force Lt. Gen. William Hall, in charge of intelligence for the Berlin airlift in 1948-49; they married in 1952. After having been promoted to bureau chief in Berlin, unusual for a woman, Marguerite was sent as bureau chief to Tokyo. Soon she was reporting on the Korean War. For her work, she won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, the first woman ever to do so, and other honors such as the George Polk Memorial Award from the Overseas Press Club. She published a book, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent, in 1951. In 1955, she established and became chief of the Tribune's first Moscow bureau. She wrote two books on her experiences, News Is a Singular Thing (1955) and Red Plush and Black Bread (1955). She and Gen. Hall settled in Washington, D.C., and had three children. In 1963, she joined Newsday and was assigned to cover the Vietnam War. From her reporting, she wrote Our Vietnam Nightmare (1965). In Vietnam, she contracted leishmaniasis and died of the disease at age 45 in 1966.