Ferociously competitive and disarmingly pretty, Marguerite Higgins was in her 20s when she covered the liberation of Dachau and the Berlin airlift. She would go on to become the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for her front-line dispatches during the Korean War. Throughout her career, she alternately enchanted and enraged male colleagues in the newsroom and military, and inspired envy, gossip, and even a spiteful roman à clef. In a new biography, Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins, Jennet Conant uncovers the best and worst of an exceptional reporter who led a glamorous, swashbuckling life with its full share of mistakes, triumphs, broken hearts, and tragedy.
New York, 1943
The tabloids had a long tradition of employing glamour girls—the media magnate William Randolph Hearst believed that a little pulchritude could work wonders—and although it was a proven formula, it was not the Herald Tribune’s philosophy. Back then, there was a clear division between the respectable and the sensational press. A serious newspaper, it was thought, needed sober, sensible-looking reporters. Maggie did not fit the mold.
Judith Crist, who was two years younger and several rungs below her, recalled Maggie as “all drive.” Around the office, she found her to be “warm, pleasant, and very attractive.” Like for fellow Tribune staffer Margaret Parton, Crist suspected “the rampant stories of her horrifying competitiveness had their origins from men who had hoped Maggie would look with favor on them and didn’t.”
A serious newspaper, it was thought, needed sober, sensible-looking reporters. Maggie did not fit the mold.
Not that Higgins was above doing some underhanded things to get a scoop. The story of her “hogging the phonebooth” on deadline—to prevent anyone, including reporters from her own paper, from calling in their copy—had the ring of truth. But that was par for the course. “She was a very good newswoman,” Crist said, “but because she was a woman and good-looking, there was a suspicion of promiscuity.” The office always buzzed with unseemly tales of closed-door meetings. “Hell,” Crist added, “I’m sure any number of people in the city room thought I must have been banging the editors to get the stories I did.”
As the war went on, more women joined the staff. While there were never more than a handful in the city room, the Tribune had a number of senior women in key positions, and they made their presence felt, more so than on any other metropolitan paper.
All this was done at the impetus of Helen Rogers Reid, the tiny, dynamic, forward-looking wife of the paper’s president and publisher, Ogden Reid. Her rise from small-town Wisconsin girl to New York aristocrat was, Maggie knew, “a saga in itself.”
After graduating from Barnard College, Helen served as social secretary to the majestic Elisabeth Mills Reid in New York, and then in London when her husband, Whitelaw Reid, was appointed ambassador at the Court of St. James’s. In 1911, Helen married the Reid scion, editor apparent of the most prominent and most respectable right-wing newspaper in America.
Within the building, no one doubted that Mrs. Reid was in charge. While she rarely interfered with editorial matters, or passed judgment on an individual story, she took a keen interest in anything that would affect the paper’s base and revenue, whether it was buying a big syndicate feature or bringing in a top columnist such as Walter Lippmann.
Filled with a sense of dynastic pride, she treated the staff as members of her extended newspaper family and became personally involved in the smallest decisions about their fate. She had given women an even chance throughout the organization, and Maggie could only hope that her enlightened attitude would extend to foreign assignments.
“She was a very good newswoman, but because she was a woman and good-looking, there was a suspicion of promiscuity.”
By the spring of 1944, the idea of going abroad had become an obsession. While Maggie was stuck covering local news in New York, she was missing all the action overseas.
In June, following the Normandy invasion and the Allies’ big push on the Continent, a large group of male reporters from the city room departed for Europe. The word was that victory was within sight.
Even though she knew it was impertinent to ask for a sought-after overseas post after scarcely two years on the paper, Maggie insisted on adding her name to the list of those under consideration. She spoke up, loudly and often, about her desire to cover the conflict. “I was so violently intent on going to the wars that there was no time or emotion left over for humility or self-doubt,” she wrote. “Getting overseas was something I felt too strongly about to be prepared to stand politely in line and wait my turn.”
She waged a tireless, unremitting campaign to be sent abroad. She badgered her city editors until they were sick of the sight of her. Although they dismissed the idea out of hand—she was far too green—Maggie persevered. At the time, civilian and enlisted journalists were assimilated into the army at the rank of captain and required to wear uniforms. The Army War College had only just gotten around to outfitting women that spring, when Life arranged for their celebrated photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White to be accredited to the U.S. Air Force, with the Pentagon getting first dibs on her pictures.
Bourke-White served as both consultant and model for the army’s first official women correspondents’ uniform. It followed the basic pattern of a gold-buttoned officer’s jacket, shirt, and slacks—standard khaki for every day, dress “pinks” (really gray) for special occasions—except that it included two skirts.
“I was so violently intent on going to the wars that there was no time or emotion left over for humility or self-doubt.”
Maggie knew her fluent French was an argument in her favor. To boost her chances, she enrolled in a crash course in German at a Berlitz language school, attending classes in the evenings. She played the practice records late into the night, repeating the phrases over and again until her roommate complained. “She put in hours and hours of study,” recalled Ilma. “The guttural din, I was certain, would arouse the suspicions of our neighbors that we had a Nazi hidden in the apartment.”
In the meantime, Maggie made the most of her assignments, hoping to score points with her superiors. She earned a mention in an inter-office memorandum—a sure sign a reporter’s star was ascendant—with another page-one story on Madame Chiang Kai-shek. China’s captivating First Lady was in the midst of a public-relations tour of the U.S. in a last-ditch effort to drum up support for her husband’s faltering Nationalist regime.
Assigned to cover what looked like an unpromising chicken dinner at the Waldorf, Maggie managed to wangle her way into an A-list event being hosted later that evening by Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, at which Mme. Chiang was to meet with 12 Republican governors and an assortment of New York luminaries. As the meeting was closed to the press, the other reporters left after collecting a transcript of Mme. Chiang’s planned remarks. Maggie stayed just in case. The Secret Service questioned her, but she sweet-talked her way past the gray suits.
Following the dinner, she intercepted Luce and asked if she could tag along for the private tête-à-tête with the governors. He demurred, explaining that he could not admit her without granting access to her colleagues. “But all the other reporters have gone,” she beseeched him. “It would be just one more person. Just me.”
That “just me” spoke volumes about her resolve and earned her a reputation as a tenacious and enterprising reporter. Her colleagues had never seen anything like it. As Newsweek would later observe of the breathtaking audacity that won Maggie the Mme. Chiang exclusive, “Into the very masculine world of journalism she carried her intense ego-centrism and combined it with a frightening determination and a strong-men-will-melt smile which, when used in tandem, held her to the bitter end of every story.”
The Secret Service questioned her, but she sweet-talked her way past the gray suits.
She proved she could handle the pace and pressure of the toughest assignments with her harrowing account of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus fire in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1944. Under normal circumstances, she would never have been trusted with such an important breaking story, but by the time the first call came in around three P.M., most of the reporters had already been sent out on assignment. In the meantime, the big top was ablaze.
Of the thousands who had flocked to see the afternoon performance, it was estimated that more than 100, many of them children, had been trapped inside, and in the confusion were burned, suffocated, or trampled to death. The city room editor, L. L. Engelking, dispatched the only man left, Ted Laymon, telling him to grab the first train out of Grand Central for Hartford. As Laymon waited impatiently for it to leave, he caught sight of Higgins “running down the length of the depot, blond hair flying.”
The moment she leaped aboard, the train started to move. They arrived at a scene of nightmarish proportions. All that was left of the tent was a smoking pile of canvas and charred seats. Bedraggled circus performers, still in their tights and spangles, were assisting the firemen. Police officers, some of them weeping openly, carried out the small bodies of burned children. No one knew how the fire had started, but it was theorized that a dropped cigarette had ignited a tiny flame that turned into a devouring curtain of fire, racing through 19 tons of canvas in the main tent in “less than ten minutes.”
Maggie had gotten that staggering detail from the survivors. “If she hasn’t talked to all the 6,000 or so who weren’t killed, she will before morning,” Engel hollered at re-write, which was putting together the running from her dictated notes. Maggie worked the story, reporting nonstop and phoning in voluminous eyewitness accounts to the city desk, until four A.M. First thing the next morning, she was at city hall demanding answers. How could the fire have spread so quickly? How could it have claimed so many lives? The final death toll was at least 168 killed and more than 700 injured.
According to the Tribune’s exclusive report, the tragic fire, the worst in circus history, had been fueled by the waterproof coating on the tent, a highly flammable solution of paraffin wax and gasoline. By the end of the day, warrants charging manslaughter were issued for five circus officials. Both Maggie and Ted Laymon were commended for their efforts. The two of them had competed against six Times men for material vital to the story.
No other paper had the waterproofing angle, which explained the stunning swiftness of the blaze. Covering a major disaster was a rite of passage, and she had passed the test with flying colors.
Laymon thought she had performed well on deadline, remaining calm and unruffled. She had helped to marshal the facts and refused to be put off by lies and excuses. At one point, he remembered a harassed Hartford city official griping, “Where did you get that girl? She’s so aggressive.” Laymon had to laugh. “That was Maggie all right, not afraid of anything or anyone,” he said. “She could be pushy as hell, but there was never anything small or spiteful about her. She was quick to congratulate others on good work and was ready with compliments or commiseration.”
“Into the very masculine world of journalism she carried her intense ego-centrism and combined it with a frightening determination and a strong-men-will-melt smile which, when used in tandem, held her to the bitter end of every story.”
Maggie renewed her bid for an overseas assignment. This time, she decided to go over the heads of her editors and appeal directly to the boss, Mrs. Reid. She picked the right publisher at the right time. “The Herald Tribune was an especially good place for women just then,” recalled Tania Long, then a correspondent in the paper’s London bureau. “Mrs. Reid liked to promote up-and-coming women journalists and Marguerite was lucky in having her support and sympathy as she was, in my view, very inexperienced and naïve.”
But Helen Reid recognized the raw ambition in Maggie. It was a quality she looked for in her female employees. In her view, not enough women pushed against the boundaries of convention and “projected their imaginations” toward positions generally thought to be beyond their reach. Maggie was nothing if not aspirational. She wanted to seize control and shape her own destiny, not wait around to see if chance would shine on her.
In Reid’s opinion, she had displayed “drive and ingenuity” beginning with almost her first assignment on the paper. If she had stepped out of line, and tramped on some male toes along the way, so be it.
At that very moment, the Tribune was busy making a play for women readers. A saleswoman at heart, Helen Reid was eager to encourage their patronage—especially since women did 80 percent of the nation’s buying—and she believed they wanted to see more stories with a woman’s byline. Another woman war correspondent might be just the thing. A month later, on a sultry August afternoon, the paper’s mild-mannered managing editor, George Cornish, called Maggie into his office and announced, “You are all set for overseas.”
South Korea, 1950
In September, General Douglas A. MacArthur had decided to gamble that he could stop the relentless North Korean offensive, and gain back all the ground he had lost, with an amphibious landing 110 miles behind enemy lines, along the beaches of Inchon. It was a hazardous undertaking, rife with risks. His advisers said it was impossible—the geography was all wrong, the beaches too exposed, the tides too unpredictable. But MacArthur was convinced the sheer difficulty of the scheme recommended it.
Maggie learned of the landing plans, a huge invasion fleet of more than 260 ships, the largest since Normandy, weeks in advance. The secret was so well known at the press club that the correspondents dubbed it “Operation Common Knowledge.”
After so many close calls in recent months, she had debated whether to accompany the assault troops or seek out the comparative safety of a destroyer. On September 7, another three correspondents had died when their C-54 plunged into a fog-shrouded mountain.
It was the latest in a series of press-corps tragedies and plunged her into an “I’m-going-to-get-killed-today” funk, the opposite of the “nothing-can-touch-me” mood that usually propelled her forward. She was still undecided when a naval-public-relations officer informed her of the regulations barring women from combat ships. Once again, the facilities were the problem. Maggie reflexively balked at this latest prohibition. Her request to go to Inchon on one of the assault crafts had apparently been greeted by the brass with “the same degree of horror as might have met a leper’s request to sleep with the admiral.”
Told she had been relegated to a hospital ship, the Consolation, and might not even be allowed to disembark, she boiled with resentment at the “anti-female navy.” Her earlier hesitation forgotten, she immediately petitioned the top brass to be afforded the same opportunity as the other 80 reporters, from six countries, going to cover MacArthur’s offensive.
Her request to go to Inchon on one of the assault crafts had apparently been greeted by the brass with “the same degree of horror as might have met a leper’s request to sleep with the admiral.”
Maggie cabled Whitelaw Reid, the paper’s young editor, that the navy was “hampering Herald Tribune coverage and competitive position.” Reid wired Francis P. Mathews, secretary of the navy, and Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, chief of naval operations, requesting their assistance. He argued that the army generals had accepted Higgins for battlefront assignments, and hoped the navy would send a similar message to its admirals in Korea. No such announcement was forthcoming. But by some strange twist of fate, when she went to pick up her travel orders, the busy captain in charge of logistics made a mistake—the four mimeographed sheets he handed her stated that Miss Higgins could board “any Navy ship” in pursuit of press duties.
As soon as she grasped the wonderful implications of this snafu, she raced to catch a flight for Korea, and then hitched to Busan Harbor, where the assault force was set to depart the next day. The only problem with her reprieve was that she was still on the passenger list for the Consolation. She would need to talk her way onto another transport.
Her first request for a place on a ship was refused, ostensibly on the grounds that it was already overcrowded. She offered to sleep on the deck, but it was no use. Tense and dispirited, she decided to try the U.S.S. Henrico, a command ship ferrying a unit of the Fifth Marines. The captain studied her orders, then nodded his approval.
As she stood there trembling in elation, he mentioned that there was even a spare room, a sort of emergency cabin. A typhoon threatened, so he would be moving up their departure time to get out of the congested harbor. Thanking her Irish luck, she went straight to her cabin and locked herself in. She lay on the bunk with her heart racing, afraid every approaching sound meant someone was coming to throw her off.
On the morning of September 15, after a massive bombardment, she approached Red Beach with the fifth wave of Marines, the first to face serious opposition from the surprised enemy. By the time she dropped into one of the small assault boats, the last of 38 to clamber down the swaying rope ladder, they could hear the sound of enemy machine-gun fire coming from shore.
There were two other correspondents and a photographer in their group. According to Private First Class Thomas Shay, “No one knew there was a woman on board until we reached the harbor.” With her helmet and heavy overcoat, Higgins looked just like another G.I. “When the Gooks opened up with small arms fire, it didn’t seem to bother her,” he added, “though she didn’t say much.”
After circling for almost an hour, the channel reverberating with the earsplitting sound of warship guns and rockets, they went in. As they neared the seawall, an amber star shell burst over the beach. It was a good sign—the initial objective of the Fifth Marines, Cemetery Hill, had been taken. Before she could let out a sigh of relief, brightly colored tracer bullets ripped across the bow of their landing craft. Everyone hunched down low in the open boat. Maggie peered up at the men to try to gauge how things were going and saw that their faces were contorted with fear. Then their boat smashed into the seawall.
“Come on, you big, brave Marines!” yelled Lieutenant R. J. Schening. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He gave the man in front a shove. Another burst of fire and she got out fast, landing in three feet of water. Red Beach was not a beach at all, but a rough seawall composed of giant boulders. They were immediately trapped against a portion of the crumbled canyon, down which the North Koreans were rolling grenades.
Their group crawled on their stomachs to a gouged-out spot in the wall that provided some cover and remained pinned there for hours. She watched wave after wave of Marines hit the beach. Another assault boat swept up, disgorging more men into their crevice, until Marines were stretched out all along the top of the seawall. It was nearing twilight when the strong tidal currents shifted and a sudden swell of water came rushing into the dip in the wall.
They saw a huge landing ship tank (L.S.T.) bearing down on them, its platform doors open and ramp half lowered. All at once, their whole group rose up and vaulted the trenches on the inland side of the seawall. The Marines fanned out across the open area. Maggie and the other correspondents raced to a raised mound for protection from the gunfire.
Two men in the back got caught by the churning tide, their legs crushed by the steel ramp before they could be pulled clear. In the half-dark, Marines were zigzagging toward the cliffs. Maggie had an anguished view of a half-dozen as they were hurled to the ground by a hail of bullets. Crouching down, she took what would become an iconic photograph of the battle, showing Marine first lieutenant Baldomero Lopez leading his men over the seawall under fire. Minutes later, Lopez was shot in the act of throwing a grenade. He crawled onto the explosive to save his men. (He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.)
By about seven P.M., Red Beach was secure and there was only intermittent small-arms fire. As night fell, the Marines advanced inland without too much difficulty. Lieutenant John Counselman had just taken a ricochet and was lying on the ground injured when he saw her on shore. “A round skipped off the side of a tank and hit my leg,” he recalled. “It hardly drew blood, but my leg immediately turned blue black. A corpsman had my pants around my ankles. I looked around and, Oh, God!, there was Maggie Higgins. Every time you looked around, there she was!”
Maggie emerged unscathed. She and two other correspondents threaded their way across the beach through the heavy traffic of tanks, artillery guns, and trucks until they were back at the seawall. The tide had turned, and they were stunned to see the boats were now 25 feet below where they stood.
After a shaky climb down the rope ladder, their small boat had to fight the rip current to reach the flagship, the Mount McKinley. It had started to rain, and it was all Maggie could do to balance precariously on the gunwale, grab one of the slippery steps of the ship, and haul herself aboard. When she stumbled into the McKinley’s wardroom, which seemed to her the last word in luxury and warmth, she immediately ran afoul of the navy brass.
“No one knew there was a woman on board until we reached the harbor.”
After angrily demanding to know what the hell she was doing there, the captain treated her like a criminal on the lam. He refused to allow her to remain on the flagship, citing the lack of suitable facilities. After a prolonged debate, Maggie insisted on seeing the senior-ranking officer, Rear Admiral James H. Doyle, the commander of the amphibious phase of the Inchon operation. “Naturally I agreed to see her and she was brought to my cabin,” Doyle later recalled. He could still picture her, tall and slender, her damp hair in ringlets, a smudge of dirt on one cheek. “She was beautiful.”
Maggie’s account of the invasion made page one of the Herald Tribune:
WITH THE UNITED STATES MARINES AT INCHON, KOREA—Sept. 15. Heavily laden United States marines, in one of the most technically difficult amphibious landings in history, stormed at sunset today over a ten-foot sea wall in the heart of the port of Inchon and within an hour had taken three commanding hills in the city. I was in the fifth wave that hit “Red Beach,” which in reality was a rough vertical pile of stones over which the first assault troops had to scramble with the aid of improvised landing ladders topped with steel hooks. Despite a deadly and steady pounding from naval guns and air planes, enough North Koreans remained alive close to the beach to harass us with small-arms and mortar fire.
“I looked around and, Oh, God!, there was Maggie Higgins. Every time you looked around, there she was!”
The invasion was a rousing success. Only 20 Marines were killed, and 174 wounded, along with one cameraman. MacArthur’s great gamble at Inchon had paid off, and the Marines blazed a bloody path to Seoul. She and the Chicago Daily News reporter Keyes Beech were with a battalion of Marines when they advanced on Kimpo Airport. It was tough going, and they were stalled for 30 minutes at a time by enemy fire. Just ahead of them, the lead tank was blown up.
They dove for the ditches, and Maggie filed another first-person eyepopper for the Tribune. The Americans recaptured the old walled capital on September 25, though it would take three more days to subdue the North Korean resistance. She and Beech were among the first correspondents there. They were trailing Charlie (C) Company, which was spearheading the First Marine Battalion’s drive through the city, when they realized they were within a block of the old, redbrick Chosun Hotel, a familiar landmark. They helped to liberate the hotel staff, who broke into cheers when the two correspondents burst through the gate flanked by 20 South Korean soldiers.
Maggie was there when MacArthur triumphantly handed the keys to the city to the tearful, white-haired Syngman Rhee, restoring the South Korean president to the capital seat he had been forced to abandon three months earlier. The pursuit and destruction of the retreating North Korean army was underway. The war seemed all but over.
She had never seen quite so much bright, shiny army brass collected in one place. She and Beech, along with most officers from the First Marine Division, kept to the rear. They had no time to make themselves presentable after the battle for the city, which had ended only the night before. Catching sight of her in the crowd after the ceremony, MacArthur feigned surprise at her disheveled appearance and called out, “Hello, there, tall, blond, and ugly. Come up and see me sometime.”
Judging by the astonished faces of the officers, dignitaries, and reporters around him, she knew the general had succeeded in launching a fleet of rumors.
The Marines’ victory allowed her to make good on the promise she had made to herself—she had walked back into Seoul. She celebrated another personal victory of sorts. Her Inchon dispatch had been the news lead in the Tribune. In the early edition, the copydesk had accorded her an unusual compliment, simply headlining the piece: “Miss Higgins’ Story of the Landing.”
Beech, her staunchest defender and harshest critic in Korea, summed her up best. “In her quest for fame Higgins was appallingly, almost frighteningly, single-minded in her determination to overcome obstacles,” he wrote. “But she had more guts, more staying power, and more resourcefulness than 90 percent of her detractors. She was a good newspaperman.”
Jennet Conant is a journalist and the author of several books, including Tuxedo Park and 109 East Palace. Her latest book, Fierce Ambition, will be published on October 31
