FIERCE AMBITION

The eventful life of an intrepid journalist.

Conant offers a brisk, richly detailed biography of acclaimed reporter Marguerite Higgins (1920-1966), the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence, for reporting on the Korean War, one award among many others. Born in Hong Kong to an American aviator father and French mother, Higgins grew up in Oakland, California, itching to escape. In 1937, she entered the University of California, Berkeley, soon writing for the well-regarded college paper, the Daily Californian. Journalism, she decided, was to be her future. Arriving in New York in 1941, she enrolled in the Columbia School of Journalism, eager to find a job at a newspaper. She was hired by the New York Herald Tribune the following year, beginning a career that was as illustrious as it was controversial. Her enemies—and they were many—accused her of exploiting “her feminine charms to get ahead.” She was dogged by gossip and rumors of affairs wherever she was assigned. Conant acknowledges that Higgins liked sex but “courted fame more ardently than she ever did men.” She also courted risk, excitement, and the rush of danger. Reporting from Europe during World War II, she “loved the tension in the air, the lightning pace of events.” When Germany surrendered, she was one of the first reporters inside Dachau, shocked by the sight of more than 30,000 “half-starved, lice-infested, traumatized prisoners,” who ecstatically embraced the American liberators. She left with a new sense of mission, and her reporting took on “an undercurrent of gravity and moral responsibility.” Conant chronicles Higgins’ career in detail, including stints as the Tribune’s Berlin and Tokyo bureau chief; two marriages and motherhood; her close friendship with the Kennedys; and her ferocious drive. In 1950, a profile in Life made her “the most famous war correspondent in the world.”

An admiring, cleareyed portrait of an ambitious, successful woman.