Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins

Historian Conant (The Great Secret) delivers an engrossing portrait of “nervy and relentless” war correspondent Marguerite Higgins (1920–1966). An only child of “Irish-French-Hong Kong heritage,” Higgins launched her career at UC Berkeley’s Daily Cal, garnered one of only 11 seats reserved for women at Columbia’s School of Journalism, and, as the second female reporter brought on staff at the New York Herald Tribune, traveled to Europe in 1944. Upon witnessing the dire results of Nazi “sadism and mass murder,” including at the liberation of Dachau in 1945, Higgins swore to report on injustice everywhere. As Berlin bureau chief, she covered the Nuremberg trials in 1947. During the Korean War, she went on assignment as “the only woman at the... front,” carrying only “a towel, toothbrush and lipstick”; her reporting there earned her recognition as outstanding woman reporter of the year at the New York Newspaperwomen club’s 1950 “Front Page” dinner, among other accolades. Her career also included 10 trips to Vietnam at the height of that conflict. Much of the book is devoted to Higgins’s private life, including her 1952 marriage to Gen. Bill Hall, which brought her to Washington, D.C., where she became part of John F. Kennedy’s inner circle. Propulsive and high-spirited, this is a riveting depiction of a larger-than-life trailblazer. Photos. (Oct.)