Columnists: Lady at War

All through the long plane trip home from Viet Nam last September, Columnist Marguerite Higgins was violently ill. Her body ached; her fever flared as high as 105 degrees. At home, intermittent bouts of pain and fever drained her strength, but she continued to write three columns a week. In early November she had to be hospitalized at Walter Reed. Doctors at first thought that she had picked up the drug-resistant malaria that has reached almost epidemic proportions in Viet Nam. Later, they suspected she might have cancer. But an exploratory operation uncovered nothing, and meanwhile her condition continued to worsen. She developed uremic poisoning and began to hemorrhage internally. Finally, the doctors surmised that she had a rare tropical ailment called leishmaniasis, in which protozoa from the bite of a sandfly enter the bloodstream and attack the liver and spleen. As a rule, few people die of the disease if they are properly treated, but in Marguerite Higgins’ case, the doctors were unable to arrest it. Last week, at 45, she died.

Mud Instead of Makeup. The strange disease was just about the only thing that ever subdued Maggie Higgins. A driving, headstrong girl, she made a name for herself by slogging through Germany as a New York Herald Tribune reporter in the waning days of World War II. She made an even bigger reputation in the Korean War as the only woman correspondent on the scene. At first, the U.S. Army wanted no women reporters at all and ordered her out of the country. Getting wind of this, a Soviet magazine gleefully ran a cartoon showing her being ejected from Korea at bayonet point. The caption: “MacArthur’s first victory.” But it was the general who capitulated. Maggie confronted him in Tokyo and complained: “I am not in Korea as a woman but as a war correspondent.” Mac rescinded the order and let her return.

Though she roughed it with the troops and took risks that many of them balked at, she never lost her femininity on the battlefield. “Maggie wears mud like other women wear makeup,” said an admiring G.I. In fact, she used her blonde, blue-eyed charm to get the stories she wanted, a ploy that left some of her male colleagues sputtering with rage. Angriest of all was her fellow Trib reporter Homer Bigart. “Maggie is driving Homer right into a Pulitzer Prize for the best coverage of the Korean War,” said another correspondent. The two drove each other; they shared a Pulitzer in 1951.

Early Warnings. After the war, Maggie moved to Washington, D.C., where she gave up the grind of daily reporting for the more leisurely life of a roving reporter and pundit. She lived in an elegant town house with her husband, Lieut. General William Hall (her first marriage to Philosophy Professor Stanley Moore ended in divorce in 1948), raised two children and cultivated an impressive list of sources. In 1963, she left the Trib to become a columnist for Newsday. She knew how to take a cool, levelheaded look at world affairs, and she disdained those commentators who were addicted to “romantic nonsense.” In 1962, long before most other pundits got around to it, Maggie warned that the Russians were entering Cuba in ominously large numbers. She was one of the first to report that the Viet Nam Buddhists, who had been characterized by other reporters as innocent victims of oppression, were actually political opponents of the Diem regime.

Still a restless reporter at heart, Marguerite Higgins always liked to take a firsthand look at the world’s trouble spots before she made up her mind. And it was that determination that took her back to Viet Nam.