The Press: Maggie v. the Boors

As a correspondent in Korea, the New York Herald Tribune’s Marguerite Higgins could hardly find words enough to praise the battling G.I.s—and they liked her too. Fortnight ago, Correspondent

Higgins took a look at another group of G.I.s and clucked her tongue. She wrote from Frankfurt that some soldiers in the U.S. occupation forces are brawling, raucous boors who whistle and shout “Kommen Sie her” from street corners at every passing fraulein. Such carryings-on may have been understandable right after the war, wrote Correspondent Higgins, but now it is inexcusable, and hardly the way to make friends and influence the Germans against the Reds.

Last week the Army Times, an unofficial service weekly, immediately set up a raucous shout from its own street corner. Said the Times: Miss Higgins had tied a 15-in. column “of nothing to a nubbin of something that may or may not have happened and cabled it off at press rates just in time to catch the first whisky sour at the Carlton bar . .. We spent a month recently in Frankfurt and other parts of Germany. We must confess that not once did we hear a soldier shout ‘Kommen Sie her’. . . Yet Miss Higgins, pausing briefly in her flight to elsewhere, is right in the thick of things.

“Of course, it has occurred to us that someone did shout this phrase—but at Maggie, in the belief she was a fraulein —and she resented it. Or that no one took the trouble to shout at her, and she resented that… What we would really like some time is to have Miss H. do a piece on ‘The Foreign Correspondent and the Three-Hour Lunch,’ or ‘Making a Headline with Angostura,’ or ‘How to Write Out of Your Hat.’ Not that she would have personal experience in any of these directions, but there is plenty of such material in all the press clubs of Europe. Besides, who needs material?”

Not the Army Times apparently. For its caterwauling at hard-working Correspondent Higgins seemed to be tied to a nubbin of nothing at all.