Reporting Under Fire (16 page)

Margaret pulled a “veil” over her mind as she took pictures at Buchenwald, working methodically and grateful that the camera placed a barrier between her and the horror she beheld. Two of her photos ran in
Life
on May 7 along with the work of several other photojournalists who recorded the atrocities, a black-and-white record that proved rumors about Nazi barbarism were
true and not the work of anti-German propaganda. Many more weren't published until 1960 when
Life
ran a special double issue, “25 Years of
Life.”
Her shot of 15 Buchenwald survivors leaning on a wire fence, heads shaved and eyes hollow, became one of her best known.

After the war, Margaret Bourke-White kept taking pictures. She went to India and patiently waited to photograph Mohandas Gandhi, the Hindu leader who used civil disobedience to gain India's independence from Great Britain. The mystical Gandhi insisted that Margaret learn to use a spinning wheel before he permitted her to take only three photos of him. After taking two shots, Margaret knew she hadn't gotten what she had come for, but her third and final try resulted in a masterpiece. Gandhi was assassinated soon thereafter, and Margaret's pictures of his funeral also ran in
Life.

Margaret went on to take pictures of abused diamond miners in South Africa and also covered the Korean War. She developed Parkinson's disease in her mid-40s and fought its crippling effects for the next 20 years as it incapacitated her muscles and nerves. She died in 1971.

T
he Allied victory in World War II placed part of Germany and all of Eastern Europe into the hands of the Soviet Union. By 1947, the Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe, dividing it into democratic and Communist nations. For the next 50 years, the Cold War mentality underscored how nations did business.

The Cold War created a sense of anxiety among Americans, despite the country's booming economy and status as the leading nation of the Free World. Even as Americans feared a nuclear war with the “Reds,” the United States made giant strides in war technology, developing B-52s and missiles to carry hydrogen bombs to wipe out enemy targets. The Soviets did the same.

A rabidly anti-Communist senator, Joseph McCarthy, was trying to convince the public that “Commies” were destroying the American way of life and conducted hearings that appeared
on television. Children in schools practiced air-raid drills and crawled under their desks. The United States and the USSR embarked on a space race after Russia launched the first satellite into orbit in 1957. Overseas, the United States tasked its military and the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with ensuring that other nations, large and small, stay in line with the Free World.

The Cold War never turned hot between the United States and Soviet Russia, but the two nations equipped and financed small wars and revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. When the Cuban Revolution put Fidel Castro in power in 1959, it soon became clear that Communists had a foothold in the Americas. Castro's presence in Cuba seemed to signal imminent revolution all across Latin America and the Caribbean, and for the next 25 years, the United States bolstered anti-Communist governments, regimes that nonetheless were decidedly nondemocratic.

With China under the control of its Communist rulers by 1949, the US government feared that all of East Asia could also go “red.” When Communist North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, the United States rushed to aid the South and fought an undeclared war against North Korea and China. At the US Department of Defense, a theory in foreign policy began to take hold: that once a small country succumbed to Communist rule, its neighbors would fall like a series of dominoes. This domino theory became the operating principle for American foreign policy during the Cold War years in the 1950s and '60s, driving the buildup of US forces to fight the Vietnam War.

Then suddenly, for the first time in the war, I experienced the cold, awful certainty that there was no escape. My reactions were trite. As with most people who suddenly accept death as inevitable and imminent, I was simply filled with surprise that this was finally going to happen to me.—Marguerite Higgins

Sometimes the men and women who report the news become news themselves. Celebrity journalists are nothing new in American culture; Elizabeth Cochrane, aka Nellie Bly, captured readers' imaginations in 1889 with her globetrotting exploits, and Peggy Hull drew quite a following as the girl reporter “who got to Paris.” But none rose faster nor further than Marguerite Higgins, a war correspondent for the
New York Herald Tribune,
when she went to Korea to report on the Chinese invasion in June 1950, which won her a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1951. Her friend Carl Mydans, a prominent
Life
magazine photographer, shot a series of pictures and wrote a flattering article that
Life
ran in a six-page spread on October 2, 1950. Marguerite Higgins became a national sensation.

Mydans's story neatly summed up how Maggie was “engaged in three separate campaigns” in Korea: one to report on the war; the second, her famous feud with fellow
Herald Tribune
reporter Homer Bigart; and the third, “ever to deny that sex has anything to do with war correspondence.” In fact, Maggie's dear friend (and defender) was spot on about her life as a war reporter, and
biographers and students of American history and culture have wrangled over the details of her life ever since.

Marguerite Higgins seemed to know what she wanted from life. She cultivated an air of cool detachment, though she claimed to have deep doubts about how she measured up against everyone else. Born in Hong Kong in 1920 to an American father and French mother, she grew up speaking a mix of languages and was teased about her accent when her family moved to Oakland, California. Her father, Lawrence Higgins, like so many well-heeled businessmen, lost his job as a stockbroker when the stock market crashed in October 1929. Though he found other work, Marguerite's dissolute father succumbed to alcoholism that put a strain on his family. Maggie's mother, Marguerite Goddard Higgins, got a job teaching French at a tony girls' school where her daughter could attend tuition-free.

Marguerite's father resented the life that the Depression had doled out to him, complaining about the “flabby routine of his petite bourgeois life in Oakland, California,” to use his wife's French words for the lower middle class. He spoke to his daughter of his heroic past during World War I, first as an ambulance driver and later as a pilot, and pointedly raised his daughter to fear nothing and no one. Years later, after Maggie had made a splash as a war correspondent, he told a
Time
interviewer that he raised Maggie so “that she should always be able to stand on her own feet.” Then Lawrence Higgins said something else:

Marguerite is not so much competitive, as she is a perfectionist. There was only one place for Marguerite and that was the top, regardless as of what she was doing … learning to swim, to play the violin, or whatever she went into. But it was strictly for her own satisfaction, not to beat somebody else out.

From the girls' school, Maggie went to college at the University of California at Berkeley. She joined a sorority, where she must have shocked a few sisters when she stated she believed in free love. But on large parts of Berkeley's campus, the “petite bourgeois” attitudes of Oakland didn't fly. Her interests turned to working for the campus paper, the
Daily Californian.
Big ideas were always churning at Berkeley, and Maggie met students and professors who didn't share the same values as her neighbors at home. She mingled with liberals and Socialists who dreamed about a new and different order to American society, and she dated a Communist, a philosophy student named Stanley Moore who was studying for a doctorate.

For a time Maggie worked as a cub reporter for a small-town paper, but the promise of working in big-time journalism lured her to the master's program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. Only 12 slots were open to women when Maggie applied, and she scrambled to get a spot just four days before classes began in the fall of 1941. Off to New York Maggie went, rooming with an artist in Greenwich Village, where bohemian culture flourished.

While she attended grad school, Maggie worked as a stringer for the
New York Herald Tribune,
then a leading city paper and fierce competitor against the
New York Times.
She dug around Columbia's campus for stories and submitted them to the
Herald Tribune,
which paid her only for the ones they accepted. At some point during her studies she announced that she planned to become more famous than Dorothy Thompson, then the nation's leading female journalist.

Maggie's talent for digging out news got her a full-time job at the
Herald Tribune
after she graduated in 1942, and she began the typical climb up the reporter's ladder—first on general assignments, next on district news, then the graveyard shift reporting
on crime and fires, then to the rewrite desk, and finally to the top as a features writer. Maggie never did become a top-notch writer among American journalists, but several old-timers noticed that no one could equal her skill at getting news, including fresh angles to old stories.

It was a man's world in the city room at the
New York Herald Tribune,
even if a handful of women like Maggie Higgins worked there. After hours, a reporter was likely to stroll down the street to the Artists and Writers Restaurant, affectionately called “Bleecks” (pronounced “Blake's”) after its owner. Over drinks at the bar or in the back room, newspapermen talked shop and tossed around ideas, much as executives and managers at New York's banks and corporate headquarters gathered in their private dining rooms for drinks and lunch. Maggie Higgins wasn't welcome in that back room, as women in general were excluded from these sacred male watering holes where they talked shop and made important decisions. Maggie may have considered herself as competent as any male reporter and entitled to the same information, but in the 1940s, most men didn't see things that way.

Controversy and gossip followed Maggie Higgins from her college years onward. Her outward appearance—bright blue eyes, tall, athletic figure, and curly blond hair—could easily have attracted others. But the simple truth was that most people, women or men, didn't like Marguerite Higgins. Her single-mindedness and her need for perfection worked against her. But Maggie didn't care what other people thought. Her raw ambition made her few friends and many enemies. Soon enough, the gossip began: that she stole colleagues' stories and that she slept with sources, editors, and other reporters, all in her drive to reach the top and stay there.

With America at war in two theaters of operations, Maggie Higgins ached to get overseas as a correspondent. Seeing her
wish granted didn't seem likely; there were plenty of experienced, hardened men at the
Herald Tribune
who were readily credentialed by the War Department to work in combat zones, including another Californian named John Steinbeck (who went on to become a leading novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner, as Maggie would).

In late 1944, Maggie Higgins got to Europe and soon found her way to the
Herald Tribune's
Paris bureau where her skilled French gave her an edge in reporting. Over the fall and winter that year, as the Allies made their final push into Germany and Austria, she traveled with the US Third Army commanded by General George Patton. She got to know lots of military men—from troops on the ground to top brass—and she made enemies. Some of the other women correspondents, some 20 or more years older than Maggie (who was 24), resented her untidiness. She showed no regard for the older women's standing or experience. She ignored the smudges of carbon paper on her face and wore her uniform with tennis shoes. Worst were the rumors that Maggie Higgins would sleep with a military man or another reporter in exchange for information.

Whatever others may have thought, Maggie earned her editors' respect and was rewarded for her reporting when the
Herald Tribune
named her its Berlin bureau chief in 1947. She covered the transformation of Poland from a republic to a Communist society after the Iron Curtain dropped on Europe, and she watched the Berlin Airlift take off in 1948.

Tongues continued to wag about Marguerite Higgins in Berlin, where she fell in love with a married man, General William Hall. More gossip followed; there was a new book out at home with the provocative title,
Shriek with Pleasure,
written by Toni Howard, another woman reporter who knew Maggie in Berlin. Its protagonist very much resembled Maggie Higgins, and the
plot was a “bitchy little story,” according to Keyes Beech of the
Chicago Daily News,
who worked with Maggie later. When she was transferred to Tokyo as bureau chief in 1950, it looked like a big step back for Maggie, and some in her circle quietly cheered.

Maggie arrived in April to find Tokyo life quiet and boring—until there was a surprise attack in a neighboring country. On Sunday, June 25, 1950, the North Korean People's Army, backed by Communist China, crossed over the 38th parallel in a full-court offensive against South Korea. That afternoon, Maggie Higgins showed up at the Haneda airfield to fly to Korea. Three other newsmen were there: Beech of the
Chicago Daily News,
Burton Crane of the
New York Times,
and Frank Gibney of
Time.
Gibney suggested that “Korea was no place for a woman,” but Maggie ignored him. After several false starts and a side trip to southern Japan, they found room on an empty C-54 cargo plane that was to return filled with Americans evacuating Seoul. The pilot was amazed that the four didn't plan to come back with him.