‘Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins’
By Jennet Conant
W. W. Norton, 416 pages

Maggie Higgins got to Dachau ahead of just about every one of her fellow war correspondents. At only 24 she outperformed male reporters twice her age. Many of them never forgave her, saying she slept with anyone who could give her a scoop, or she pretended to be a vulnerable young woman who endeared herself to the high and mighty such as General Douglas MacArthur.

The daughter of a World War I pilot who regaled her with adventurous stories, Higgins had the grit that made her father proud and drove her to cross the line between the roles of reporter and participant in making the news, so that she became the story — resembling, Jennet Conant points out, Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson, the feisty reporter in “His Girl Friday.”

Ms. Conant acknowledges that Higgins broke the rules her male cohort claimed to honor. The author might have noted that plenty of males also crossed the line — Hemingway, for one, who buddied up with officers and profited from special privileges during World War II while correspondents like Higgins and Martha Gellhorn were scrambling to get their scoops.

Higgins understood that to compete with men, she had to use every resource at her disposal. Sometimes she showed up in glamorous clothes to dazzle the officer corps; sometimes she wore dirty clothes, coming from the front, to show that she was no different from her male competitors.

Higggins was unusual but not unique. Gellhorn, for example, had Hemingway’s help, starting with her reporting alongside him in the Spanish Civil War, but all the same she acted as an independent woman who slept with newsman and soldiers, including a general, and delivered reports to Collier’s that surpassed anything Hemingway was able to produce.

A scene in Gellhorn’s novel, “A Stricken Field,” about her reporting in Czechoslovakia just before Hitler invaded, discloses the difference between her and Higgins. Gellhorn’s female journalist is quite aware of the male chauvinism, but deflects her colleagues’ patronizing comments with banter that makes her (sort of) one of the boys.

Higgins had no time for that kind of finessing of the differences between male and female correspondents. Fortunately, she found men who admired her ambition and her competence and were willing to team up with her, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the road to the next breaking story.

When Higgins’s employer, the New York Herald Tribune, had enough of the fierce ambition that aggravated her male colleagues, she was shipped off to Japan, which she considered a dull assignment until the Korean War started. Then she was again in the thick of the action, filing quicker and better reports than her male counterparts.

Being Maggie Higgins, though, was exhausting and racing around to battlefields became a wearying enterprise to a woman who wanted marriage, a family, and by her 30s a place on the editorial pages of the Tribune, as well as a Washington, D.C., salon of press and political power brokers.

Ms. Conant shows how Higgins made the transition to columnist from reporter, befriending President Kennedy, who was “Jack” to her, and waltzing with President Johnson, who always made a point of singling her out for attention. 

Higgins was part of a generation of journalists close to power and who bridled at a breed of reporters in Vietnam who decried their government’s misleading propaganda. To her outrage, the new stars of journalism, like David Halberstam, predicted that American involvement in the Vietnam war was a losing cause. 

Gradually Higgins began to see that beginning with the Kennedy administration, the American government had misconceived the Vietnam war. She remained, however, a staunch Cold Warrior, blasting President Johnson for not prosecuting the war more aggressively. She wrote books and columns, appeared on television, and remained a fixture on the D.C.-Georgetown circuit of powerful government and press figures.

She was only 45 when she died in 1966, a victim of a rare parasite picked up in Vietnam that doctors identified too late to rectify the damage that had been done to her kidneys and other organs. With her death, Ms. Conant implies, the day of the “girl reporter” standout who became a syndicated columnist was over.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn.”