Marguerite Higgins

Marguerite Higgins was born on September 3rd, 1920 in Hong Kong, where her father worked at a shipping company. She moved to the United States in 1923. In her freshman year of college, she worked for The Daily Californian, the University of California, Berkeley, newspaper. She graduated from Berkeley in 1941 with a BA in French, and then she continued to receive a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University.
She earned the position of campus correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and persuaded management to send her to Europe so she could become a war correspondent. She was stationed in London and Paris, and then reassigned to Germany in March of 1945. She received a US Army campaign ribbon for her assistance during the SS guards' surrender, and she witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. She also covered the Nuremberg war trials and the Soviet Union's blockade of Berlin.
Higgins covered the Korean War in 1950, and she was one of the first reporters on the scene. General Walton Walker ordered her out of the country because he claimed that women did not belong at the front and that the military had no time to worry about making separate accommodations for them. Higgins appealed to General Walker's superior officer, General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur sent a telegram to the Herald Tribune stating: "Ban on women correspondents in Korea has been lifted. Marguerite Higgins is held in highest professional esteem by everyone." This was a huge breakthrough in journalism for women everywhere, and Higgins was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. She won it alongside five male war correspondents.
She continued to cover foreign affairs throughout her life, interviewing world leaders such as Francisco Franco, Nikita Krushchev, and Jawaharlal Nehru. She even made it to Vietnam under Newsday in 1963. She spoke out against Vietnam writing newspaper articles, editorial columns, and a book title Our Vietnam Nightmare.
While on an assignment, she contracted a tropical disease called leishmaniasis, and she died at age 45 in 1966.



Sources: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/mhiggins.htm
http://centennial.journalism.columbia.edu/1950-the-korean-war/