In an era where the field was almost exclusively "a man's world", she became the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in a major journalism category, winning in 1937 for correspondence.

[3] After her graduation in 1898 as valedictorian, the family moved to Cleveland, where McCormick's mother sold her book, Songs at Twilight,[4] and both of them became associate editors for the Catholic Universe Bulletin.

[2][6] They settled in a Dayton house called "Hills and Dales," which they left in the 1930s to take up residence in the Gotham and then the Carlyle hotel in New York City, when not traveling in Europe.

Van Anda accepted, and McCormick provided the first in-depth reports of the rise of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist movement in Italy.

[1][2][10][11][12] As described in a Current Biography article in 1940, "she was perhaps the first reporter to see that a young Milanese newspaper editor, lantern-jawed, hungry and insignificant, would attain world importance".

[16][17] Although the New York Times editorially was less disposed to support Fascism than its correspondents like McCormick, she justified the illegal Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the sending of Italian "volunteers" to support the revolt of General Francisco Franco against Spain’s democratically elected government during the Spanish Civil War, and the Rome-Berlin Axis with Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

"[16] According to Diggins, McCormick “fell under the spell" of Mussolini and "gave the New York Times' readers not so much an analysis of Fascism as a fantasy portrait of a resurrected Italy.

The next publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger put her on the staff on June 1, 1936, as the first woman member of the editorial board, at a starting salary of $7,000 (equivalent to $158,616 in 2024) per year.

"[28] She built a special relationship with the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who "rejoiced in her company and repaid her with long, candid, private conversations.

[31][34] In 1939, with World War II imminent, McCormick spent five months in 13 different nations, speaking with both political leaders and ordinary citizens in reporting the growing crisis.

[2] With her foreign policy column, her position on the Times editorial board and her vast experience with interviewing world leaders, she became an influential political analyst in journalism along with Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson of The New York Herald Tribune and Arthur Krock of The New York Times, she became an influential political analyst in journalism.

She could be considered as one of the first prominent intellectual Cold Warriors, voicing anti-Bolshevik perceptions which were common at the State Department and which would become operational under the containment-oriented Truman Doctrine.

About her accomplishments and that of other contemporary newspaperwomen, she said: “We had tried hard not to talk—meaning too much—but just to sneak toward the city desk and the cable desk, and the editorial sanctum and even the publisher's office with masculine sang-froid.” [2][45] She preferred to stay in the limelight, not allowing that articles be written about her and not revealing any details of her private life, anxious as she was that personal fame could interfere with “the kind of impersonal and uncolored reporting ... on which the maintenance of a free press and therefore a free society depend.” She was not an advocate for feminist causes, but did encourage women to enter professional public life and advocated for women's talents to be utilized by government and business.

[2] President Dwight D. Eisenhower called her "a truly great reporter, respected at home and abroad for her keen analysis and impartial presentation of the news developments of our day.

She will be greatly missed by all the members of the newspaper profession and the hundreds of thousands of readers who followed her column in the New York Times."