She subsequently won Long Island University's George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting for articles from behind enemy lines in Korea and other nations in 1952.

[2] Higgins started at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1937, where she was a member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority and wrote for The Daily Californian, serving as an editor in 1940.

In those days women had to be tougher to succeed in journalism, a male-dominated and essentially chauvinistic business, and Maggie carried toughness to the outer edge, propelled by driving ambition, which was soon apparent to us all.

[2] Eager to become a war correspondent, Higgins persuaded the management of the New York Herald Tribune to send her to Europe in 1944, after working for the paper for two years.

She witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945 and received a U.S. Army campaign ribbon for her assistance during the surrender by its S.S. guards.

The gossip at the time speculated that the novelist, Toni Howard, based the main character on Higgins, raising suspicion and hostility among Tokyo staffers.

On 28 June, Higgins and three of her colleagues witnessed the Hangang Bridge bombing, and were trapped on the north bank of Han River as a result.

Higgins made a personal appeal to Walker's superior officer, General Douglas MacArthur, who subsequently sent a telegram to the Tribune stating: "Ban on women correspondents in Korea has been lifted.

She refused and the Tribune allowed her to stay, which would lead to a competitive feud between the two that would result in both receiving the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

As a result of her reporting from Korea, Higgins received the 1950 George Polk Memorial Award from the Overseas Press Club.

[8] She contributed along with other major journalistic and political figures to the Collier's magazine collaborative special issue Preview of the War We Do Not Want, with an article entitled "Women of Russia".

[9] Higgins continued to cover foreign affairs throughout the rest of her life, interviewing world leaders such as Francisco Franco, Nikita Khrushchev and Jawaharlal Nehru.

In 1955, she established and became chief of the Tribune's Moscow bureau and was the first American correspondent allowed back into the Soviet Union after Stalin's death.

[10] While in South Vietnam, another feud developed between Higgins and David Halberstam, a New York Times correspondent who was assigned to replace Bigart.

"[5] Halberstam and many of the young correspondents in Vietnam at the time opposed the Diem regime and reported a negative view of the war.

Higgins believed they did not have a real understanding of the war and oftentimes called them Rover Boys, who never ventured outside of Saigon to the countryside to see what was going on.

She remarked that, that was what female journalists at the time had to do: I feel that people critical of Maggie and her so-called dirty tricks forget just how hard it was in those days to be a woman in a man's world.

[11] Men saw the world of reporting as their own territory and were oftentimes not willing to share with women entering the field, according to Carl Mydans, a former photographer for Life.

[2]Ambitious and high-achieving female journalists were often accused of sleeping around or using their sex appeal to get the best assignments, sources, or to boost their career.

[5] In 1952, she married William Evens Hall, a U.S. Air Force major general, whom she met while bureau chief in Berlin.

[4] By 1963, Hall had retired from the Air Force and went to work for an electronics firm, with a weekly commute to New York, returning to their home in Washington, D.C., by Friday.

[18] On September 2, 2010, South Korea posthumously awarded Order of Diplomatic Service Merit Heungin Medal (Korean: 수교훈장 흥인장), one of its highest honors, to Marguerite Higgins.