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Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins

Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins

By Jennet Conant
Norton, 2023, 416 pp.
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Reviewed by Lawrence D. Freedman

March/April 2024Published on
In This Review
Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins

Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins

By Jennet Conant

Norton, 2023, 416 pp.
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War correspondents have privileged opportunities to observe the course of a conflict and shape the popular understanding of the key events and actors involved. The desire to be first with the big story also means that their profession is an intensely competitive one. In this lively biography of Marguerite "Maggie" Higgins, Conant explores how an ambitious, hardworking woman used all the means at her disposal to get the right assignments. The highlights of her career included reporting on the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1946, the Berlin airlift from 1948 to 1949, and the Korean War in the early 1950s. There, despite being told by a U.S. general that women did not belong on the frontlines, Higgins showed she could more than cope and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 on the back of her dispatches. When she got to Vietnam, her hawkish anticommunism put her at odds with a younger generation of more skeptical reporters. Before she saw any need to doubt her own beliefs, she was cut down in 1966, at the age of 45, by a parasitic illness she contracted while covering the war.


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