Front Woman – Frank McNally on a pioneering war correspondent, Maggie Higgins

Among the mostly male and typically grim faces in the exhibits of a war museum near the Korean border, there is a strikingly female one, smiling broadly. Glamorous and beautiful, but wearing military fatigues, the woman could be a Hollywood star, on a morale-boosting visit to the troops. In fact, she was a journalist, embedded with the US army, whose fearless dispatches from Korea in 1950 made her the first ever female winner of a Pulitzer prize for foreign correspondence. Californian by upbringing (although born in Hong Kong), Maggie Higgins inherited some of her good looks, and all her attraction…