Pioneering reporter tells (almost) all

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REMEMBER TO LAUGH

By Maggie Kilgore

Palari Publishing, $22,

202 pages

REVIEWED BY MURIEL DOBBIN

Maggie Kilgore was one of a new breed of women reporters who were arriving in Washington in 1963, the year when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and a grimly eventful news decade of violence and scandal was beginning.

Ms. Kilgore came out of a family newspaper business in Ohio, and went on to become a state government reporter, a wire service correspondent in Washington, a foreign correspondent in Vietnam for United Press International and a financial reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

She was a departure from the female reporters who in earlier years covered the social beat, because there was nowhere else for most women to go in the newspaper world, and who unfortunately became linked to the journalistically superficial.

Ms. Kilgore walked in the footsteps of Helen Thomas, an indefatigable UPI reporter who over half a century fought her way to an iconic position as a White House reporter. Yet even Ms. Thomas spent years in which she was delegated to tracking the schedule of the First Lady.