I don't think my success [as a journalist] has anything to do with being a woman. Call it tenacity or resourcefulness or refusing to take no for an answer.

Lisa Howard was born Dorothy Jean Guggenheim in middle America, Cambridge Ohio. She attended Miami University but left to pursue a career in acting. She was in several movies and had a role in the Edge of Night daytime drama.

In 1960 Howard became a correspondent for the Mutual Radio Network covering the United Nations and later the next year she became the first American reporter to interview Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. This brought her to the attention of ABC News and she was the first female correspondent to cover the Vienna Summit between Khrushchev and the President Kennedy. This led to anchoring the noon news show The News Hour With Lisa Howard.

In April of 1963 she traveled to Cuba for a documentary about the leader of the island nation. Through eight hours of conversation with Fidel Castro she found that he was open to restoring friendly relations with the US and felt that many of the issues could be resolved by talk directly with American leaders.

When she returned she told CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms what she had learned. His classified memo to the President read "Lisa Howard definitely wants to impress the U.S. Government with two facts: Castro is ready to discuss rapprochement and she herself is ready to discuss it with him if asked to do so by the U.S. Government." Of course this did not sit well with the CIA where they were still plotting the demise of Castro.

With no encouragement from the CIA, Howard wrote in the War and Peace Report - "In our conversations he [Castro] made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel and military hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for expropriated American lands and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for Communist subversion throughout the Hemisphere." She urged President Kennedy to send a representative to Cuba to begin talks, and this was in the works as of November 22, 1963.

French journalist Jean Daniel was with Fidel Castro when news of the assassination came through. A dejected Castro commented, "This is an end to your mission of peace. Everything is changed."

Lisa Howard did not give up. In December of 1963 contacted Lyndon Johnson – who had no interest in her efforts. She kept in touch with Castro. When Johnson did not respond, she contacted Adlai Stevenson, the US delegate to the UN with her requests. At that point, National Security Council staffer Gordon Chase wrote in a classified memo that it was important "to remove Lisa from direct participation in the business of passing messages" from Cuba.

Frustrated with the response from the White House Lisa became involved in the campaign of Kenneth Keating in 1964 as she though there was better opportunity with the Republican than with Robert Kennedy working through the Democrat Party. Late in the year she arranged a meeting with Che Guevara. The White House was not interested so she invited Senator Eugene McCarthy. The White House freaked out and told McCarthy the meeting must remain a secret so other South American countries don't learn of it.

Since ABC News had a policy that because she had "chosen to participate publicly in partisan political activity contrary to long established ABC news policy" she was fired from her position.

After losing her job and suffering a miscarriage, Lisa Howard ended her life on July 4, 1965 with an overdose of barbiturates.