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Neil Sheehan was born Cornelius Mahoney
Sheehan in Holyoke, Massachusetts and raised
on his family's dairy farm. From an early
age, he worked on the farm, but he dreamed
of the world beyond the pasture gate. With
the encouragement of his Irish immigrant
mother, he won scholarships to Mount Hermon
Academy and then to Harvard, where he
distinguished himself as an editor of the
Harvard Advocate literary magazine.
On graduating from
Harvard, he entered the United States Army
and was assigned first to Korea, but later
transferred to the division newspaper in
Tokyo. While editing the weekly Bayonet,
he began to moonlight in the Tokyo office of
the wire service United Press International
(UPI). After his discharge from the army, he
became a full-time reporter for UPI, and was
soon assigned to the Saigon bureau, covering
the emerging conflict in Vietnam.
The withdrawal of
French colonial forces had left the
Vietnames peninsula divided. A Communist
regime in the North, led by Ho Chi Minh,
received support from the Soviet Union and
China. In the South, the colonial regime was
succeeded by a series of weak governments,
supported by the United States. Sheehan's
reporting from Vietnam won him a place with
the most prestigious newspaper in the United
States, The New York Times.
The Times assigned Sheehan to
Jakarta, Indonesia, where he covered the
large-scale massacre of suspected leftists
by the U.S.-backed Indonesian military. Soon
he was back in Vietnam as the Times
correspondent. By now, U.S. advisory support
for the faltering South Vietnamese regime
had given way to a full-scale U.S. military
involvement. While the American government
portrayed the Vietnam War as one front in a
global conflict with a unified Communist
enemy, Sheehan saw that the Vietnamese
regarded their struggle as a war of national
liberation from foreign occupation. As the
U.S. resorted to increasingly extreme
methods to suppress the Viet Cong insurgency
in the South, the Vietnamese resistance
hardened. Sheehan's reporting made him
deeply unpopular with the Pentagon and the
State Department, but his reports were
making an impact on public opinion at home.
Returning to the U.S.,
Sheehan was assigned to cover the Pentagon
and later the White House. In 1967,
Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara had
assigned his subordinate, Leslie Gelb, among
others, to compile a history of United
States-Vietnam relations. The resulting
document ran to 7,000 pages in 47 volumes.
In 1971, a former State Department employee,
Daniel Ellsberg, obtained a copy of the
confidential report and attempted to give it
to members of the United States Senate.
Rebuffed, Ellsberg contacted Neil Sheehan.
Sheehan spent weeks studying the documents,
tracing U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia
from 1945, and found a disturbing pattern of
deception. From early in the war, Sheehan
concluded, American leaders had been
skeptical of the chances for victory in
Vietnam, but had led the United States into
war for political considerations, using
false information to mislead the public.
When the Times began to publish
Sheehan's reports, including excerpts from
the classified documents, the Nixon
administration claimed the entire document
was top secret and secured a court
injunction barring the Times from
publishing further excerpts or descriptions
of the documents. A series of trials
resulted, in a battle between the Nixon
administration and the Times that
lasted 125 days. Overreaching, White House
operatives broke into Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office, hoping to find
information that would discredit Ellsberg
and bring the authenticity of the documents
into question. This burglary, which preceded
the Watergate break-in, eventually led to
Nixon's resignation. The Supreme Court, in
The New York Times Co. v. United States,
ruled that publication of the documents was
not injurious to national security, but was
in the public interest, protected by the
First Amendment. Neil Sheehan's edition of
the Pentagon Papers became a national
best-seller.
1972 saw the publication of another book by
Sheehan on another scandal of the Vietnam
War. The Arnheiter Affair, recounted
an infamous case in which the dangerously
eccentric commanding officer of the U.S.S.
Vance was relieved of his command.
Sheehan had now been reporting on the
Vietnam War for the better part of a decade.
He wanted to put the experience behind him,
but felt that there was more that he needed
to say. That year, he attended the funeral
of an old friend, Colonel John Paul Vann, a
decorated hero of the war. In Sheehan's eyes,
Vann's story captured the entire tragedy of
America's involvement in Vietnam, with all
its good intentions and all its calamitous
results.
Sheehan took a leave
from the Times, expecting to spend
two to three years writing his book. it
proved a far more demanding venture than he
ever expected. Midway through his work on
the book, he was seriously injured in a head-on
collision. With eleven bones broken, he
spent three months in the hospital and was
unable to work on the book for another year.
When he resumed work, his finances were
badly strained. He received a number of
grants to continue his project; an advance
from his publishers and the sale of partial
serialization rights to The New Yorker
enabled Neil Sheehan to finish his
monumental narrative. It took another year
to edit the manuscript to a reasonable size.
When it was finally published in 1989, A
Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and
America in Vietnam was hailed as the
greatest book ever written about the war.
Sheehan was praised for combining the
dramatic skills of a novelist with the
investigative skills of a great reporter and
the insight of a historian. A Bright
Shining Lie received the year's Pulitzer
Prize for Non-Fiction. Alongside The Best
and the Brightest, by his friend
David
Halberstam, Sheehan's book remains
essential reading for any student of
America's experience in Vietnam. The same
year, Sheehan returned to Vietnam for the
first time since the end of the war, and
toured the country, North and South,
revisiting old friends and interviewing
veterans of both sides of the conflict. His
resulting observations appear in the books
After the War Was Over (1992) and
Two Cities: Hanoi and Saigon (1994).
Today, Neil and his
wife Susan, also a Pulitzer Prize-winning
author, live in Washington, D.C. Neil
Sheehan, an early critic of the Iraq War,
continues to write and speak on American
foreign policy. His latest book, A Fiery
Peace in a Cold War, tells the story of
Bernard Schriever, the Air Force general who
led the development of the United States'
intercontinental ballistic missile program.
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