Neil Sheehan

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Cornelius Mahoney "Neil" Sheehan (born October 27, 1936) is an American journalist. As a reporter for The New York Times in 1971, Sheehan obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. His series of articles revealed a secret U.S. Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and led to a U.S. Supreme Court case when the United States government attempted to halt publication.^{[citation needed]}

He received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his 1989 book A Bright Shining Lie, about the life of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

Life and career

Born on a farm in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Sheehan graduated from Mount Hermon School (later Northfield Mount Hermon) and Harvard University with a B.A. in 1958. He served in the U.S. Army from 1959 to 1962, when he was assigned to Korea, and then transferred to Tokyo, where he did work moonlighting in the Tokyo bureau of United Press International (UPI). After his stint in the army he spent two years covering the war in Vietnam as UPI's Saigon bureau chief.

Like many US journalists covering Vietnam, Sheehan relied heavily for information on Pham Xuan An, who was later revealed to be a North Vietnamese agent. In 1963, during the Buddhist crisis, he and David Halberstam debunked the claim by the Ngo Dinh Diem regime that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam regular forces had perpetrated the Xa Loi Pagoda raids, which American authorities initially accepted. They showed instead that the raiders were Special Forces loyal to Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, motivated to frame the army generals. In 1964 he joined The New York Times and worked the city desk for a while before returning to the Far East, first to Indonesia and then to spend another year in Vietnam.

In the fall of 1966 he became the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent and in 1968 began reporting on the White House. He was a correspondent on political, diplomatic and military affairs. In 1971 he obtained the Pentagon Papers for the Times.^{[citation needed]} The U.S. government tried to halt publication.^{[clarification needed]} The resulting case, New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713), saw the Supreme Court reject the government's position, and became a landmark First Amendment decision. This exposé would earn The New York Times a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1970 Sheehan reviewed Conversations With Americans by Mark Lane in the New York Times Book Review (December 27). He called the work a collection of Vietnam War crime stories with some obvious flaws which the author had not verified. Sheehan called for a more thorough and scholarly work to be done on the war crimes being committed in Vietnam.^[1]

Almost twenty years later he completed his own contribution, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988, published by Random House and edited by Robert Loomis). It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction^[2] and the National Book Award for Nonfiction.^[3]

Family

His wife Susan Sheehan won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1983 for Is There No Place On Earth For Me?^[2]

Books

• The Pentagon Papers as published by the New York Times (1971)
• The Arnheiter Affair (1972) — about Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, a U.S. Navy officer relieved of command in 1966
• A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988)
• After the War Was Over (1992)
• A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (2009)

References

External links

• Conversation with Neil Sheehan
• Neil Sheehan Papers at the Library of Congress
• Neil Sheehan at the Internet Movie Database
• David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan & The Vietnam War Writers at C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Sheehan, September 20, 2009
• Critical review of Sheehan and other Vietnam War historians and journalists