Neil Sheehan - Life and Career

Life and Career

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts and raised on a farm nearby, 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. Sheehan relied heavily for information on Phạm Xuân Ẩn, 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 Ngô Đình Diệm regime that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam regular forces had perpetrated the Xá Lợi Pagoda raids, which U.S. authorities initially accepted. They showed instead that the raiders were Special Forces loyal to Diệm's brother, Nhu, and 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. The U.S. government tried to halt publication. The case, New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713), saw the Supreme Court reject the government's position, and become a landmark First Amendment decision. The 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.

In November 1974 Sheehan was badly injured in a two-car accident on a snowy mountain road in western Maryland, caused by an uninsured motorist whose driving behavior was arguably criminal in nature. Sheehan's wife, Susan, chronicled details of the accident and its emotional, legal and financial impact in the September 25, 1978 edition of The New Yorker (A Reporter at Large: "The Accident"). In addition to time and effort spent in 1974 fighting three libel suits in connection with a previous book, Sheehan's lengthy recovery from his injuries significantly delayed work on his book, begun in 1972, about John Paul Vann, a dramatic figure among American leaders in the early stages of the war in Vietnam.

Sheehan eventually completed the book, 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 and the National Book Award for Nonfiction.