Neil Sheehan - 84 - Pentagon Papers reporter and historian of the Vietnam War

 Neil Sheehan, like Daniel Ellsberg and David Halberstam, was a young, idealistic Ivy Leaguer and reporter who like many others found himself in Vietnam.  He shared a Kennedyesque idealistic vision of Americans as anti-communist warriors.  There was little thought of an independent stance.  `We were Americans and we jumped on helicopters and reported on combat raids from the front lines' he then thought.  But like most honest observers he came to view the American war in Vietnam as A Bright Shining Lie - the title of the book he spent sixteen years writing.  Told through the vision of a young american warrior John Paul Vann it was the most powerful history of what we call the Vietnam War but what was in fact the Vietnamese war of national liberation.  Neil Sheehan died today at 84. - GWC

Neil Sheehan (UPI), David Halberstam (NY Times)

and Malcom Browne (AP) 1963

In addition to his wife, Mr. Sheehan is survived by two brothers, Patrick and Eugene; two daughters, Maria Sheehan and Catherine Sheehan Bruno; and two grandsons.

“Some days I wake up and I think, I’m not young anymore, I’ve got a bum knee, I’ll never be able to jump out of a helicopter again like I used to do in the Mekong Delta,” Mr. Sheehan was quoted as saying in an article by his wife, published the year after “A Bright Shining Lie” came out. “But then I think, ‘What the hell, age catches up with you whatever you do, and I’ve been lucky. I saw more of our daughters than most fathers do, and I wrote the book I wanted to write.’”

By Janny Scott

• Jan. 7, 2021Updated 6:20 p.m. ET
• Neil Sheehan - 84 - Pentagon Papers reporter and historian of the Vietnam War Neil Sheehan, the Vietnam War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who obtained the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times, leading the government for the first time in American history to get a judge to block publication of an article on grounds of national security, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 84.

Susan Sheehan, his wife, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Sheehan, who covered the war from 1962 to 1966 for United Press International and The Times, was also the author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” which won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1989. Reviewing it in the Times, Ronald Steel wrote, “If there is one book that captures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it.”

Intense and driven, Mr. Sheehan arrived in Vietnam at age 25, a believer in the American mission. He left, four years later, disillusioned and anguished. He later spent what he described as a grim and monastic 16 years on “A Bright Shining Lie,” in the hope that the book would move Americans finally to come to grips with the war.

“I simply cannot help worrying that, in the process of waging this war, we are corrupting ourselves,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1966. “I wonder, when I look at the bombed-out peasant hamlets, the orphans begging and stealing on the streets of Saigon and the women and children with napalm burns lying on the hospital cots, whether the United States or any nation has the right to inflict this suffering and degradation on another people for its own ends.”

Mr. Sheehan’s readiness to entertain the notion that Americans might have committed war crimes prompted Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had turned against the war, to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of American decision-making on Vietnam, to him in 1971. The papers revealed that successive administrations had expanded U.S. involvement in the war and intensified attacks on North Vietnam while obscuring their doubts about the likelihood of success.

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