"We had a military and political leadership at that period which was genuinely deluded." -- Neil Sheehan
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 in the Times revealed a secret U.S. Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and resulted in government attempts to halt publication. 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.
"Americans, particularly after World War II, tended to romanticize war because in World War II our cause was the cause of humanity, and our soldiers brought home glory and victory, and thank God that they did. But it led us to romanticize it to some extent.""At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.""I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.""I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.""I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.""Just because you put higher-octane gasoline in your car doesn't mean you can break the speed limit. The speed limit's still 65.""People talked to me in a way I think they would not have talked to somebody who hadn't shared the experience; they gave me their papers, they gave me their diaries. I found people constantly opening up to me. And I think they did because I had shared that experience with them.""The destruction of civilian hamlets, the killing and the wounding of civilians, became vastly greater than it had been before, and it was very upsetting; but I still couldn't bring myself to understand that the policy itself was wrong.""The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.""These men were wrongfully rejected, the veterans. The fighting man should never have been blamed for Vietnam.""We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans.""We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.""World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.""You remember all those phrases about how "these people" - Asians - don't value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese."
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, served in the U.S. Army from 1959 to 1962. In 1962 he began working at the United Press International's Tokyo bureau, and spent the next two years covering the war in Vietnam as UPI's bureau chief. In 1963, during the Buddhist crisis, he and David Halberstam debunked the claim by the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam regular forces had perpetrated the Xa Loi Pagoda raids, which the American authorities initially believed, and that instead, the Special Forces loyal to Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu had done so to frame the army generals.
In 1964, he joined The New York Times. He worked the city desk before returning to the Far East to report from 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. In 1971 he obtained the Pentagon Papers for the Times. He was a correspondent on political, diplomatic and military affairs.
In the New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1970 he claimed that Conversations With Americans by Mark Lane was 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.
He was awarded a non-fiction Pulitzer Prize in 1989 and a National Book Award for A Bright Shining Lie about the life of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement during the Vietnam War. (The book was published by Random House and edited by Robert Loomis.)
His wife, Susan Sheehan, also was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for Is There No Place On Earth For Me?
