Neil Sheehan obit

Neil Sheehan: The Journalist Who Fixated on Exposing Vietnam

 He was not on the list.

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 United States Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and led to a U.S. Supreme Court case, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), which invalidated the United States government's use of a restraining order to halt publication.

Fifty years later, it is hard to remember how divisive and consuming the Vietnam War was in the spring of 1971, when more than 500,000 U.S. soldiers were fighting in that distant Southeast Asian country. That was the backdrop one day in April of that year, when I got called into the office of A.M. Rosenthal, the formidable managing editor of the New York Times. He started with a stark question: “Do you have any objection to working with classified government documents?”

All I could think to say was, “Well, Mr. Rosenthal, I guess if you don’t have any objection, then I don’t.” Good answer, he replied, before telling me Neil Sheehan had gotten hold of a top-secret government study of how the United States became involved in Vietnam. He told me to walk over to the New York Hilton Hotel, where the newspaper had just taken over a suite of rooms. Neil was there, Rosenthal told me, with the 7,000 pages of what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

Neil died this past January, half a century after doing as much as anyone to bring an end to the Vietnam war, a monumental achievement. He had first gone to Vietnam in 1962, as a young correspondent for United Press International soon after graduating from Harvard and a stint in the Army. Initially, he was a true believer in the American mission. But he became haunted by what he observed during four years in South Vietnam, feeling the United States had betrayed its cause through endless lies and large numbers of civilian casualties. He returned home with a passion, almost an obsession, to get Washington out.

At the Hilton, along with a small team of Times reporters, editors and researchers, I began plodding through the mass of documents Neil had obtained. There was one thing we were not allowed to know, and that was who the source of the leak was. But I did notice that at the bottom of several pages there was a handwritten name, Daniel Ellsberg, as if he was either the source or had helped write some of the material. It was a name I recognized, since I had been an Asian studies student at Harvard, and Ellsberg and Neil were both Harvard graduates, too.

But it wasn’t until after the Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, in June 1971, and Ellsberg’s subsequent public acknowledgment that he was Neil’s source that I learned this for sure. And it was only after Neil died this year that the Times ran a remarkable article by Janny Scott, based on a long-ago interview with Neil in which he admitted that he had secretly photocopied those 7,000 pages of classified government documents without Ellsberg’s permission. Ellsberg never “gave” him or the Times the papers, Neil said. Ellsberg told him he could read the material, but Neil then smuggled the papers out of an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ellsberg had stored them and took them to a local copy shop. Neil justified the deception by calculating that the value of making the material public outweighed the ruse.

It was the kind of risk-taking and duplicity that had characterized much of the American venture in Vietnam. Ellsberg himself had illicitly copied the whole Pentagon Papers trove in the first place, while working at RAND, in hopes of speeding up the end of the war, he wrote in his 2002 memoir. In his own account, Ellsberg said he had not learned what the Times was doing with the material until the day in 1971 when he picked up the paper in Harvard Square and saw the first installment of the series. But Ellsberg was delighted to see the play the story got and the public reaction. “There had been more attention than I could ever have dreamed,” he wrote in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

Although the war itself continued until 1975, the Pentagon Papers revelations, parts of which were published in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and other newspapers, marked a watershed in public opinion about Vietnam, contributing both to President Richard Nixon’s break-in at the Watergate and then to America’s military withdrawal.

Neil’s missionary-like quest to stop the war did not end there. A year later, he read about the death in a helicopter crash of the man who seemed to personify the American endeavor in Vietnam, John Paul Vann, whom Neil had earlier known and written about while he was a correspondent in Saigon. Vann had been a brilliant, fearless Army lieutenant colonel who at first had serious reservations about the way the war was being fought, leaked his doubts to journalists, then came back as the senior civilian leader directing the war in the Central Highlands and calling in B-52 bombing missions. Neil wanted to tell the whole story of Vietnam through Vann’s conflicted, contradictory life, and he had to go back to Vietnam himself to write that book.

Fate has a funny way of paying favors. My own “reward” from the Times after working on the Pentagon Papers was to be sent to Saigon. When Neil arrived to start researching his book, I found myself once again sharing an office with him. Initially, he thought the reporting would take a few months. But like the Vietnam War itself, it became all-consuming. All journalists in Vietnam talked about little else beyond the war, whether we were at the official daily news briefing in Saigon, derisively known as the Five O’Clock Follies, or out in the field embedded with American or South Vietnamese troops. The war had a way of intensifying everything. But Neil took this to another dimension. He seemed to agonize over his search for the real John Paul Vann, as if he were living in a perpetual argument about the facts of Vann’s life. Neil could sit in the Times bureau simply staring at his typewriter for hours.

I did not leave Vietnam until the final day of the war in April 1975, when I was evacuated by helicopter. Neil, however, continued working on the book for 16 years back in Washington, discovering that Vann had been born in the Navy port city of Norfolk, Va., to a mother who was a prostitute. This secret past, in Neil’s telling, drove Vann, leading him to sleep only a few hours a night and stay in poorly defended villages subject to Vietcong attacks; it also helped to spur Vann’s drive to win a war that he knew was unwinnable. Neil’s resulting book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, clocked in at 862 pages, and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Another of Neil’s discoveries was that during the two years Ellsberg was in Vietnam in the 1960s, his best friend was Vann, who became his mentor. Vann drove Ellsberg to villages with communist sympathies and explained that the local South Vietnamese officials were too corrupt to mount offensive operations. So, the war became, in the title of Neil’s resulting, prize-winning book, A Bright Shining Lie — the full extent of which the world would never know if not for Neil Sheehan.