A Bright Shining Life

Amid the focus on current events, it was easy to miss that journalism recently lost a significant figure, with the death of former New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan on Jan. 7 at age 84. Sheehan is best known for the Pentagon Papers and for his award-winning book, “A Bright Shining Lie,” both of which pulled back the curtain on U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

The Pentagon Papers were documents leaked in 1971 by former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg that detailed secret decision-making and military escalation in Vietnam, even as leaders grew increasingly doubtful about chances for victory. Sheehan’s book, which won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1989, was prompted by his work as a young reporter in Vietnam in the early and mid-1960s and later stateside for the Times.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the Pentagon Papers in modern journalism. They comprised 7,000 pages, the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history to that point. The Nixon administration got a temporary court order to halt publication after three days. But the Supreme Court ruled 17 days later that the Times, and other outlets such as the Washington Post, could continue publication, a decision that’s often viewed as a cornerstone of the rights of a free press.

How Sheehan obtained the documents and how the Times managed to publish them is a story in itself. He never spoke publicly about it and finally revealed it to a reporter in 2015, under the condition that it not be disclosed until after his death. The tale includes documents smuggled first out of government offices and then a private apartment, burned-out copy machines, suitcases full of documents strapped into their own airplane seat, teams of reporters and editors working feverishly in Washington D.C., and Manhattan hotel rooms, an increasingly fearful source, an increasingly anxious reporter, and terrified newspaper attorneys. And obviously, in the days before the Internet and electronic documentation, reams and reams of paper. Sheehan eventually disregarded Ellsberg’s instructions that he only take notes and not make copies of the report, smuggling thousands of pages from Ellsberg’s apartment to make copies. He had reasons for doing so and didn’t believe that he acted unethically or betrayed a confidence.

The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its work, though Sheehan has said that his life was turned upside down for six months after the Papers’ publication. He was investigated by federal law enforcement, and many days included conversations with investigators and lawyers.

If the Pentagon Papers consumed him for months, his book did so for years. At its center is a man named John Paul Vann, a complex, charismatic, often abrasive character and top-shelf military tactician who Sheehan knew and made the symbol of U.S. involvement in the war. Vann was a former Army lieutenant who served in Korea and then Vietnam before leaving the military. He eventually returned to the war effort and became the only civilian to lead combat operations. He believed the Vietnam war winnable, but disagreed with strategies and how the war was being conducted. He wasn’t bashful about sharing his thoughts with both superiors and reporters. He was killed in Vietnam in 1972 in a helicopter crash that some wonder was a hit job, since he routinely and publicly berated Vietnamese officials and commanders, an immense affront in most Asian cultures. His funeral in D.C. was attended by the upper echelon of American military and political power, as well as Sheehan, who made it the launch point of the book.

Sheehan spent five years researching Vann and another nine to write the book. His wife, writer Susan
Sheehan, joked that she might have committed hara-kiri if she had known how long it would take, and she wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine amusingly titled: “When Will the Book Be Done?” Sheehan’s opus is 861 pages and is considered one of the great wartime pieces of literature and scholarship. HBO adapted a decently-received movie of the book, with the underrated Bill Paxton as Vann. Former senator, Secretary of State and Vietnam vet John Kerry told the audience at a screening of Ken Burns’ documentary on the war that he never understood the level of anger and frustration about the war until he read “A Bright Shining Lie.” He learned that those conducting the war “were just putting in gobbledygook information, and lives were being lost based on those lies and those distortions.”

Debate is ongoing about classified information versus the public’s right to know. I’ll leave legal arguments to barristers in the audience and beyond, but it’s safe to say that Sheehan’s work helped pave the way for holding power to account, including current and future examinations of our experiment in venal authoritarianism and performative cruelty over the past four years.

Sheehan and Ellsberg had limited contact after the Papers’ stories published, but they ran into each other in New York months later. Sheehan recalled that Ellsberg said to him, “So you stole it like I did.” To which he replied, “No, Dan, I didn’t steal it and neither did you. Those papers are the property of the people of the United States. They paid for them with their national treasure and the blood of their sons, and they have a right to it.” Sheehan said in an award speech that publishing the Pentagon Papers was “to the American people, who had given to those who governed us 45,000 of our sons and $100 billion of their treasure, a small accounting of a debt that can never be repaid. … But if to report now be called theft, and if to publish now be called treason, then so be it. Let God give us the courage to commit more of the same.”