He learned only later, he wrote, that Mr. Sheehan he could make notes but not photocopy the documents. Sheehan and later gave him a key to the apartment in Cambridge, Mass., where he had stashed them. Ellsberg, who had copied the Pentagon Papers illicitly in the hope of hastening the end of the war, wrote in his 2002 memoir that he had offered them to Mr. “The more perspective we gain on our behavior, the uglier our conduct appears,” he wrote. Three months later, he concluded that there was no moral or legal difference between the killing of 25,000 noncombatants in the Philippines during World War II, for which the United States had tried and hanged a Japanese general, and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Vietnam. In The New York Times Book Review in December 1970, he wrote that the United States “desperately needs a sane and honest inquiry into the question of war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam.” Impassioned and haunted, he had what his wife later called “a quasi-religious streak.” By 1966, he wrote, the moral superiority that the United States had possessed after World War II had “given way to the amorality of great power politics.” He was one of the youngest and least experienced of a group of celebrated correspondents that included David Halberstam of The Times, who became his collaborator and friend. Transferred to Tokyo to put out the division newspaper, he moonlighted for United Press International, which hired him in 1962 and sent him to Saigon as a reporter, two weeks out of the Army, for $75 a week. He then joined the Army, becoming a journalist to get out of a job as a pay clerk in Korea.
GRIM DAWN HAUNTED STEEL FULL
He received full scholarships to both the Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts and Harvard, where he studied Middle Eastern history and graduated in 1958. Neil (his nickname from the time he was born) grew up on his family’s dairy farm outside Holyoke, attending Mass with his two brothers every Sunday at his mother’s insistence. His father, Cornelius Joseph Sheehan, was a dairy farmer, and his mother, Mary (O’Shea) Sheehan, was a homemaker. 27, 1936, in Holyoke, Mass., a son of Irish immigrants. He was, he said later, less obsessed than trapped.Ĭornelius Mahoney Sheehan was born on Oct. Impressed by Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” he labored to give his book - a combination of history and biography - the narrative drive of a novel.
His subjects, humanity and war, proved more complicated than even he had known.ĭisciplined and nocturnal, he worked regularly until 4 a.m. airstrikes, the Pentagon announced changes aimed at reducing risks to noncombatants in its military operations.īut he lost more than a year recovering from a head-on collision with a car that a young man was driving on the wrong side of a road. Civilian Harm: Following reports of civilian deaths from U.S.high schools were accused of sexually abusing their students. Sexual Abuse: Pentagon officials acknowledged that they had failed to adequately supervise the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, after dozens of military veterans who taught in U.S.A Culture of Brutality: The Navy SEALs’ punishing selection course has come under new scrutiny after a sailor’s death exposed illicit drug use and other problems.Rules on Drone Strikes : President Biden signed a classified policy limiting counterterrorism drone strikes outside conventional war zones, tightening rules that President Donald J.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. He left, four years later, disillusioned and anguished. Sheehan arrived in Vietnam at age 25, a believer in the American mission. 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.” 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. Susan Sheehan, his wife, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease. 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.
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