Neil Sheehan, Pentagon Papers reporter, Vietnam author, dies
WASHINGTON » Neil Sheehan, a reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who broke the story of the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times and who chronicled the deception at the heart of the Vietnam War in his epic book about the conflict, died Thursday. He was 84.
Sheehan died of complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter, Catherine Sheehan Bruno.
His account of the Vietnam War, “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” took him 15 years to write. The 1988 book won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
Sheehan served as a war correspondent for United Press International and then the Times in the early days of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s. It was there that he developed a fascination with what he would call “our first war in vain” where “people were dying for nothing.”
As a national writer for the Times based in Washington, Sheehan was the first to obtain the Pentagon Papers, a massive history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam ordered up by the Defense Department. Daniel Ellsberg, a former consultant to the Defense Department who had previously leaked Vietnamrelated documents to Sheehan, had allowed the reporter to see them.
The Times’ reports, which began in June 1971, exposed widespread government deception about U.S. prospects for victory. Soon, The Washington Post also began publishing stories about the Pentagon Papers.
The documents looked in excruciating detail at the decisions and strategies of the war. And they told how involvement was built up steadily by political leaders and top military brass who were overconfident about U.S. prospects and deceptive about the accomplishments against the North Vietnamese.
Sheehan revealed in a 2015 interview with the Times, which first appeared Thursday because Sheehan asked that it not be published until after his death, that Ellsberg did not give him the Pentagon Papers as is widely believed. He had actually deceived his source and taken them after Ellsberg told him he could look at the papers but not have them.
Made “really quite angry” by what the papers revealed, Sheehan made up his mind “that this material is never again going in a government safe.”
Sheehan smuggled the documents out of the Massachusetts apa r tment where Ellsberg had stashed them, and illicitly copied
thousands of pages and took them to the Times.
Ellsberg would be blindsided when excerpts of the papers were published verbatim. But Sheehan said he feared that Ellsberg’s recklessness would ruin the project.
“You had to do what I did,” Sheehan said. “I had decided: ‘This guy is just impossible. You can’t leave it in his hands. It’s too important and it’s too dangerous.’”
Soon after the initial stories were published, the Nixon administration got an injunction arguing national security was at stake, and publication was stopped. The action started a heated debate about the First Amendment that quickly moved up to the Supreme Court. On June 30, 1971, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of allowing publication, and the Times and The Washington Post resumed publishing their stories.
The coverage won the Times the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
The Nixon administration tried to discredit Ellsberg after the documents’ release. Some of President Richard Nixon’s aides orchestrated a break-in at the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to find information that would discredit him.
When Sheehan and Ellsberg bumped into each other in Manhattan in 1971, Ellsberg accused Sheehan of stealing the papers, just as he had.