REPORTER WHO OBTAINED PENTAGON PAPERS
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 Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 84.
Susan Sheehan, his wife, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
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.
Intense and driven, Sheehan arrived in Vietnam at age 25, a believer in the American mission. He left, four years later, disillusioned and anguished. 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.
Sheehan’s readiness to entertain the notion that Americans might have committed war crimes prompted Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had turned against the war, to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of American decision-making on Vietnam, to him in 1971.
At 7,000 pages, the leak was the largest disclosure of classified documents in American history up to that point. After the third day of The Times’ coverage, the Nixon administration got a temporary injunction blocking further publication. The Supreme Court’s ruling 17 days later allowing publication to resume has been seen as a statement that prior restraint on freedom of the press is rarely justified. The Times won a Pulitzer, for public service, for its coverage by
Sheehan and others.
Cornelius Mahoney Sheehan was born Oct. 27, 1936, in Holyoke, Mass., a son of Irish immigrants. His father, Cornelius Joseph Sheehan, was a dairy farmer, and his mother, Mary (O’Shea) Sheehan, was a homemaker.
Neil (his nickname from the time he was born) became a Harvard graduate and then joined the Army, becoming a journalist to get out of a job as a pay clerk in Korea.
He was one of a group of celebrated correspondents that included David Halberstam of The Times, who became his collaborator and friend. In 1964, The Times hired Sheehan.