Neil Sheehan

American · 1936 to 2021

Born Cornelius Mahoney Sheehan on October 27, 1936, on a dairy farm near Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Irish immigrant parents, Neil Sheehan grew up doing farm chores before school and later traced his reporter's patience back to that upbringing. He graduated from Mount Hermon School and then Harvard, earning a history degree in 1958, and served in the Army from 1959 to 1962, an assignment that took him to Korea and then Tokyo, where he moonlighted at the local bureau of United Press International and discovered he wanted to be a journalist rather than a soldier. Discharged in 1962, he went straight to Saigon as UPI's bureau chief and spent two years covering the earliest, most confused phase of the American war, including the Battle of Ap Bac and, with David Halberstam, the exposure of the Diem government's cover story about the Xa Loi Pagoda raids. He joined The New York Times in 1964, returned to Vietnam for another year, then covered the Pentagon and the White House through the escalation years of a war he had watched from its start. In March 1971, tipped off by contacts at the Institute for Policy Studies, he obtained the classified history of the war that became known as the Pentagon Papers, secretly photocopying thousands of pages with his wife's help before delivering them to his editors; the Times's publication of them produced the landmark Supreme Court case that curtailed the government's power to censor the press in advance. He left daily journalism in 1976 to write full time about John Paul Vann, the army officer whose disillusionment with the war had shaped Sheehan's own understanding of it, and spent sixteen years on the resulting book, sustained by fellowships and lecture fees. He married the writer Susan Margulies in 1965, and they had two daughters. He died at his home in Washington, D.C., on January 7, 2021, at eighty-four, after some years of declining health from Parkinson's disease.