Cornelius Mahoney Sheehan was an American journalist.
24 Facts About Neil Sheehan
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Neil Sheehan received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his 1988 book A Bright Shining Lie, about the life of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
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Neil Sheehan was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts on October 27,1936.
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Neil Sheehan's father, Cornelius Joseph Sheehan, worked as a dairy farmer; his mother, Mary, was a housewife.
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Neil Sheehan was raised on a dairy farm near Holyoke.
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Neil Sheehan served in the US Army from 1959 to 1962, when he was assigned to Korea and then transferred to Tokyo; there, he did work moonlighting in the Tokyo bureau of United Press International.
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Neil Sheehan was a correspondent on political, diplomatic, and military affairs.
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Neil Sheehan obtained the Pentagon Papers for the Times in 1971.
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In 1970, Neil Sheehan reviewed Conversations With Americans by Mark Lane in the New York Times Book Review.
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Neil Sheehan called the work a collection of Vietnam War crime stories with some obvious flaws which the author had not verified.
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Neil Sheehan called for more thorough and scholarly work to be done on the war crimes being committed in Vietnam.
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Neil Sheehan suggested that the conduct of the Vietnam War could be a crime against humanity and that senior US political and military leaders could be subject to trial.
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Neil Sheehan published his first book, The Arnheiter Affair, in 1972.
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Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, the subject of the book, proceeded to bring an action for libel against Neil Sheehan but was ultimately unsuccessful.
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Neil Sheehan then secured an unpaid leave from the Times to work on a book about John Paul Vann, a dramatic figure among American leaders in the early stages of the war in Vietnam.
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Two years later, in November 1974, Neil Sheehan was badly injured in a road accident on a snowy mountain road in western Maryland.
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When Neil Sheehan finished "three-fifths of the manuscript" in the summer of 1981, the initial advance was renegotiated and raised to $200,000 with a projected delivery date of 1983, while William Shawn of The New Yorker agreed to excerpt the finished manuscript and advance funds as needed.
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In 1990, Neil Sheehan received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
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Neil Sheehan released the book, After the War Was Over: Hanoi and Saigon, in 1992.
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Neil Sheehan published his last book, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, in 2009.
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Neil Sheehan was introduced to his wife, Susan Margulies, by fellow reporter Gay Talese.
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Neil Sheehan died on January 7,2021, at his home in Washington, DC He was 84, and suffered from complications of Parkinson's disease in the time leading up to his death.
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Neil Sheehan was portrayed by Jonas Chernick in The Pentagon Papers, and Justin Swain in The Post.
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Neil Sheehan appears as himself in Ken Burns' 2017 documentary series, The Vietnam War.