Cornelius Mahoney "Neil" Sheehan (born October 27, 1936 in Holyoke, Massachusetts) is an American journalist.
As a reporter for The New York Times in 1971, Sheehan obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. His series in
the Times revealed a secret U.S. Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and resulted in government attempts to halt publication. The
resulting case, New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713), saw the Supreme Court reject the government's position, and became a landmark
First Amendment decision. This exposé would earn The New York Times a Pulitzer Prize.
Born on a farm in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Sheehan graduated from Mount Hermon School (later Northfield Mount Hermon) and Harvard University
with a B.A. in 1958, served in the U.S. Army from 1959 to 1962. In 1962 he began working at the United Press International's Tokyo bureau, and
spent the next two years covering the war in Vietnam as UPI's bureau chief.
In 1964, he joined The New York Times. He worked the city desk before returning to the Far East to report from Indonesia and then to
spend another year in Vietnam. In the fall of 1966 he became the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent and in 1968 began reporting on the White House. In
1971 he obtained the Pentagon Papers for the Times. He was a correspondent on political, diplomatic and military affairs.
In The New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1970 he claimed that Conversations With Americans by Mark Lane was a collection
of Vietnam war crime stories with some obvious flaws which the author had not verified. Sheehan called for a more thorough and scholarly work to be done
on the war crimes being committed in Vietnam.
He was awarded a non-fiction Pulitzer Prize in 1989 and a National Book Award for A Bright Shining Lie about the life of Lieutenant Colonel John
Paul Vann and the United States involvement during the Vietnam War. (The book was published by Random House and edited by Robert Loomis.) His
wife, Susan Sheehan, also was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for Is There No Place On Earth For Me?
And Other Vietnam War Short Stories
http://www.vietnamwar.net
