The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Neil Sheehan has died at the age of 84. He is perhaps best known for having told the story of The Pentagon Papers for The New York Times. These revealed the highly secret US history of decision making in the dreadful Vietnam War. They illustrated the decisions and strategies adopted by successive US administrations which substantially increased the war effort even as their own serious doubts about the possibility of success rapidly diminished. There is an utterly fascinating long article in The New York Times about the cloak and dagger story of how he obtained the Papers. He revealed all in a 4-hour 2015 interview which was embargoed until after his death.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/now-it-can-be-told-how-neil-sheehan-got-the-pentagon-papers.html

The NYT has a firewall, but by using google and his name you can access it.

As a war correspondent in the early days of the Vietnam War, he was fascinated by this first war where "people were dying for nothing". This led him to investigate the War in far greater detail. The result was "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam". This took him 15 years to write and won him the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. He decided to write about the war focussing on one charismatic lieutenant colonel. Vann was very confident the war could be won.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience in 2017 that he never understood the country's anger against the war until he read "A Bright Sining Lie" which showed him that all up the chain of command "people were just putting in gobbledygook information, and lives were being lost based on those lies and those distortions." But Kerry was a bit late. He should have read former Secretary of Defence Bob McNamara's mea culpa in his 1995 book "in Retrospect" where he writes, "We in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in the light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong."

"A Bright Shining Lie" is a wonderfully written expose that should serve as a lesson for future governments considering war to obtain its goals.  

Like in Afghanistan??

15 hours ago, PeterRS said:

"A Bright Shining Lie" is a wonderfully written expose that should serve as a lesson for future governments considering war to obtain its goals.  

it should but it will not as future bellicose governments will no doubt think ' this time is different" like their types always did throughout human history