Cornelius Mahoney "Neil" Sheehan (born October 27, 1936) 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. This expose 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. [1]
He was awarded a non fiction Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for A Bright Shining Lie.
His wife, Susan Sheehan , was also awared a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
Books
- The Pentagon Papers as published by the New York Times, 1971
- The Arnheiter Affair, 1972
- A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, 1988
- After the War Was Over, 1992
