Neil Sheehan

Journalist, The New York Times (Pulitzer Prize 1972), and Author (Pulitzer Prize 1989)

Spring 2012

Neil Sheehan graduated from Harvard where he was an editor of the Harvard Advocate literary magazine. After serving with the United States Army in Korea and Japan, he became a full-time reporter for United Press International and was soon put in charge of the Saigon bureau, covering the emerging conflict in Vietnam. Sheehan’s reporting from Vietnam won him a place with the New York Times. It made him deeply unpopular with the Pentagon and the State Department, but he was making an impact on public opinion at home. Returning to the U.S., Sheehan was assigned to cover the Pentagon and later the White House. In 1971, Sheehan obtained a confidential 47 volume history of United States-Vietnam tracing U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia from 1945. When the Times began to publish Sheehan's reports, including excerpts from the classified documents, the Nixon administration claimed the entire document was top secret and secured a court injunction barring the Times from publishing further excerpts or descriptions of the documents. Eventually, The Supreme Court, in The New York Times Co. v. United States, ruled that publication of the documents was not injurious to national security, but was in the public interest, protected by the First Amendment. The Times's edition of the Pentagon Papers became a national best-seller and won the paper the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Neil Sheehan received another Pulitzer Prize for A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), hailed by some as the greatest book ever written about the Vietnam war.

Today, Neil Sheehan and his wife Susan, also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, live in Washington, D.C. An early critic of the Iraq War, Sheehan continues to write and speak on American foreign policy. His latest book, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, tells the story of Bernard Schriever, the Air Force general who led the development of the United States' intercontinental ballistic missile program.

May 10, 2012, 6:30 p.m. A Unique Gift to Truth and Freedom: The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Location: HCA, Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais, Hauptstr. 120, Heidelberg

CURT UND HEIDEMARIE ENGELHORN PALAIS HAUPTSTRASSE 120 • 69117 HEIDELBERG • TEL. +49-6221-54 3710 • www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de