Neil Sheehan

A member of the “silent generation,” Neil Sheehan ’58 made a life out of making noise.

“The classes of the ’50s didn’t question anything,” the journalist said recently. “We believed all that rubbish about the Cold War. We were brought up on it.”

Sheehan earned The New York Times a Pulitzer Prize for his 1971 exposé of the Pentagon Papers, a secret report on the U.S. government’s policies in Vietnam.

For Sheehan, the Vietnam War and its aftermath would ultimately play a substantial role in his career and the way he viewed the world.

AN EPIC JOURNEY

Sheehan was not always on the road to becoming a journalist. An active member of the campus literary magazine, The Advocate, he originally concentrated in English with the hopes of entering the publishing industry.

But he began to question his academic focus after receiving an “A” in a course taught by comparative literature professor Harry T. Levin ’33, though he had attended only two lectures. After he was able to rely on generic literary terms to write an exam essay on a book he had not read, Sheehan said he decided it was time for something more challenging.

The change in concentration was at least partially influenced by Sheehan’s sophomore and junior year roommate in Claverly Hall, Reza Majd, who hailed from the Middle East. A combination of Majd’s influence and the strength of Harvard’s program led Sheehan to switch his concentration to Middle Eastern History after sophomore year.

Sheehan said he particularly enjoyed courses with engaging lectures, like Humanites 103: “The Great Age of Athens, ” co-taught by his House master in Eliot, classics professor John H. Finley Jr.

MR. SAIGON

After graduating in 1958, Sheehan signed up for a three-year stint in the U.S. Army and was shipped to Korea. He was given a job as a pay clerk, but then began to work as an army journalist. He was eventually transferred to Tokyo, where he reported for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Sheehan decided that he wanted to pursue journalism as a career and jumped onboard with the United Press International wire service in Tokyo.

A month into his time at UPI, he was transferred to the Saigon bureau.

It was there that he met former Crimson managing editor David L. Halberstam ’55, who was reporting for The New York Times.

“In those years, a wire reporter and a reporter who worked for a daily newspaper could team up because they weren’t competing,” Sheehan said.

In April 1964, Sheehan returned to the United States after being hired by The Times. It was at this time that he met his future wife Susan Margulies, a staff writer for The New Yorker who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for her book “Is There No Place On Earth For Me?”

After a brief post in Jakarta, Sheehan returned to Vietnam in 1965 to cover the war for The Times.

Top-ranking U.S. government officials wanted some journalists—including Sheehan—to be fired for their controversial coverage, he recalled.

“They denounced us reporters as wrong-headed, emotional young men,” Sheehan said. “There was a reputation that we were left-wingers or pinkos.”

But one of Sheehan’s extracurricular involvements as a Harvard undergraduate proved helpful in dismissing their threats.

Though his politics had since changed, Sheehan was more conservative in college and had been a member of the Harvard Republican Club.

“I was glad I joined the Republican Club because I knew they’d look into my background,” he said. “The Republican Club membership served me well in that regard.”

BREAKING THE SILENCE

While covering the war in Vietnam, Sheehan met Daniel Ellsberg ’52, a government official working for the RAND Corporation, who would later leak the Pentagon Papers to him.

According to Ellsberg, Sheehan had written two articles for The Times that suggested the possibility that war crimes had been committed in Vietnam. These articles were so impressive to Ellsberg who Sheehan was the first person who came to mind when he decided to give the papers to The Times in 1971.

“I thought a journalist that had that perspective and was sticking his neck out to suggest Americans had committed war crimes would have the guts to write about the Pentagon Papers,” Ellsberg said.

Ellsberg said Sheehan was essential in getting The Times to publish the documents, which earned the paper the most prestigious Pulitzer Prize, for public service.

When Sheehan left The New York Times in 1972 to focus on writing a book, he found it difficult to leave behind the conflict that had dominated his career.

“I spent my whole reportorial career up to that point covering Vietnam in Vietnam or the Washington end of Vietnam,” Sheehan said.

He wrote a book about the history of the war centered around the biography of Army Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann entitled “A Bright Shining Light,” which won him a Pulitzer Prize.

Reflecting on the Vietnam War, Sheehan said that he “did not want to leave that war behind with just another magazine or newspaper article.”

For the “silent generation,” the Vietnam War was eye-opening.

“It transformed my thinking and I think the thinking of my whole generation,” Sheehan said. “We believed in authority figures and what they told us. And it turned out they were wrong or lying to us.”

—Staff writer Lauren D. Kiel can be reached at lkiel@fas.harvard.edu.