A Bright Shining Lie
Neil Sheehan (1936–2021) was brought up in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard before a spell in the US Army in Korea and Japan. He spent several years working as a journalist in Saigon, covering the early stages of the conflict in Vietnam, before becoming the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times. During this time he obtained a leaked copy of the Pentagon Papers, highly classified material relating to the Vietnam War. The Times’s victory in a case brought by President Nixon attempting to halt publication of the Papers was a landmark in the history of free-speech protection in the United States. In 1972 Sheehan began work on a history of the Vietnam War told through a biography of John Paul Vann, which was eventually published as A Bright Shining Lie in 1988. The book was feted with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and was adapted as an HBO movie in 1998. Later Sheehan wrote After the War Was Over, based on a return visit to Vietnam at the end of the 1980s, and A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, about the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the US. He died in January 2021.
George Packer is a journalist and novelist who has been acclaimed for his work on US foreign policy, published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic. His books include The Assassins’ Gate (on the invasion of Iraq in 2003); The Unwinding (a study of a changing America since 1978; winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction); Our Man (a biography of the Clinton-era diplomat Richard Holbrooke; Pulitzer Prize finalist); and most recently Last Best Hope, an analysis of division in contemporary America, published in June 2021.