NEIL SHEEHAN: Well, there were a number of reasons. First of all, I, as a reporter, never could escape from Vietnam. I went there first, it was my first assignment in 1962 as a wire service reporter. I spent two years there, went back to New York, got a job with The New York Times and was sent back to Vietnam for a third year, came to Washington in '66 to cover the Pentagon with all the anti-war protests, etc. And then one day found myself at Arlington Cemetery at the funeral of a friend, John Vann, and realized that I wanted to leave something behind other than another magazine article or another newspaper story. And I felt that through him, I could write a book that would really tell a story of the war.

LAMB: So how long have you been working on this book?

SHEEHAN: It took me 15 years to write it and then it spent another year going to press. I was as impetuous as Robert McNamara in thinking, at the beginning, that I could do this work in three to four years, that is, write a biography of John Vann and a history of the war, which is what the book is. It's the two combined. Tell the story of the war through the man, and tell the story of the man through the war. But it turned out to be a vastly greater task than I had imagined. I also had some setbacks; I had an auto accident in '74 that took a year out of my life. And I had to lecture to earn a living and that sort of thing. But, basically, most of those 15 years went into that book.

LAMB: What's the origin of the title of the book, "A Bright Shining Lie"?

SHEEHAN: It was from a remark by John Vann. When he came back here in July of 1963, he said to a US Army historian, "We, too, were among -- had been among the --we, too, were, to all the visitors who came out there, among the bright, shining lies." And so I used that because he had said it and because, also, it, to me, reflected the many, many ironies of the war and the many, many illusions of the war. It was, to me, a very apt title because our venture in Vietnam was fueled by many, many illusions, and the title is meant to reflect those ironies. It's not a simple title, in other words.

LAMB: Who was John Paul Vann?

SHEEHAN: John Vann was the closest we came in Vietnam to an American Lawrence of Arabia. He was an extraordinary character -- at least to me he was an extraordinary figure. I met him when I first went there in 1962 as a young reporter on my first assignment for United Press International. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Army, and he was the senior adviser to the South Vietnamese infantry division in charge of the northern Mekong Delta. And he left the Army after that first year under controversial circumstances; he got into an argument with a commanding general as to whether we were losing the war or winning it. Vann said we were losing, and the commanding general said we were winning. Vann left the Army.

And then he went back as a pacification adviser, a civilian, for AID in '65. And he finally rose to be the first civilian to command troops in wartime as a general -- in a general officer's position. And then he was killed in June of '72 after the better part of 10 years there. And I went to his funeral at Arlington because he was a friend. And when I walked into the chapel, it was like going to a very strange class reunion. I got there only about 10 minutes before it started, and the chapel was already full. And this man had drawn together everyone -- or almost everyone who was of significance in that war -- that is, a great many of them.

I mean, here was William Westmoreland, who was the chief pallbearer of this former renegade lieutenant colonel who had retired from the Army in 1963. Daniel Ellsberg was over on the other side sitting next to the family. Edward Kennedy came in a few minutes before the service began. And I thought of the one Kennedy who had turned against the war, the second Kennedy -- the one Kennedy who had started us into Vietnam, John; and the second one, Bobby, who'd been murdered in the election, of course, of '68 after he turned against the war; and then Edward, who'd known John Vann.

And so I felt that you had to feel a keen feeling in that chapel that we were burying more than John Vann. We were burying a whole era -- that era of self-confidence, the mind-set of that era Henry Luce so boastfully called "the American century," the self-confidence and the arrogance, if you will, that had led us to Vietnam. We weren't burying the United States of America, obviously. We were burying a frame of mind, a mind-set that had marked this country. And it struck me that if I wrote a book about this man, who is an extraordinary character in his own and who had spent the better part of 10 years in Vietnam, who had summed up the American adventure there in his life and his work, I could also write a book about the war that people would understand because they would be seeing the war through a man, and they would be coming to grips with this experience in a human way because Vann was a way to tell the story.

LAMB: Open to the book where the picture -- and the audience just saw the picture of the Vann family and Richard Nixon. And the story about this particular event -- it's a little bit out of context with all that we're going to talk about, but it's probably worth telling now, as we head into this. First, who's in this photograph?

SHEEHAN: Well, here you have, over to the -- it would be, of course, my left, so let's go left to right. You have his oldest brother, Frank; his younger brother, Gene; his sister, Dorothy Lee; and then his son Jesse ...

LAMB: With the long hair.

SHEEHAN: With the long hair -- then. He's since cut his hair. But Jesse then had long hair, and he left half his draft card on his father's coffin, and he was going to give the other half to Richard Nixon, but he was stopped from doing it because he was told they were going to abort the ceremony. They weren't going to go forward with the medal ceremony if he insisted on giving the other half to the president. So he agreed not to.

LAMB: This is the day of the funeral.

SHEEHAN: This is the day of the funeral. This is the ceremony at the White House after the funeral at Arlington during which Nixon awarded posthumously to the eldest son the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

LAMB: This is his wife or his divorced wife.

SHEEHAN: His former wife, right. And then the next son, Tommy; then Peter, the youngest son, who's still got in his hand the flag from the coffin; Mary Jane, his former wife; and then President Nixon. And it's hard in that picture, because it's blown down, to see his face. But the president's got a kind of queasy, nervous look on his face. And I think he was still a bit nervous about what Jesse might do -- well, even though Jesse had agreed not to hand him half of this draft card. And then you have John Allen, the eldest son, who received the medal on behalf of the family. Nixon posthumously awarded John Vann the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian decoration you can receive and the second highest of all our awards. The highest is the Congressional Medal. Now down here is Melvin Laird, then the secretary of defense; and William Rogers.

It was an extraordinary picture because it summed up, in some ways, the conflicts of that era: a war hero with a son who was personally very much opposed to the war, opposed to it to the extent that he was willing to go to jail because Jesse would have gone to jail, or certainly he would have committed -- he had already committed one crime in mutilating his draft card. It was against the law to mutilate your draft card. And he was about to call enough attention to that by handing the other half to the president. So it was, to me, an extraordinary -- that was -- when I looked into this funeral, I didn't know that at the time. I'd gone to the chapel, obviously. This had occurred after the chapel when the family had gone to the White House. But later on when I interviewed them all, I realized that the funeral was more extraordinary for other reasons as well.

LAMB: Because our audience has seen Brent Scowcroft so often, tell us the Brent Scowcroft story and how he played a factor in this.

SHEEHAN: That was Brent Scowcroft, who's now a retired lieutenant general from the Air Force and who's associated with Henry Kissinger in New York in Kissinger Associates, and who later became President Ford's special assistant for national security affairs -- Brent Scowcroft was then President Nixon's senior military aide. And when they discovered that this young man had left half his draft card on his father's coffin -- and the family was waiting in the Roosevelt Room to go into the Oval Office for the ceremony, which the medal would be awarded -- and the young man had the other half in his suit coat pocket, and he was going to hand it to the president, they -- when this was discovered, at first there was a furious argument within the family because the other members of the family did not want Jesse -- most of them did not want Jesse to go to do this, to hand the president the other half of his draft card and they felt spoil his father's funeral and ruin the medal award ceremony. But they couldn't persuade him -- or hadn't succeeded in persuading him.

And so the eldest son, John Allen, went out and told one of the civilian officials in charge what was happening. And they called Scowcroft, and he told Scowcroft what was happening. And Scowcroft is a very calm man. He's a very calm, very precise man. And he went in and told the president that there'd be a slight delay. There was a problem. He'd have to settle it. And then he went into the Roosevelt Room where the family was gathering, and he called Jesse aside -- took him aside, took him by the arm and said, "Look, if you're going to do this, we're going to have to call off the ceremony, because there's no way we can go ahead with this ceremony if you're going to do this."

And by this time Jesse had been battered enough by the members of his family, so I think he was willing to resist -- excuse me, willing to listen. And he said, "OK, I won't do it." And then Scowcroft turned to his oldest brother, John Allen, and said, `Will he or won't he?" And John Allen said, "Well, if he says he won't do it, he won't do it." So Scowcroft decided to let the ceremony go forward. And he told me afterwards that during the ceremony, he had his eye -- he is not in this picture, of course. He was standing on the other side of the Oval Office with his eye on Jesse through the whole ceremony, asking himself, `Well, I wonder if he really will keep his word and won't do anything," because it was good judgment on the part of Scowcroft to let it go forward.

But at the same time there was some risk. And it was probably good judgment on the part of President Nixon to let it go forward. He was taking a risk, too. He could have been very embarrassed. And I think that's why he was somewhat nervous during the whole thing.

LAMB: This funeral was in 1972.

SHEEHAN: It was in 1972. And the picture you just showed was the ceremony at the White House after the funeral when the whole family was driven over to the White House from Arlington Cemetery for the awarding of the medal posthumously because President Nixon himself did not attend the funeral.

LAMB: What were you doing then?

SHEEHAN: I was then a reporter for The New York Times. I had, the year before, obtained the Pentagon Papers for The Times, and the intervening year had been one of turmoil. And I was just about to settle back into work, as a daily reporter, when I went to this funeral of a man who'd been my friend because I had gotten to know John, I thought, quite well. As a young reporter in that first year, I'd gone to Vietnam and I'd seen him since then. And I had not thought he would die in Vietnam. None of us did. He took so many risks that after a while his friends began to think he was that the odds, as he said, did not apply to him. And one day I picked up the paper and there was the news that he was dead. He died on the 9th. He was killed on the 9th.

And so I went to the funeral on the 16th, along with all those other people in that chapel. There were a lot of other faces of people involved with Vietnam who were not famous but who were well known. I ...

LAMB: Who gave the eulogy that day?

SHEEHAN: The eulogy was given by a guy named Robert Komer, Ambassador Robert Komer, who had headed the pacification program in Vietnam. And he gave a very good, very fine eulogy. He and Vann were friends. That was another thing that was so striking about it. Bob Komer had played a major role in Vietnam. Another one of the pallbearers was William Colby, who later became head of CIA who played a major role in Vietnam. The chapel was just filled with these people.

And so I had that sense then that if I wrote a book -- I had spent my career involved with Vietnam, not because I was obsessed with the war, but because I couldn't get away from the war. As I said, I was sent from Vietnam home in '66 to be the Pentagon correspondent in the Washington bureau of The Times. Then they sent me to the White House in 1968 for the last six months of Johnson's administration, when Johnson was driven from office by the war. Then came the Pentagon Papers in 1971. I could never get away from this war. It had dominated my newspaper career.

And I wanted to leave behind something that would endure. And going to that funeral gave me the feeling that -- well, gave me the idea that if I wrote a book about this man, I could really tell the story of this war and perhaps help this country to come to grips with the war, with this very painful experience that had divided us more profoundly than any war since the Civil War. And we had, obviously, not come to grips with it at that point, and I don't think we still have come to grips with it. I hope the book will help people to come to grips with it because I think we have to somehow redeem Vietnam if we're to draw wisdom from the war, but going to that chapel simply because I was the friend of John Vann was what set me off.

Now I thought I knew him. It turned out I didn't know him. He was a lot more complicated than I had realized. All of his friends thought that we -- they knew John Vann. Turned out that no one knew John Vann.

LAMB: Let me stop you there and ask you this because if you look at this book, and we'll show the audience, in the back, you've shown each division how you sourced it, but let's stop and just go through the particulars. Three hundred and fifty interviews?

SHEEHAN: Three hundred and eighty-five, almost 400.

LAMB: Individual, in-person interviews?

SHEEHAN: Yes. Some of them now were over the phone. Some of them -- a small number were brief exchanges over the phone or in-person or were letters. But many of them went on -- most of them were substantial, and many of them went on for days at a time. I think -- if you'll check, I think I acquired about 670 tape cassettes.

The reason I did so much interviewing for the book was that I realized when I began -- I realized before I started my research, but the experience of doing the research deepened my conviction, that much of the history of this war had never been written down, that it existed only in the minds of people, in their memories and perhaps, in some cases, notes and diaries they'd kept or letters. But that in most cases it hadn't been written down and that one of my tasks was to capture the history of the war before it disappeared, as people's memories faded, as they moved on, etc. And I thought a reporter was uniquely qualified to do that.

So I interviewed at such length because it was absolutely necessary. If you look at the documents of Vietnam, you find that, unlike World War II -- what you find in the official documents about Vietnam is the thinking of the people at the top -- they tell you what they thought, but they don't tell you the realities of what was happening on the ground because in Vietnam the people at the top didn't know what was happening on the ground. And so I interviewed as extensively as I did for that reason.

And it was very fruitful. A lot of people were terribly good to me. For instance, Ambassador Bunker -- the late Ambassador Bunker, when he was negotiating the Panama Canal treaty, would give me an hour every month or two, and I had 11 sessions with him. When I was in Vietnam on two research trips for the book in 1972 and '73, I'd spent days with people who were fruitful, somebody who was important, who was really telling me something that was useful. I'd spend two, three days with a person interviewing them and tape cassette after tape cassette. And it was extraordinarily valuable. I couldn't have written the book without the interviews. I had a lot of documentation as well. I had his papers. His family turned all of his papers over to me, and the documentation was extremely valuable, too. But the interviews were a real adjunct to it.

LAMB: What did you do with all those audiotapes? Did you keep them?

SHEEHAN: I've kept them, and they'll eventually go to the Library of Congress. Some of them will have to be sealed because there are some private things in there, but they'll all go to the Library of Congress. I didn't transcribe them all. I didn't have the money to do -- the funds to do that. I did get summaries made of them often with the subjects and, you know, side A -- tape 1, side A, footage X, X subject. And so years later, I put that tape in a machine and go back and listen to it. And it was very laborious to sit there and listen and spend two or three days taking the details off the tape because you don't have secretarial help; you've got to do this all yourself. But it was extraordinary valuable, because I don't take shorthand. And the tape recorder catches things that you don't even catch in shorthand. So they were a wonderful memory bank of events.

For instance, there's an extraordinary rescue of the advisers at a place called Tam Quan in 1972 by Vann when he snatches them right out from under the North Vietnamese tanks. I played the tapes I'd done with his helicopter pilot and with the senior adviser there, and I had made those tapes at a time when this event was very vivid in their memories -- with the senior adviser it was only months afterwards and with the pilot it was a couple of years afterwards. And the tapes were extraordinary. And they helped me to gather detail, if you will, to retain detail. The tape recorder is a wonderful memory device. It can be a trap for you if you depend on it, but I didn't depend on it; I used my notes primarily. But it was a wonderful memory device.

LAMB: When did you make your first interview, and when did you make your last in order to get this book done?

SHEEHAN: I did my first interviews with the American family shortly after the funeral when I was thinking of doing the book.

LAMB: His American family.

SHEEHAN: His American family. I should say the American family, because John Vann left two families. One was a Vietnamese family and the other an American family. And I interviewed the American family at the point when I was trying to make up my mind whether I ought to write the book or not. And I called them first. I spoke to his former wife, and I asked whether she would cooperate with me. I told her that if I undertook the book I would ask her to be absolutely honest with me and be absolutely open -- and the other members of the family as well, and that I would then write the book and they would have no control over it and they would not see it ahead of time. They would have no censorship, no prior approval, etc. And I did not want to undertake the project unless everyone was willing to agree to this, and I would also ask them to give me his papers. And I spoke to his oldest son as well; and I spoke to the other members of the family. I called them about this. And they all agreed, said yes; his wife -- or former wife -- was the first that said she'd cooperate; she was very open to having a book done.

So I went out to Colorado where most of them were, and I interviewed first his former wife, Mary Jane Vann, who knew him better than anyone else, because they had married when they were young and he had talked to her more about his childhood than he had to anyone else; and he was a product, as you know, of an extraordinarily painful childhood, of a mother who rejected him and who was cruel to him. And my interviews with her, first of all, lasted for days. She was absolutely honest with me. She's a woman of -- a strong woman of great moral courage. And she was very open, and I spent days talking to her. And she first came -- I first learned through her what a really complicated man he was, and he fascinated me even more as a result of those interviews. I realized that this was much more even than a story of Vietnam, that it was a kind of an American saga, if you will, the story of how he got to Vietnam as well.

LAMB: This is his mother and his wife right here.

SHEEHAN: That's right. That's a picture at the wedding, and that's his mother. And John Vann is a young man when he was an Air Corps -- a lieutenant and navigator in the US Army Air Corps in World War II, and that's his bride-to-be about -- that photo was probably taken the day before the wedding. And here they are at the wedding, in Rochester, New York, on October 6, 1945. That photograph -- those photographs were from Mary Jane, his former wife. She gave me her wedding album.

LAMB: Has she seen this book yet?

SHEEHAN: She hasn't seen the book; she's seen The New Yorker series. But she hasn't seen the book, but she'll be getting one soon in the mail from me.

LAMB: Has she had any reaction?

SHEEHAN: She liked the series in The New Yorker. She's, as I said, a very strong and a very honest and very forthright woman. And she had made up her mind that she was willing to tell the tale. This was back in '72 originally; and she's remained that way ever since. I mean ...

LAMB: We're going to talk about John Vann in some detail in a later discussion. But she was divorced from him at the funeral and went with the family to the Oval Office. Why?

SHEEHAN: Well, because I think if you were to put it emotionally, she was divorced from him in fact but not emotionally. I think at that point in her life she was probably still in love with him; I think she was. She told me she was, and I believe she was. The divorce had been an act of frustration. He ...

LAMB: She lived in Denver, and he lived in Vietnam.

SHEEHAN: Yes. As the readers will see when they read the book -- an extremely troubled marriage. And she had finally, out of frustration, asked for a divorce. But they had only been divorced about -- let's see, they divorced in October of '71 and he was killed in June of '72.

LAMB: OK, those are your first interviews. What were your last, and at what date did you finish all your interviews before you wrote this book?

SHEEHAN: I kept interviewing -- I did most of my interviews -- first of all, I rushed off to Vietnam after interviewing members of the family here.

LAMB: Back in '72.

SHEEHAN: Back in '72. I rushed off to Vietnam to do six -- three months of interviews there with the Americans and the Vietnamese who fought his last battles with him, before they moved on to other things and before that very fragile society of South Vietnam came apart, because I had a sense that it was going to disappear, as it did in 1975. So I wanted to talk to them before this happened.

And then I interviewed, except for the year I lost with the auto accident, I interviewed until about '76 when I started writing -- '75, '76 I began writing. But then I kept up the interviews. As I would get to a section and I would need to fill in, I would go to people -- additional people -- and I would interview for that section. And one of the reasons it took so long was that I discovered that this canvass -- first of all, this man was much more complicated than I had ever imagined. And that required a great deal more interviewing and a lot more research than I had ever thought.

And secondly, the war had gone on for 30 years, and it was a lot more complicated than I had imagined. So I kept up the interviewing through the years, not with the intensity I did in earlier years because I was writing, but as I got to a section, as I said, I would do a interviews to fill in those research holes; and sometimes they'd be extensive. Again, I'd take two or three days out and interview someone. So the interviews continued on through the years. As I would need something, I would turn to someone and I would do it. Although the basic interviewing was done in the 1970s.

LAMB: Is there a particular section of this book that's your favorite?

SHEEHAN: I guess my favorite would be the funeral itself which may be one reason being that it was the easiest to write. I wrote it back in 1976 and didn't ever change it substantially. The difficulty was in finding the structure of the rest of the book. I had an enormous struggle to come up with a structure that worked for the rest of the book, that is to meld the biography of this man and the history of the war. My favorite sections within the book then vary. Chapter 5 on his childhood and youth is, to me, a favorite section.

LAMB: We're talking with Neil Sheehan, author of this new book by Random House, "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam."

[Announcements]

LAMB: Neil Sheehan, author of the book, "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam," when you hear the word "Vietnam," what's the first thing that comes to mind?

SHEEHAN: The wasted gallantry, the sacrifice, in vain; provided, of course, we don't draw some wisdom from it, but the tragedy of it all is what comes to mind, the inevitability of it because it was a war toward which we were headed as a nation. There was a great inevitability about it. But all of those things come to my mind, the names on the wall down there at the memorial. The sadness always comes to mind. At the same time you have that it's even sadder because of all that gallantry that went into it, all that self-confidence and that was wasted.

LAMB: How old were you and when was the first time you set foot in the country?

SHEEHAN: Let's see, I was born in 1936, and I went there in 1962, so I was in my mid-20s. My mathematics is so poor that I can't add it up for you right now off the top of my head. But ...

LAMB: Twenty-six.

SHEEHAN: Yes, that's right, it would be. And it was my first assignment for United Press International. I'd just gotten out of the Army in Tokyo where I took my discharge -- was out of the Army two weeks when my boss, the head for Asia, left a note in my typewriter one night in Tokyo. It said, "How is your French? Come and see me in the morning." I was working the night shift. So I stayed over to see him when he came in in the morning. And he said, "How would you like to go to Saigon?" The fellow down there had resigned. And I said, "I'd love to go to Saigon." And he said, "Well, get ready to go." So about a week and a half later I was in Saigon. I spent two years there, two years in Vietnam.

LAMB: Is this a picture of you?

SHEEHAN: That's a picture of me with a South Vietnamese general named Zu Qui Tong. This is during my third year in Vietnam when I was there with for The New York Times. There was a minor civil war going on in Da Nang, which is a port up in the north where the Marines were located, between -- it was the civil war was between two factions on the Saigon side. And a group of reporters got trapped in Bogota. That picture of me, I was talking to that general trying to get the Saigon side to stop shooting so we could get those reporters out of that Bogota. And, actually, we were talking in French, which was the language that he knew best. He had served in the French army, and he was the commander of the Vietnamese Airborne Division.

LAMB: When you were first there, what was the status of our involvement in Vietnam?

SHEEHAN: When I first went there it was the outset of the what one would call the Kennedy commitment. John Kennedy had sent military advisers, pilots -- Air Force pilots who were flying planes with Vietnamese markings on them. And he had sent helicopter companies to fly Vietnamese troops into assault operations. But, essentially, the war was being fought through the Saigon army -- through the Saigon forces.

LAMB: Who was the president of the country?

SHEEHAN: Ngo Dinh Diem was still the president, and that was before we decided that -- the United States decided, not just the news media, that he was no longer useful, that he was helping to lose the war. And he was overthrown in an American-instigated coup in 1963. But he was still the president then, still very much in charge, was still with full backing of the United States. But the guerrillas because of his own abuses and incompetence -- the communist revolution in the countryside had grown to the point where his regime was in danger of being overthrown. That's why those American advisers had been sent. There were several thousand then. But it was the beginning then. Not many Americans had been killed. When I went there perhaps less than 20 had been killed.

LAMB: How many other reporters were there when you got there?

SHEEHAN: Very small number then.

LAMB: Do you remember any of them?

SHEEHAN: Oh, sure. Most of them have stayed friends of mine over the years. There were less than a dozen of us then. David Halberstam wasn't there when I first got there. There was a man named Homer Bigart, who was an older reporter, who was on his last foreign assignment. He was probably the most distinguished foreign correspondent of his time.

LAMB: Was he with Time magazine?

SHEEHAN: No. He was with The New York Times. He had worked before that for the Herald-Tribune. He had won two Pulitzer prizes.

LAMB: So you had two New York Times reporters in Saigon?

SHEEHAN: Well, no, he preceded David Halberstam. And then he left and David Halberstam came in September and was there for most of my subsequent time. Halberstam for The Times -- Malcolm Browne, who's now with The New York Times as a science writer.

LAMB: He was AP then?

SHEEHAN: He was AP. Peter Arnett, who's now with CNN, was also with the AP.

LAMB: Photographer.

SHEEHAN: No, he was a reporter. A man named Horst Faas, a German-born, photographer who worked for the UPI in Africa, who covered the revolution and the turmoil in the Belgian Congo, which is now Zaire, shortly became the photographer for the AP and won two Pulitzers in Vietnam. He's now in London. There's a fellow named John Sharkey, who was with NBC. And then some well-known outsiders would come in -- outsiders in the sense that they weren't based in the country but they frequently came through: Bernie Kalb with NBC; Peter Kalishew who's now retired with CBS; a good friend of mine named Charlie Moore, who was then the chief correspondent for Time. But the resident correspondents were a small group, less than a dozen, and though we competed with each other quite intensely, we were friends.

LAMB: And you were UPI.

SHEEHAN: And I was UPI, right.

LAMB: How much did your editors back here in the United States at that point care about this story?

SHEEHAN: The story really was a secondary story during my first six months there. The country was focused on other foreign policy crises: Cuba, Berlin. Those were the main focuses. People hadn't really understood that there was that we had gone to war in Vietnam -- that John Kennedy had committed the arms of the United States and he'd begun to spill American blood and he had planted the flag. They didn't really understand that.

Malcolm Browne of the AP, in fact, one day got a letter addressed to him; it was Saigon French Indonesia rather than Saigon French Indochina. It wasn't until the Battle of Ap Bac in January 1963 which a full section is devoted in this book -- and you asked me about favorite sections earlier. That's one of my favorite sections, if you will, because it's a battle and I identify with soldiers having spent so much time around them. It wasn't until the Battle of Ap Bac in January '63 when the Saigon forces were defeated in a very decisive way by a small group of guerrillas, humiliated, if you will. This American-backed Army with its armor and its artillery and its aircraft was defeated by a battalion of guerrillas in a battle that was a fiasco on our side. That, in effect, illuminated the war. It caught headlines in this country and got on television, although print was much more important television is now. Television was coming into its own. And that began to think after that, the country began -- January of 1963, the country began to realize that we were involved in a war in Vietnam.

And then, of course, came the Buddhist, that is the Buddhist revolt against Diem and burning of the Monks, the suicides by the Monks and then the overthrow of Diem and the war continually worsening. From about January '63 forward, people began to understand that we were really involved in a major crisis and it began to dominate the news.

LAMB: For somebody that might get your book, which is published by Random House, what style did you use to write this story? I know that in the back you have each section, the sources and the material and all that stuff, but is it a narrative?

SHEEHAN: I deliberately wrote this book for the general reader because I wanted to try to write a book that would help people to come to grips with this war. And so this book is deliberately written with what I hope is a powerful narrative, a driving narrative, that retains suspense and narrative force. I felt that that was the way a reporter ought to write a book; that is the kind of training a journalist gets. And I was influenced in my writing very much by Truman Capote's book "In Cold Blood." I read that when it was published first in The New Yorker and then in book form. And he made me realize that you could write a book about real events with a book that would have the narrative drive of a novel and yet would be about real events which are often much more interesting than those that appear in a novel. And certainly it's true, at least, I think, in the case of Vietnam.

Now it's much more difficult to write that way and to retain truth and to retain subtlety and to retain all of the complexity that you want. And I was writing a biography of a very complicated character and a history of a very long war. But it's written deliberately with what I hope is narrative drive because I wanted people to read this book. I did not want to write a scholarly book. It would have been easier to do -- scholarly in a sense of form, with footnotes, etc. There are no footnotes in the book. Those notes you mentioned, of course, are source notes at the back because I wanted to give full documentation for what I had written. But I deliberately kept it to source notes at the back because I did not want anything to get in the reader's way. And as I said, it made it much more difficult to write. But I hope it was worth it.

LAMB: One of the things I noticed in the bibliography when you referred to "things to write" -- I think if I can find it here -- no, maybe it's not the bibliography. Someplace in here, I saw the name Susan Sheehan. Any relation?

SHEEHAN: Yes, of course; Susan is my wife.

LAMB: What was it I saw back here? Something that you ...

SHEEHAN: You saw in the acknowledgements a tribute to Susan. I'm surprised ...

LAMB: No, I saw that, but there was some other place, where I ...

SHEEHAN: The book is dedicated to her and to my daughters and to my mother and mother-in-law. And then you probably saw in the acknowledgments that Susan had read all the drafts and edited them and typed some of them. Susan was a staff writer for The New Yorker when we met in 1964 and Susan won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for nonfiction for a book called, "Is There No Place on Earth for Me?" It's a study of mental health and schizophrenia. And she has always edited my stuff and I've always edited hers.

LAMB: Who's Kitty?

SHEEHAN: Kitty is my mother-in-law, who's been a wonderful person to me. And so the book was dedicated to Susan and our two daughters, Maria and Catherine, and to my mother and Kitty, Susan's mother. But Susan and I have always worked with each other. I mean we've always edited each other's material, encouraged each other, and, I think, edited each other's material honestly and critiqued each other's work
honestly.

LAMB: Let me read something that I saw when I read part of the book and I wrote down something that you wrote. It's a philosophical statement. You said that "By the second decade after World War II the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination and moral and intellectual insensitivity."

SHEEHAN: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Let me read just a little more. "And it also touched the civilian bureaucracies, the CIA, the State Department and the lesser civilian agencies, that join the armed services in managing American overseas interests for the president. The attitudes had spread as well to the greater part of the political, academic and business leadership of the United States." Do you want to expound on that a little more?

SHEEHAN: Sure. One of the reasons we went to Vietnam in all of our self-confidence and all of our ignorance, if you will, was the enormous success this country had in World War II -- the great miracle of World War II, the great moral crusade that it was, and the economic success that followed World War II led to a kind of moral torpor, an intellectual torpor. Americans ceased to think imaginatively. The American generals in Vietnam thought they'd prevail simply because they were American generals. They'd ceased to realize that you could lose a war.

The American civilian leadership assumed that because its generals had four stars and said they knew what they were talking about, that they really did know what they were talking about. What had happened to us was that we had a process that happened to European countries, but that had never happened to the United States before -- is that we had gone through that historical process of becoming a great power. And as a result of it, our leadership had become arrogant and self-satisfied and unthinking. This is a process which has happened to other countries. It happened to the Europeans prior to World War I and led to that enormous tragedy that began in 1914. And this same kind of thinking led us to Vietnam. And for us, Vietnam was a kind of mini-World War I. It was an experience of great pain and great disillusionment. I hope it'll be an experience from which we'll draw wisdom.

But prior to Vietnam, the American leadership of that period, and Americans in general, assumed that we were an exception to history; that your leadership couldn't become so self-confident that it would become filled with it, that it would be driven by illusions; that your industries -- and we're having this problem, obviously, when your industrial management could become so self-satisfied that it would lose its competitive edge. And so those sentences you read are meant to sum up the mentality of the leadership that took us to war in Vietnam, the mentality of generals who thought they were going to win, as I said, simply because they were American generals with four stars on their shoulders.

Our leadership in World War II was quite different than that. They were very keenly conscious of the fact that they could lose because they were little men going up against big men. We've forgotten that since. But we were the little men in World War II going up against these big, professional Germans who were the world champions. And Eisenhower and Patton, etc., were very conscious of the fact that they could lose, and that's one of the reasons they were such fine, fine, fine generals. And very conscious of the fact that you could not waste soldiers; that the soldier would sense this right away and he wouldn't follow you. Patton was so effective because he was a winner, and but also because he was conscious of losing. That he could lose.

By Vietnam, our generals had ceased to be conscious of that, and so they lost their grip on reality. What's one of the most striking things about the war in Vietnam is that it's fought with a total sense of unreality, of illusion. And what's ironic about it -- and I don't want to go on too long. But what you see when you read this book is that anyone who challenged this system, and you have a series of figures who first of all, you have John Vann, who says, "We're losing the war in Vietnam." This is 1962-'63.

LAMB: Who is he telling that to?

SHEEHAN: He was telling that to his superiors -- General Harkins, who was the commanding general. He went back to the Pentagon and tried to tell it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Maxwell Taylor canceled his briefing -- his scheduled briefing.

LAMB: What year was that?

SHEEHAN: '63. The reporters were reporting it. We assumed that if you ...

LAMB: Let me just show the audience this photo and tell us who this is so ...

SHEEHAN: That's General Harkins here, who is the commanding general in Vietnam in '62-'63, and next to him is General Wheeler, the late General Wheeler, who was, at that time, chief of staff of the Army when that photo was taken in '63 and later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

LAMB: General Harkins was the top man ...

SHEEHAN: He was the top man in Vietnam in '62-'63.

LAMB: Vietnam. And John Paul Vann at that time was what?

SHEEHAN: Was a lieutenant colonel and the adviser to the Vietnamese division in the northern Mekong Delta. And Vann said we were losing the war. And he had good reasons why, and he wasn't the only one who said we were losing the war. Most of the advisers in the field were convinced that we were losing. But General Harkins wouldn't listen to them. We thought, at the time that, the reporters thought, that General Harkins was so optimistic because he felt that he ought to put the best face on things. We thought he had some sort of a grip on it. We thought that, privately, he had a grip on reality; that he had some understanding of what was going on.

In fact, when I got at the secret records later on, the records of the internal discussions, the strategy conferences in Honolulu with Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense and General Harkins and the rest of the military hierarchy assembled, I realized that these men believed these illusions. They really thought they were winning the war. Because here was a top-secret conference, which I hadn't seen before -- the records of it and they were spouting these same illusions that they were giving us in press conferences, which we regarded as an insult to our intelligence, because we were young reporters were going out into the field, seeing what was happening, talking to advisers like Vann. Vann happened to be the most brilliant of the advisers, and the most outspoken. But the others were also speaking to us. And we thought that these factually optimistic remarks by General Harkins were simply an attempt to fob us off. It turned out that he believed these illusions.

And it was striking that then, after the Kennedy -- excuse me, the advisory phase of the war that President Kennedy started, failed and then they had to send the American Army and the Marine Corps to Vietnam to prevent the Saigon regime from collapsing, Westmoreland began to acquire the same set of illusions, despite his own experience at watching Harkins. Westmoreland was then fueled by the same illusions. And anyone who challenged these was crushed. First, you see Vann attempting to challenge it and his briefing for the joint chiefs is canceled by Maxwell Taylor, who did not want to hear bad news. He was convinced he was winning the war. And they ...

LAMB: Let's go back to that for sure. The John Paul Vann briefing was to take place where?

SHEEHAN: July 1963. This is very early on.

LAMB: In Vietnam?

SHEEHAN: No, by this time, he was back in this country. He'd finished his first year in Vietnam. And he had decided to carry on a crusade at the Pentagon to convince the military leadership of the country that we were losing the war in Vietnam and that if we did not change policy we would lose it. And he started out -- first he asked to -- they had a program at the Pentagon to allegedly learn lessons from Vietnam by interviewing returned advisers. It's called "debriefing" in military slang. He went to the debriefing officer and asked to be debriefed, and he was informed that he was not going to be debriefed at the request of the commanding general in Saigon.

So he went off and started briefing himself. And he gradually worked his way up from his own section to where he was talking to generals in the Pentagon; and he finally encountered a general who thought he really had something to say, and that was a man named Harold Johnson, who subsequently became chief of staff of the Army. And Johnson, through another senior general, had a briefing scheduled for the joint chiefs, which Vann was going to present his case. Essentially, the briefing said that we were losing the war and everything General Harkins said was an illusion. And Maxwell Taylor, who had put Harkins into Vietnam, persuaded Kennedy to appoint him the commanding general in Vietnam. General Harkins was one of General Taylor's proteges. General Taylor had enormous influence on the Army leadership of that period. And many of the figures who dominated the Army were proteges of General Taylor. And he canceled the briefing. He had the briefing canceled.

LAMB: At that time, the Secretary of Defense was Robert McNamara.

SHEEHAN: Right.

LAMB: Secretary of State was Dean Rusk.

SHEEHAN: Right. And the president was still John Kennedy. And ...

LAMB: What did those three men feel about this effort in Vietnam at that point?

SHEEHAN: They thought, again, that they had the situation under control.

LAMB: Was John Paul Vann the lone voice at that point?

SHEEHAN: He was the lone -- if you will, he was the most outspoken dissenter within the system at that point, but he wasn't the lone voice because what he was saying inside you could read in print in the news columns because the advisers were talking to us.

Let me back up for one moment. There's a considerable misimpression about the role of the press in Vietnam all along and particularly in this early period. The reporters who went to Vietnam early on, like myself, were not anti-war dissenters. We were very much in favor of American intervention in Vietnam. We had the same set of illusions everyone else did. What we felt was our duty -- we felt our duty was to report the truth, so that the president would know what was happening in Vietnam -- the president and the rest of the leadership -- and win the war. And the advisers in the field, like John Vann, told us, "Look, this isn't working. The policy isn't working. We're losing. And here's why." And we were writing these stories and they were being denounced.

LAMB: Let me ask you about the statement you made earlier about John Paul Vann. You said he was brilliant.

SHEEHAN: Yes, he was a brilliant soldier.

LAMB: How did you determine who was brilliant and who wasn't?

SHEEHAN: Well, by comparing him with his contemporaries. He stood out among the field advisers then. You've got to remember, this was a small war effort in '62-'63. There were perhaps 3,500 advisers out in the field. And we got to know a lot of these men because we spent most of our time in the field.

LAMB: You went right out in the middle of the battles.

SHEEHAN: We went out and got on a helicopter and we'd spend days walking with ARVN battalions. So ...

LAMB: Any restrictions on you at that point?

SHEEHAN: No restrictions, really. There were restrictions at the beginning. The Kennedy administration, at first, would not let us go out in operations, but then they lifted the restrictions and let us go.

There was pressure on the advisers to get us to write optimistic stories, but once you got out on the field, that was abandoned. These men were young captains and majors and lieutenant colonels, and they weren't about to try to hide the truth from us. In fact, they discovered that we were the only people who would listen to them. The commanding general in Saigon wouldn't listen to them when they told him things weren't working, that the South Vietnamese army wouldn't fight, that the Diem regime was deliberately holding it back from fighting, that they wouldn't take on the Communist guerrillas. Because Diem wanted to preserve his army as a force in being to preserve his regime. The Americans thought of the army, the South Vietnamese army, as a force with which to fight the Communists. Diem saw it as a force to keep him in power. And so he had a secret order out to his commanders not to take casualties. And the advisers couldn't get them to tangle with the guerrillas, and they would tell us this. And so we were reporting this, because we thought that if we got the facts out, that someone in authority back here would listen.

LAMB: Was anybody reading what you were writing back here?

SHEEHAN: They were reading it and they were denouncing it. I mean, General Harkins was and the ambassador were denouncing what we were saying.

LAMB: Anybody in Congress reading it and responding?

SHEEHAN: Some of them were raising doubts.

LAMB: Remember who they were?

SHEEHAN: Well, it started out with people; many of them began to use it for their own purposes, because they turned against the war. It would -- I can't remember the Congressman in '62-'60 -- well, let me give you an example -- Mike Mansfield, who was Senate majority leader. Mansfield came out on, and Mansfield was one of those who had been an original backer of Diem. And Mike Mansfield came out and he's hardly a radical ...

LAMB: Current ambassador to Japan.

SHEEHAN: Right. And he was then Senate majority leader. And he came out on a trip and he decided that the reporters were reflecting what the advisers in the field were saying, and that what the American ambassador and the commanding general was saying were not correct. And he handed in a report to President Kennedy to this effect and it didn't change things.

LAMB: When you sat down to write this book, some 15 years ago, and you said it has taken you 15 years to complete it, who did you have in mind to read it? What would make you the most happy if what kind of person read this book?

SHEEHAN: I would be most happiest, I guess, I would be most pleased if the veterans read it because it was their war. But also it was the war of a lot of other people in this country: the mothers and fathers who sent their sons off, the sisters and wives and others who knew them. I would hope that the cadets would read it. I would be most pleased if young people, like my daughters, for whom Vietnam is history, would read it. And that it would bring a wisdom to them that an earlier generation didn't have.

LAMB: We're talking with Neil Sheehan, author of "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam," published by Random House.

[Announcements]

LAMB: Neil Sheehan, author of "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam." What role did the press play in the war?

SHEEHAN: At the beginning, I suspect the press helped us to go to war in Vietnam. The press was in the news media of this country, in my opinion, tend to be quite conventional. They reflect conventional ideas. They are not the cabal of liberal plotters that the right wing would have us believe, at least, that thesis doesn't stand up to reality in my experience.

In the beginning, you have -- first of all, let's take myself and the small group of reporters in Saigon. We were objecting to the way the war was being fought, because the advisers in the field, the military advisers in the field, were telling us that it was being lost. But our objective was to help the country win the war. We thought it our duty to report the truth so that we could win. If you take the press back here, they were, by and large, accepting what the Kennedy administration was saying, and then, later on, what President Johnson was saying.

I'll give you a very good example of it: the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 1964. That was a wonderful case of news management, where the administration had inadvertently provoked a clash between the North Vietnamese torpedo boats and our destroyers. They announced that the attack had been unprovoked, even though they knew at that point they had inadvertently provoked it. No one in the news media questioned their version of events. And the Tonkin Gulf resolution sailed right through the Senate. In fact, it was sponsored by Senator Fulbright, who also didn't question it at that point.

And if you watch Walter Cronkite -- if you watched the recordings of "CBS Evening News," Walter Cronkite sounds like a Pentagon spokesman in 1965 and 1966 -- and hope I'm not making Mr. Cronkite angry by saying this. But he's essentially repeating in an enthusiastic way what he's being told. It is only after 1968, after Tet '68 -- the Communist Tet offensive of '68, which disillusioned the general public -- that you find an anti-war bias coming into the news media in general. You find figures like Cronkite really questioning the war. And that was crushed again by Agnew and Nixon in '69 and '70 with their attacks on the press. And you don't find it really asserting itself again until '72 when the country begins to absolutely get fed up with the whole thing and there's another crisis in Vietnam.

So the role of the media initially was, I think, to help us get in and that they reinforced what the administration was trying to do. And then, you do, I think, find the media reinforcing the course of getting out of Vietnam, which was inevitable in any case, because we had lost the war by Tet, '68. And the television reporting and news reporting reinforces that impression by reflecting. But it was reflective of reality. I do not think the media got us out of Vietnam a lot sooner. In fact, Nixon was able to persist in the face of an unpopular war. I think they did help finally to get us out, yeah, but they were not a controlling factor. The news media were a contributing factor. I don't think they ever are a controlling factor.

LAMB: Fellow that I knew who is now deceased worked for a major network, used to tell the story that in order for him to get his film at that time on the evening news, he would leak a story to a print reporter in Vietnam so that by the time the film got back on an airplane, his editors in New York would feel like they could put it on because it had already been news. Did you ever find people, when you were with The New York Times or even UPI, using that as a legitimate reason to continue publishing any story of any kind?

SHEEHAN: With the print media, we tended to fuel each other only by competition. If somebody got a story that somebody else didn't have, of course, then your boss wanted to know why you didn't have it. But I found that, in that period of time, and that's early, when print was still much more powerful than it is now -- I did find, often, that television was driven by print, yes. Television editors, the senior people in New York, would look at the front page of The New York Times and if The New York Times was running the story prominently, they wanted it. Yes, television
people told me that. I was frequently told that.

And, of course, the wire services played a major role then, too, because a lot of papers did not have foreign correspondents. And if the wire services were running a story in a strong way, yes, then it certainly did affect television coverage. Because I think it gave the television reporters told me it gave their editors confidence that this is what we ought to be running on our evening news show, etc., and our morning news show. I think print did affect television much more then than it probably does now.

But, again, I do want to say that -- let's take the converse of the myth that the media lost the war for us in Vietnam, that if it weren't for all of this bad news reporting, we would have won. Let's take the converse of that. Let's say that the print reporters had written nothing but optimistic stories. The sort of thing that would come that would please the Pentagon as a press release. Let's say that television suppressed all of those ugly pictures of bodies, of burning houses. Let's say they even suppressed gaffs like General Westmoreland giving a press conference at the American embassy in Saigon with the bodies of the Viet Cong sappers who had penetrated the compound littering the place right after they'd announced that 67 percent of the population was living under American security, etc.

I think the result would have been that the American public would have ceased to believe its own media. Because this is what's happened in other countries. This is what -- we would have ended up with it prior to Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost. People in the Soviet Union don't -- didn't believe what they read in their own newspapers or saw on their own television. And this has happened before. In World War I, the British and French and German press almost universally lied about what was happening in the trenches. And their own public, and particularly, their own soldiers, ceased to believe what they were reading, because they knew it was lies. The word gets back. And so I think the war in Vietnam would have ended as it did without the news media. The news media hastened us in and hastened us out, but they didn't effect -- they didn't determine the outcome.

LAMB: In your 860-page book, "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam," obviously, John Paul Vann plays a major role. The purpose of our discussion right now -- I want to talk about how John Paul Vann used you or how you used him or better put, maybe, the interaction of the two. How did you all come to get so close to one another? And not just you, but the rest of the press?

SHEEHAN: Well, in the beginning, the press corps was very small; there was less than a dozen of us. And the main action was occurring in the northern Mekong Delta, right south of Saigon. Because that area had not yet fallen to the Communist guerrillas. And Vann was the senior adviser to the Vietnamese division that was assigned responsibility for the whole of the northern Delta. So it was, and reporters follow a story. It was natural that we would go down and cover events that were occurring in the 7th Division area. And when we discovered that this senior adviser to the division there was an extremely bright lieutenant colonel ...

LAMB: This fellow right here in the middle.

SHEEHAN: That's right.

LAMB: That's Daniel Ellsberg standing on his left.

SHEEHAN: That's right. That's Daniel Ellsberg over on John Vann's left holding a carbine. That's the fall of 1965 when Vann had gone back to Vietnam as a civilian in the Pacification program and was Pacification adviser in a very insecure province outs west, just west of Saigon where that picture's being taken.

Dan Ellsberg had just come over there as a member of General Edward Lansdale's team. And he'd gone out to Hoai Nhon to travel around the province with John Vann. And that's when the beginning of their friendship occurred.

LAMB: OK. I didn't mean to interrupt, but I wanted the audience to see what John Paul Vann looked like and you were starting to talk about how you got to know John Paul Vann.

SHEEHAN: But the reporters went down to his area to cover the war because that's where the real action was occurring. As I said, reporters cover a story, or follow a story, and that's where the action was. And we discovered that this man, who was the senior adviser, this lieutenant colonel who was the senior advisor to this division, was an extremely bright man who very quickly came to understand the realities of the war to the extent an American could understand it in that period of time. He could analyze it with much more precision than anyone else, and he began to teach us an awful lot about what was happening in Vietnam. And it made sense because -- let me give you an example.

The ordinary adviser would say to you, "We're losing a lot of weapons through the outpost." We're supplying the South Vietnamese militia in the outposts, the guerrillas come along and they overrun the outpost and capture the American weapons. John Vann had gone around and made a study of exactly how many outposts there were in his area and exactly how many weapons were flowing through them. And he would sit you down and say, "Now look, if we continue to supply the South Vietnamese militia at this rate, with 700-plus outposts in my area, we're going to start pumping an enormous number of weapons, thousands of weapons into the Communist guerrillas. And we're going to end up with an enemy who's far more powerful, that's far more better armed than the guerrillas we face now who are using these old French weapons from the French-Indo China War. This country that is the United States -- we, the United States of America, are arming our enemy and giving them far better weapons than they already have and we're going to change the war we're fighting. We're creating a monster here."

John could do that sort of thing. He had those insights. And so we were drawn to him. And also he was a very fearless man, physically fearless man. He was always out in the field. And he had great charisma to him. And you're drawn to a person like that.

LAMB: What was the attitude of General Harkins at that point? Could you go see him? And would he explain to you what was going on?

SHEEHAN: Well, at first, John Vann was managing to kill so many Viet Cong that he was General Harkins' favorite adviser, as I say in the book. Because General Harkins, initially, ignored the things that displeased him.

LAMB: General in charge in Vietnam ...

SHEEHAN: In Vietnam, right. The commanding general. He died a number of years ago, but he was then the commanding general of Vietnam. He'd been senior staff aide to George Patton during World War II, but he was quite different than General Patton. At first, Vann was his favorite adviser because Vann was killing so many guerrillas until the Battle of Ap Bac occurred in January '63 and the Saigon side suffered a really stunning defeat. And all the warnings Vann had been sending General Harkins in his after-action reports came true. Vann kept saying that this army is not fighting, won't fight and disaster lies ahead. Then Vann started really opening up to us and telling us what he really -- he began to leak to us.

LAMB: Leak stories.

SHEEHAN: He began to leak his reports to General Harkins. He would sit you down and he would lay out for you what he was telling General Harkins.

LAMB: A lieutenant colonel ...

SHEEHAN: Taking on the commanding general.

LAMB: ... taking on the commanding general by leaking reports to you?

SHEEHAN: We was willing -- right. And he was willing to do it.

LAMB: Well, how would you publish those? What would you say in your story?

SHEEHAN: We would attribute them to an American adviser or American advisers. We tried to disguise it as much as we could.

LAMB: Did they know right away who was doing it?

SHEEHAN: It became pretty obvious very quickly who was the source of a lot of the reporting coming out of the northern Mekong Delta. Because Vann didn't try to hide it. In fact, we cautioned him. We'd say, "John, don't be so bold about this thing. We'll disguise it more. You're getting yourself in deep trouble professionally." Because when a lieutenant colonel takes on a four-star general, even if he protects himself to some extent by denying he's leaking things, and even with the reporters protecting him, there are private ways, unofficial ways, in which revenge can be taken. And we kept saying to John, "Look," but he insisted -- he was quite bold about it. He said, "No, no, no, no." He wanted to -- "You're not hurting me anymore than I want to be hurt." It turned out, as I explained in the book, there were personal reasons why he no longer felt he had a career in the Army and he was willing to throw it away. But he also did have moral courage. He was willing to take on the commanding general because he thought the commanding general was losing the war.

LAMB: Who else was John Paul Vann leaking to besides you?

SHEEHAN: David Halberstam.

LAMB: New York Times.

SHEEHAN: New York Times. In fact, Halberstam was the reporter whom Vann focused on most, with whom he became closest. Because first of all, John was an enormous source to us. He educated us. He was a source of information. But John very quickly sensed that what David Halberstam wrote had the most impact. Because The New York Times was the most powerful paper in the world, particularly in that period of time. The President of the United States read what David Halberstam wrote. And if you talk to David Halberstam and he reported it, it was going to get to the attention of the senior leadership of this country right away.

LAMB: Where is this picture ...?

SHEEHAN: That is a picture of David Halberstam up in the central highlands, actually, and not down in Vann's area -- up in the central highlands of Vietnam fording a stream with a backpack on his -- he was doing a trip up to the highlands. He's out in the field with a group of South Vietnamese soldiers who were right beyond him crossing the stream and the picture was taken by a photographer for the AP named Horst Faas who won two Pulitzers in Vietnam. David and Horst had been friends in the Belgian Congo when they both covered that and they were both out on an operation with the Vietnamese when Horst took that picture. As David said, "knee-deep in the big muddy," later on.

LAMB: Before we leave that, Mr. Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize winner, a book he wrote right around this time?

SHEEHAN: David won a Pulitzer -- David and Malcolm Browne shared a Pulitzer for their reporting in Vietnam. And then David went on to write a number of books, first of which was an account of his experiences in Vietnam in '62-'63 called "The Making of a Quagmire." And then a book published in 1972 which was in indictment of the American leadership that had led us to Vietnam called "The Best and the Brightest."

LAMB: Now did you replace him as a New York Times reporter in Vietnam?

SHEEHAN: Well, I went back to Vietnam -- no, I didn't really replace him. There were a couple of people in between. But when David and I first knew each other, I was working for the UPI. Then I went to work for The Times and David left Vietnam at the end of '63, December of '63. I went to work for The New York Times in '64 and then The Times sent me back to Vietnam in the middle of '65, August of 1965. At the time, when the US Army and the Marine Corps were coming to take over the war, the advisory war had failed, as Vann had said it would -- the regime was in danger of falling, and they sent the US Army and the Marine Corps in. I went back there to be reporter for The Times. The Times sent me there. A reporter named Charlie Moore, who was then the bureau chief, who had also gone out there, whom I'd known earlier when he was chief correspondent for Time -- Charlie asked me to come and report the war with him, cover the war with him. I was first sent down to Indonesia after I went to work for The Times and Charlie wanted me to come back to Vietnam and cover the war with him; and so I did. And then a reporter who's now chief Washington correspondent, R.W. Apple, Johnnie Apple, came out and joined us over there. There was three of us in 1965, the year of the buildup -- Charlie Moore, Johnnie Apple and I.

LAMB: You said The New York Times was the most powerful newspaper in the
world. Why?

SHEEHAN: Because the United States was the most powerful country in the world. And The Times was in the position of The Times of London when a quarter of the world was was red, if you will, with the scarlet tunics of a British soldier at the high noon of the British empire. In 1963, the United States of America was at the high noon of its power. And Adolph Ochs, who founded The New York Times -- he bought a bankrupt paper -- had in mind when he bought it, or shortly afterwards, developed the idea that he would create an establishment -- if you will, an establishment paper; a paper that would be respectable, that would print the truth and not the sort of scandal, if you will, that the American press so often did print at the time. The so-called yellow journalism -- he wasn't interested in that. He wanted a solid, respectable paper that would be relied on for its news coverage. And The Times grew obviously, and became the most respected paper in this country and then when this country was the most powerful country in the world, I think The Times became the most respected paper in the world.

LAMB: Why not The Washington Post, for instance?

SHEEHAN: The Post had not, at that point, grown to the stature it has now. The Post was then beginning to grow but it did not have the stature it has now. The Times was what dominated the print field. And it was read in Washington. It wasn't read by a large number of people in Washington, but it was read by the people who counted in Washington. It was read by people who counted abroad. That is, The Times had a news service. So that if you reported something in The New York Times, the president was going to read it. And Vann knew that, and he cultivated Halberstam for that reason.

LAMB: What do you think of...

SHEEHAN: Cultivated the rest of us too, but he cultivated Halberstam particularly.

LAMB: You know, you obviously have seen more of this kind of journalism than just this particular incident, but what do you think of -- I just noticed a sentence or two here that you wrote. "Harkins and Knowlton never ceased complaining about us, hoping that our editors would fire us and replace us with more cooperative types." Frustrating for military to have their subordinates leaking to major publications and undercutting what they're doing?

SHEEHAN: Frustrating for a military leader, yeah. And frustrating for an ambassador who has shared the same illusions as the commanding general. Oh, of course, you've got to remember that prior to Vietnam, there hadn't been any disagreements, serious disagreements between the news media of the country and the political and military leadership of the country. We had pretty well marched in step through the Cold War. Because there hadn't been any occasion in which reality on the ground was conflicting with what the political and military leadership was saying.

The problem the reporters had in Vietnam was that what we saw in the field and what we were told by the advisers in the field, the men who counted like John Vann and other advisers, and by the captains who worked for Vann, was in direct conflict with what we were being told by the commanding general in Saigon. And this was a unique event in American politics and journalism. And these generals weren't used to -- excuse me -- generals like Harkins and ambassadors like Knowlty, were not accustomed to American reporters who were saying that they were consistently wrong. We weren't accustomed to generals who were consistently wrong either.

LAMB: Had this been a declared war, could this have happened?

SHEEHAN: Yes, the same thing could have happened, of course. So ...

LAMB: And would John Paul Vann have survived in a declared war with, maybe, even censorship applied?

SHEEHAN: We had censorship in Vietnam throughout the war.

LAMB: Legal censorship or just ...

SHEEHAN: It was effective censorship. It was tactical censorship. They didn't read your dispatches. But there were ground rules. If you could not report on operations prior to them, we had military censorship. You could not report on an operation prior to its occurring. You could not, at one point, report the precise number of casualties. You could say there were moderate, light or heavy, but you couldn't give the precise number of killed or wounded. There are a lot of rules that if you did not follow, your accreditation was removed and you couldn't get on military aircraft, you couldn't attend military briefings. They enforced censorship, military censorship, throughout the war.

What they could not enforce was the was the view of the war that we were conveying. And that's what frustrated them. What they couldn't enforce was to sit down and turn an account of a battle into a press release, which didn't reflect what General Harkins was sending back to Washington -- his reports simply didn't reflect what was happening in the field. And he was furious that our reporting contradicted what he was saying. And, of course, his own officers in the field were contradicting what he was saying. And he wouldn't listen to them. And they would tell him, "General, we have lost this battle for X reasons." He simply wouldn't listen.

LAMB: Were there reporters that you worked with in Vietnam -- other publications -- that were reporting a different view of the war than you were?

SHEEHAN: Most of the resident correspondents in Vietnam, at that time, were reporting basically had the same flavor -- they were reporting the same events.

LAMB: Were they all getting their information from John Paul Vann?

SHEEHAN: No, they were getting it from other advisers, as well, but we were going out into the field and were seeing what was happening and we were reporting it. And the advisers, as they grew more frustrated -- I'm talking about the men in the field now -- from lieutenant colonel on down -- as they grew more frustrated, they turned more and more to the reporters. Because we were the only people who would listen to them.

And then you'd begin to get reporters from outside like Bernie Kalb of CBS, Charlie Moore, who was then chief correspondent for Time. They came in and they began to see what the resident correspondents were reporting was true. And their reporting reflected it as well. You did get people who would come out, like the late Marguerite Higgins, for instance, who had been very critical when she was in Korea of the way the war was being fought. But when she got to Vietnam and like the political leadership of the country, she assumed these generals knew what they were talking about.

And she wrote a series of articles, I remember, in August of '63 saying we were a bunch of young cub reporters who didn't know what we were talking about and we wanted to see the United States lose the war. That sort of thing would hurt you, because you wanted to see the United States win the war, you were simply trying to get the truth about it out. Yes, there were some, but who would come in and who would say that we were all wrong. We used to laugh about it, because made no sense at all. I think there were people, in her case, who genuinely were acting on faith. Because they had never dealt with generals who really didn't know what they were talking about before.

LAMB: Given your experience, and this book and other books, could a Vietnam ever happen again to the United States?

SHEEHAN: No. Well, not in the foreseeable future. I think Vietnam has changed this country, for the foreseeable future, at least. An event like Vietnam is unique in the history of a country. Vietnam was our first bad war. Previously, when you went off to war as an American you came home having proved your manhood and you were slapped on the back and your cause was honored. Even the confederate side lost its war, and I happen to think they had a bad cause, but in their home communities, they were honored and they ran for office on their war records.

But Vietnam, for whatever reason you wish to say, that the war was fought the wrong way, or that the cause was unjust, it was a bad war. And it was the first -- it was the first war in which Americans could and did get killed for nothing. Now the Europeans had learned that you could go to war and get killed for nothing, that you could go to war and your -- in which you could get involved in a war in which your leadership was driven by illusions rather than reality. We had never learned that as a nation. That had never been driven home to us. War had always been a good experience in the American historical consciousness.

And so I think the impact of that on us has been so profound, because the war was so divisive that it remains with us today and the President of the United States cannot so blithely send Americans off to war as he does not have the power to do it that Kennedy and Johnson had, because the public doesn't give him the credibility that it gave those presidents.

LAMB: We're talking with Neil Sheehan. This is the book published by Random House, about 860-some pages. "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam." Included in this, some 385 interviews, some 630 hours of audiotape and lots of other background information on Mr. Sheehan's reporting from Vietnam from the year 1962 onward.

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A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam