Prize-Winning Author: Recall Vietnam's Lesson

"The statute of limitations" on America's involvement in Vietnam should never run out, Pulitzer Prizewinning author Neil Sheehan '58 told an audience of 250 at Starr Auditorium last night.

"To forget Vietnam is to forget the fallible capacity we share with all mankind," said Sheehan, whose noted book A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam chronicles U.S. mistakes in the Southeast Asian war through the story of an American officer fighting there.

Sheehan, who headed United Press International's Vietnam bureau from 1962 to 1964 and obtained the Pentagon Papers as a New York Times reporter, said yesterday that until Vietnam, American wars had always been thought of as crusades characterized by "messianic rhetoric."

The Holyoke, Massachusetts-born author traced the thread of American attempts to forge "a grand unifying moral force" to solve the country's problems back to the time of the Puritans.

The leaders who helped form America's tough anti-communist policy following World War II felt compelled to see the world in "black and white terms" and fashioned the communists as a demonic, monolithic enemy, said the writer.

That Vietnam did not fit into the paradigm of good and evil contributed to the U.S. failure there, he said.

By seeing Ho Chi Minh as a pawn of the Chinese communists, American politicians failed to realize that the rebels represented the nationalist desires of the Vietnamese people.

"Ho Chi Minh had no way of being seen as who he was, a communist and a nationalist," Sheehan said.

In the ensuing conflict, the Viet Cong were able to cast themselves as defenders against a foreign invader, a time-honored role in Vietnam since the Mongol invasions in the middle ages.

Sheehan also castigated American leaders of the time for their misguided yet rigid conviction that superior U.S. fire power could crush a popular insurgency in a prolonged war of attrition.

"No American president ever took pencil in hand and learned from the mistakes of his predecessor," he said. "Each American president got the country in deeper."

Sheehan told the audience, comprised of students, professors, relatives and a sprinkling of Vietnam veterans, that the war helped expose a dichotomy in the American mindset.

"We never realized that there were two sides to our country, the social democracy, and the other side" made up of arrogant and single-minded political leaders, he said. "We never believed we could get the same kind of deluded leaders Europe had during World War I."

Sheehan said many mainstream reporters covering the war thought they could have an impact on decision-makers by writing the truth about the war. But the problem lay not only in the levels of bureaucracy which distanced politicians from the realities of jungle warfare in Vietnam, as the reporters thought, but with the leaders themselves, Sheehan said.

"We were reporting the war to help win it," he said. By the Tet offensive in 1968, however, journalists began to believe the war was unwinnable, the author said.