A Bright Shining Lie
by Neil Sheehan
Summary
A Bright Shining Lie tells the story of the Vietnam War through one man who embodied all of it: John Paul Vann, the Army lieutenant colonel who arrived as an adviser in 1962, saw at the battle of Ap Bac exactly why the war was being lost, told the truth about it to reporters when his superiors would not hear it, resigned, and then could not stay away, returning as a civilian official and rising until he commanded American forces in the central highlands as no civilian ever had, dying there in a helicopter crash in 1972. Neil Sheehan met Vann as a young war correspondent, was schooled by him in the war's realities, and buried him at Arlington among the war's architects; the book took Sheehan sixteen years, and the long labor shows on every page. It is at once a great biography, complete with the buried personal history, the childhood poverty and secret disgraces, that explains Vann's furies and ambitions, and a complete history of the American war carried inside the biography, the advisers' early illusions, the corruption of the Saigon regime, the escalation, Tet, and the machinery of official lying the title names, taken from Vann's own words about the bright shining lie the war had become. The moral architecture is what stays: Vann, the war's most clear eyed critic, was also its truest believer, and his story is the tragedy of the enterprise in one life. The book won the 1988 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and it stands with the handful of essential American books about Vietnam.
Historical Context & Significance
Sheehan had been one of the young Saigon reporters whose skeptical dispatches enraged the command, and it was to Sheehan that Daniel Ellsberg later brought the Pentagon Papers, published by the Times in 1971; A Bright Shining Lie completed a quarter century's reckoning with the war that made his career. It appeared in 1988, when America was at last ready to read seriously about Vietnam, and its double crown of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer marked the war's passage from wound to history. An HBO film followed in 1998. Successive generations of officers and correspondents have been assigned it as the anatomy of how institutions lie to themselves, and Sheehan spent two decades being asked when he would write another, and the answer arrived in 2009 with A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, his history of the intercontinental missile program.