From the dust jacket
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Random House, 1988; 800 pages) is a ponderous study of a man who, in the eyes of journalist Neil Sheehan, embodied much of the best--and worst--of America's Vietnam involvement. The book's title comes from a statement made by its symbolic anti-hero when, in a dramatic move, Vann turned to young reporters Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam to voice his frustration with the way in which the South Vietnamese and their American advisors were not prosecuting the war. Up until the Battle of Ap Bac (January 2-3, 1963), Vann had been playing a lead instrument on the military bandwagon to "show progress" against the Vietcong. His pungent remark describing this phase of his career is showcased on the frontispiece of the book: "We had also, to all the visitors who came over there, been one of the bright shining lies."
But John Paul Vann is used by author Sheehan to highlight a number of "bright shining lies" beyond those referred to in the 1963 quip--where Vann was alluding to his popular briefings for VIP's. The work is divided into seven "books." In book two, Sheehan flashes back to show how--in his interpretation--the American military and political Establishments lied to themselves after World War II, an essential first step toward our Indochina debacle. Later, in book five, Sheehan opens a sealed door to John Vann's past; as it turns out, the man who claimed to understand Vietnam so well little understood himself; he was a living lie. For Sheehan, Vann's most grievous political error was to join General William C. Westmoreland, Walt Rostow, and many others of the Establishment in proclaiming that our victory--as opposed to our press-proclaimed defeat--during the Tet offensive (January-February, 1968) provided a magnificent opportunity to gain momentum for efforts in pacification and Vietnamization. According to Sheehan, and most media spokesmen at the time, such an interpretation was clearly a case of self-delusion, albeit an influential one; Vann succeeded in selling his ideas to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. From book five to the conclusion of A Bright Shining Lie, the reader is asked to share Sheehan's view that an adventurer like John Paul Vann had too much invested in the Vietnam war to face up to the truth of America's inevitable defeat. Anyone who makes the heroic effort to complete A Bright Shining Lie will close the book with mixed feelings. Sheehan is a journalist with well-honed powers of observation and description. The opening segment of the book entitled "The Funeral" masterfully employs mise en scene to evoke personalities and issues important to the volume as a whole--both for Vann as an individual and for the big historical questions. Sheehan's scrupulous--yet, action-packed--narration for the Battle of Ap Bac has to be one of the best evocations of combat in the entire corpus of Vietnam literature. Book five, entitled "Antecedents of the Man," is a powerful case study of investigative reporting which leads to results that totally transform even the investigator's views--a Citizen Kane--style inquiry which, instead of concluding with Rosebud, discovers the trauma of pedophilia. Sheehan's sixteen years of labor on A Bright Shining Lie bore fruit in these segments; some readers will question the interpretations, but all must concede that the writing is superb.
Historical and analytical portions of the book are weaker. Book two, "Antecedents to a Confrontation," purports to be an historical analysis of the Cold War mentality of America's diplomatic and military elites. Unfortunately, the section reads like a term paper by a college senior who has relied slavishly on the work of a partisan group of diplomatic historians often referred to as "the Wisconsin School." Descriptions are slanted in the worst way while the analysis is clearly based on a small number of like-minded revisionist sources. In critiquing General William C. Westmoreland's tactics in Vietnam, Sheehan clearly borrows from as many contemporary critics as he can find rather than taking the time to reconsider, in hindsight, Westmoreland's options in a war where even the types of ordinance often were designated by "whiz kids" at the Pentagon and the White House. As a member of the press and a friend of Daniel Ellsberg, Sheehan is clearly the wrong person to tell the story of media efforts to protest the war. For example, Ellsberg's sexual history was kinkier than Vann's, yet Sheehan ignores the personal excesses of the man who came close to winning for Sheehan a Pulitzer Prize
when he handed over shopping bags full of stolen documents now known as the infamous "The Pentagon Papers." Both the gaps in Sheehan's knowledge and his prejudices work against any claims he might make to objectivity.
When the book appeared in 1988, the flaws of A Bright Shining Lie were less apparent than its polemical usefulness. The Pulitzer Committee awarded Sheehan's "politically correct" effort its coveted prize in journalism, neglecting to notice the potential pitfalls Sheehan encountered when he chose John Paul Vann as a representative figure. The National Book Award quickly followed with further kudos. Speakers committees on college campuses jumped on the band wagon, rewarding Sheehan with $10,000 per campus talk. Finally, in 1991, Jane Fonda purchased the movie rights to Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie for $300,000. As this issue of the Vietnam Veterans Institute Journal goes to press, there is much controversy surrounding the Oliver Stone movie entitled JFK. Will Oliver Stone make himself available just in time to film the screen adaptation of Sheehan's epic? Will Kevin Costner play Sheehan as a non-ideological reporter who discovers, once the war is over, that both his nation and one of his personal heroes are guilty of deceit and betrayal? Prior to the cinematic popularization of Sheehan's version, we believe it is important to consider A Bright Shining Lie as an interpretation of America's experience in Vietnam.
Professor Richard Batteiger (Oklahoma State University) opens this collection of essays with a rhetorical analysis which looks below the surface of the text to a variety of "frames of analysis" ventured by Sheehan. Does Sheehan advance his own analysis of Vietnam as "the truth" or is the book--with its surprising revelations about Vann's inner turmoil--about the impossibility of anyone ever writing a "master narrative" for Vietnam? Vann seemed to be an heroic truth teller, but then--years later--Sheehan discovered how suspect were his reasons for speaking up. Do men inevitably advance interpretations to justify personal choices rather than tell impolitic truths that might damage their careers? Batteiger has an intriguing interpretation: "The explicit warning in Sheehan's title requires that we read the book constantly aware that lying is a central theme, and that the warning may apply not only to the official version and Vann's version of the war, but to Sheehan's version as well." In this scheme, A Bright Shining Lie becomes a work about the difficulty of knowing truth. Perhaps it was this philosophical conundrum which so preoccupied Sheehan during his painful sixteen years of research and writing.
The Vietnamese in A Bright Shining Lie conform to predictable stereotypes. The Communists are principled fighters who ultimately triumph; on the other hand, our allies are cowardly and venal exploiters preoccupied with maintaining power for personal gain. As a close observer of the Vietnamese side of the story and as an historian at George Mason's Indochina Institute, Professor Nguyen Manh Hung is particularly prepared to evaluate these assertions. Like many other South Vietnamese, Professor Hung is extremely proud of the fighting skills of the ARVN, especially those evidenced at the Battle of An Loc during the Easter Offensive of 1972. Professor Hung quarrels with Sheehan's depiction of leaders on both sides: President Ngo Dinh Diem was not the reactionary Sheehan limns, nor was Ho Chi Minh the benevolent Jeffersonian of A Bright Shining Lie. Of interest to those of us--including Neil Sheehan--who are dependent upon English-language sources, Professor Hung points out that even Vietnamese historians today are debunking many of Sheehan's politically correct bromides on Vietnamese politics. Finally, getting very close to home, Professor Hung notes that he is listed as an interview source for the book, yet no such interview ever took place. Nor did Sheehan ever visit the Indochina Institute at George Mason University even though the school was only a thirty-minute drive from Sheehan's study. These flaws in research methodology cause Professor Hung to question the value of Sheehan's work as a definitive history.
My own essay tries to read the text in a different way. It seems clear to me that A Bright Shining Lie is about something beyond the war or John Paul Vann. Sheehan's subtext pits two elites in conflict: the first elite consists of the military and diplomatic Establishment after World War II; the press and selected intellectuals belong to a rising, "hip" elite which vies with the WASP Establishment for the public's attention and trust. During the early years of "the American Century," the WASP elite projected American power into far-flung areas of the globe. After World War II, it became unable to advance the true interests of the country. America's trusted Establishment bumbled us into Vietnam; to maintain its toehold, it manufactured a sparkling chain of "bright shining lies," promising always to give us "light at the end of the tunnel." Enter a "hip" elite in the persons of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Daniel Ellsberg. These post-war offspring of Harvard College--with the initial help of John Paul Vann--quickly identified the fallacy of the Establishment's position in Vietnam: driven by a paranoid view of international politics, the Establishment leaders were unable to see that our true ideological allies were the Vietcong--who were bringing true "liberation" to the Vietnamese people. John Paul Vann is lauded by A Bright Shining Lie, as long as he agrees with the new elite; after Tet, 1968, he is traduced because of his decision to help the Establishment to win. By unveiling Vann's grim childhood, Sheehan appears to empathize with his protagonist, but the real purpose of book five's backgrounding is to discredit Vann as an authority.
A straw poll has revealed that most readers have not managed to patrol further than 200 pages into the 800-page dense jungle of this tome. Since the essays of Batteiger, Hung, and Rollins spend so much time interpreting the epic, it seemed only fair to provide a profile of the text. For the record, Professor Donald Walker (Texas Tech University) has contributed a brief summary of A Bright Shining Lie. In some ways, Professor Walker's task was the hardest because the book has so many twists and turns for both its macrocosmic (America in Vietnam) and its microcosmic (John Paul Vann) stories. Some readers of this issue of the Vietnam Veterans Institute Journal may wish to begin with the summary and then move forward to the interpretive essays. While Professor Walker's summary should not be used as a substitute for Sheehan's book, it will be a helpful touchstone for many.
Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie was available at every bookstore I visited this year. It is an impressive work of imagination, the fruit of sixteen years of obsessive labor by a man who, some worried, would lose his sanity. In the not-too-distant future, A Bright Shining Lie will become a movie. As with the 1992 controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's JFK, there will be much discussion of fundamental issues--in this case, topics such as the origins of the Vietnam war, the role of the press in that struggle, and the lessons we should have learned. Our goal in this collection has been to provide some critical perspectives on the book before debate about the film begins. Neil Sheehan, as an important participant in the Vietnam drama, has many colorful and useful things to say about the war; on the other hand, like journalist Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History (Viking, 1983), he clearly lacks the language skills and methodological sophistication to write a synoptic history. A Bright Shining Lie is one man 5 "truth," rife with many problems of both fact and interpretation. As we are currently seeing with the film JFK, the forthcoming movie version of Sheehan's book will be attended by young people in search of a definitive experience. It is my sense that--unlike JFK, which has been roundly criticized in the press--the film will receive the same unanalytical praise accorded the book.
Our collection is dedicated to the notion that history is more complex and multifaceted than Neil Sheehan was prepared--by disposition, experience, or training--to admit. The film version will inevitably attack a rigid Establishment (black hats) while lauding an adversary press (white hats), but it cannot--as it simplifies Sheehan's story to accommodate a performance medium--do anything but exaggerate the subjectivity of Sheehan's book. We hope that this collection of essays will start discussion of the limitations of A Bright Shining Lie before the film enshrines media melodrama as wisdom.
