Books, Arts & Manners

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan (Random House, 861 pp., $24.95)

Oscar Wilde in a famous phrase described fox-hunting as the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. Something similar might be said about the spectacle of the media establishment in full cry on behalf of former New York Times man Neil Sheehan’s ponderous account of John Paul Vann, a key U.S. official in Vietnam who was killed in a helicopter accident days after masterminding the crushing defeat of Hanoi’s 1972 Easter Offensive in the Central Highlands. Excerpted in The New Yorker, winner of the National Book Award, a best-seller for 15 weeks already at this writing, A Bright Shining Lie has attracted an extraordinary pack of articles yelping about what Sheehan has called his “16-year odyssey” in writing the book, and whimpering discreetly of the severe emotional cost to his martyred self and his family.

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Peter Brimelow

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A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan (Random House, 861 pp., $24.95)

Oscar Wilde in a famous phrase described fox-hunting as the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. Something similar might be said about the spectacle of the media establishment in full cry on behalf of former New York Times man Neil Sheehan’s ponderous account of John Paul Vann, a key U.S. official in Vietnam who was killed in a helicopter accident days after masterminding the crushing defeat of Hanoi’s 1972 Easter Offensive in the Central Highlands. Excerpted in The New Yorker, winner of the National Book Award, a best-seller for 15 weeks already at this writing, A Bright Shining Lie has attracted an extraordinary pack of articles yelping about what Sheehan has called his “16-year odyssey” in writing the book, and whimpering discreetly of the severe emotional cost to his martyred self and his family.