A Bright Shining Lie
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- This is about the book. For the 1998 HBO film see A Bright Shining Lie (film)
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the Vietnam War. It is about U.S. Army retired Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
Sheehan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1989 and a National Book Award in 1988. A film adaptation, A Bright Shining Lie, was released by HBO in 1998 starring Bill Paxton and Amy Madigan.
[edit] Synopsis
John Paul Vann became an adviser to the Saigon regime in the early 1960s. He was an ardent critic of how the war was fought, both on the part of the Saigon regime, which he viewed as corrupt and incompetent, and, as time went by, increasingly, on the part of the U.S. military. In particular, he was critical of the U.S. military command, especially under William Westmoreland, and their inability to adapt to the fact that they were facing a popular guerrilla movement while backing a corrupt regime. He argued that many of the tactics employed (for example the strategic hamlet relocation) further alienated the population and thus were counterproductive to U.S. objectives. When being unable to influence the military command, he often used the Saigon press corps, Neil Sheehan among them, to leak his views.
