War and Peace: PW Profiles Neil Sheehan

Twenty years ago Neil Sheehan, 73, won a Pulitzer for A Bright Shining Lie, a nonfiction narrative that tells the story of the Vietnam War through the experience of a single soldier. This fall, Random House will release A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, a nonfiction narrative that tells the story of the Cold War through the experience of a single soldier. Even the book's jacket design and editor are the same.

In both these books the past feels immediate. “I believe in writing history so the ordinary reader can both understand and come to grips with what really happened and why,” Sheehan says. Like his books, Sheehan is a combination of erudite, intelligent and warm. He's the child of Irish immigrants, with wide-set green eyes and a head full of white hair, who went from a private boys' school to Harvard.

Despite his exquisite manners and patrician appearance (it's a hot day; he's wearing a blue blazer and wingtips), Sheehan bypasses the formal living room of his Washington, D.C., home, where he's lived since 1966, and heads out to the kitchen, with the mail and coffee cups and pictures of the grandkids. It's his approach to writing, too. “If you want to understand history, you have to understand people and what makes them tick,” he says.

A Fiery Peace begins with the story of how Gen. Bernard Schriever's parents met and wends around his childhood, his service in the nascent Air Force during WWII and his relationship with legendary generals Hap Arnold and Curtis LeMay. It might be the opening of a novel rather than what it is: the rigorously researched account of how Schriever's team of engineers eventually created the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and why the weapon was the key to avoiding nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Although the book's topic is technical, Sheehan never loses sight of his characters. “Movements don't make history,” Sheehan says. “People make history.” Indeed, Sheehan's book tacitly suggests that the Western Hemisphere avoided nuclear destruction in large part because of General Schriever's golf game.

Dense with information, A Bright Shining Lie is a testament to the 10 years Sheehan covered the Vietnam War as a journalist. (In 1971, Sheehan broke the story of the Pentagon Papers for the New York Times.) He enjoys research, but more than that, he values accuracy. “When you write about powerful men,” he said, “you better be right.”

To master the subject of the cold war, Sheehan spent more than a decade poring through archives and interviewing everyone he could find who was involved with the story. For A Bright Shining Lie, Sheehan had a topic he was intimately familiar with and whose main character was a friend. A Fiery Peace required Sheehan to immerse himself in an unfamiliar world. “My experience as a journalist had been on the fighting side,” he says. “These men were engineers. They got their kicks by building something and making it work.”

In Sheehan's hands, the nuts-and-bolts of getting the missile built turn into plot. The book's cinematic scenes and cliffhanger chapter endings have the feel of a thriller; Sheehan listened to audio books of John le Carré and Scott Turow while he shaved and got ready for bed.

Because of the parallels between the cold war and the present day, one might be tempted to read A Fiery Peace as a commentary on the war in Iraq, but Sheehan shakes his head vigorously. “It's history for history's sake,” he says. “The lessons are implicit. These men had the courage to stand up for what they believed in. The weapon was a success because they used it to buy time. The Soviet Union imploded on its own.”

In the end, time is both the hero and the enemy of Sheehan's story—and the most important factor in writing history itself. “I always believed there's an important historical experience that exists only in the minds of the participants,” he said, noting that he never could've written A Fiery Peace if its protagonist hadn't lived just a few streets over. As both the pages and the years go by, Schriever and his team die off. Without Sheehan to fix it in the minds of readers, their story would have disappeared, too.