Home Run Hitters - Hank Aaron and Neil Sheehan

Two American heroes have recently died - one famous, the other less glittering but both legendary heroes in our times. The big star was baseball great Hank Aaron who hit 755 home runs and broke Babe Ruth's record. The other was Neil Sheehan - a Hank Aaron of journalism, whose greatest home run as a reporter was bringing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the American public.

As a Times colleague, I worked with Sheehan, hiding from the FBI for three months in a New York hotel, while we scoured the Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages of TOP SECRET documents that exposed how the U.S. government had lied to the American people about the Vietnam War.

Even though both of us had written lots of exposes ourselves- some that got my home phone wiretapped by the FBI - we were shocked to see proof in black and white, in the government's own secret history of the war how often Congress and the public had been deceived.

In Vietnam we covered the war in the Mekong Delta and coups in Saigon. In Washington, we broke open the political earthquake kicked off by Gen. William Westmoreland's request for 206,000 more US troops in Vietnam in February 1968. Our story helped fuel a fatal political defeat for President Lyndon Johnson and marked a watershed turn-around tin Vietnam policy.