Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, March 12, 2012 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Neil Sheehan
"A Fiery Peace in a Cold War"
ABSTRACT -- "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War" tells the story of how Air Force General Bernard Schriever and those who labored with him had the insight and the fortitude to overcome opposition within the Pentagon and the Eisenhower Administration to achieve the strategic stability necessary to avoid a nuclear holocaust at the height of the Cold War. In the process, they opened space to the United States and fostered the creation of an aerospace industry that has made the U.S. the space power it is today.
SPEAKER -- Neil Sheehan was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1936 and was educated at Harvard College. He spent three years as a war correspondent in Vietnam for United Press International and The New York Times and subsequently served as Defense Department and White House correspondent for the newspaper. His reporting won him numerous awards. In 1971 he brought the Pentagon Papers to the Times, which won the paper the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Meritorious Public Service. In 1988 he published his major work on the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, and was given the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. The Modern Library jury also voted the book one of the 100 best works of non-fiction of the 20th Century.
His latest book, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, the subject of this colloquium, was published by Random House in 1990.