What it's named for

Astute followers of this blog (and of history) may have spliced together the fact that our interview series – the name of the Pandemic Papers, which has resurfaced here in early 2021 – can be traced back to a seminal moment in the history of 20^th century journalism. And that was the Pulitzer Prize winning reporting and writing by a series of New York Times reporters called the “Pentagon Papers,” which revealed misinformation, corruption and outright lies being told to the American people about the Vietnam War. Neil Sheehan, one of the journalists who worked on this, recently died at 84. The link to a story written about him and about those times is right here.