Politics & Power Quote by Neil Sheehan

A blunt sentence like this is a journalist's scalpel: it doesn’t just accuse leaders of being wrong, it strips them of the alibi that they were merely unlucky or outmaneuvered. Neil Sheehan’s choice of “genuinely deluded” is doing heavy moral work. Delusion isn’t a policy error; it’s a psychological condition. The phrase implies a leadership class so committed to its own story that reality couldn’t get a hearing, even when reality arrived as body counts, intelligence reports, and failing metrics.

Sheehan’s context is the Vietnam-era architecture of self-deception he helped expose, most famously through the Pentagon Papers. Inside that machinery, “progress” could be engineered by redefining what counted as progress: villages “secured” on paper, enemies “neutralized” in statistics, credibility maintained by not admitting the premise was collapsing. “Military and political leadership” is also a paired indictment: the uniformed planners and the elected narrators feeding each other’s certainty, creating an echo chamber with war powers.

The subtext is that delusion was not incidental but structural. Institutions rewarded confidence, punished doubt, and treated skepticism as disloyalty. Calling it “genuinely” deluded adds a final twist: this wasn’t a simple cover-up where the insiders knew the truth and lied to the public. They lied to themselves first, and that self-lying became state policy. The sentence lands because it denies the comforting fantasy of mastery; it reframes catastrophe as something produced by sincere conviction married to enormous authority.