Politics & Power Quote by Neil Sheehan

The line lands like a confession dressed up as diagnosis: not just that Americans were confident, but that confidence had curdled into a moral alibi. Sheehan’s phrasing is doing double duty. “We thought” indicts a whole cohort without letting the speaker off the hook; it’s collective, intimate, and damning. The repetition of “because we were Americans” is the key rhetorical move, exposing a circular logic where identity becomes evidence, and evidence becomes unnecessary. Rightness is presumed, success is promised, and both are insulated from reality.

As a journalist who helped pry open the Vietnam War’s internal contradictions, Sheehan is writing in the long shadow of a national project sold as competence and virtue. The quote distills a particular Cold War American habit: treating power as proof of righteousness, and optimism as strategy. “Wanted to do” points to volition rather than necessity, hinting at interventions driven by ideology, prestige, or fear of looking weak. “Right and good” collapses ethics into branding; “succeed” collapses complexity into scoreboard thinking.

The subtext is less anti-American than anti-myth. Sheehan isn’t arguing that American identity is empty; he’s arguing it became a shortcut that replaced analysis, humility, and local knowledge. It’s the mindset that turns dissent into disloyalty and setbacks into temporary PR problems. The sentence still stings because it names a self-reinforcing national story: if we fail, we say it wasn’t “really” America; if we win, we say it’s destiny.