On February 4, 2026, The Washington Post’s Ukraine correspondent, Lizzie Johnson, announced on X that she had been laid off, via email, “in the middle of a warzone”—left behind in Kyiv by a ruthless wave of layoffs at the Jeff Bezos–owned paper. Johnson’s stranding at the imperiled fringes of America’s once sturdy network of European allies seemed to perfectly embody the pending collapse of another empire, America’s formerly sprawling newspaper industry. Where once an array of informants, stringers, correspondents, editors, newsrooms, and foreign bureaus had splayed across the country and the world, now all that remained was a handful of big city papers, cannibalizing themselves and each other in order to survive, while on occasion leaving former staffers behind like weapons cast off from an army in retreat.
The Post’s self-immolation was, of course, hardly the first wave of devastating cuts to America’s newsrooms—nor was Johnson’s stranding the first time that foreign correspondents who deserved better found themselves unemployed. As Elisa Tamarkin tells us in her mesmerizing Done in a Day: Telex From the Fall of Saigon, her father was one such causality, left jobless decades earlier, after the Chicago Daily News closed in 1978. This was despite Bob Tamarkin having been, in his editor’s words, “promoted to trench coat”—industry slang for a dedicated, in-country foreign correspondent—full time, three years earlier. On April 30, 1975, he had managed to be the last American reporter to flee the fall of Saigon and one of the first to “telex” his story home, one of the triumphs of the Daily News’s 70-year-old foreign bureau, and among its last.
Yet though Done in a Day is in part an elegy for the newspaper business, Elisa Tamarkin resists turning the book into a straightforward hagiography. What results instead is a startlingly original meditation on the last day of the U.S. War in Vietnam and the end of the newspaper business—one that makes clear that, as much as newspapers were one of the great triumphs of modern civilization, they were also intimate partners in the violence that civilization seems to so endlessly produce.
The Chicago Daily News was part of the U.S. War in Vietnam from the start, or indeed, from before the start, with veteran war reporter Keyes Beech arriving in the early 1950s, when the war against Vietnamese independence still technically belonged to France. The truth, of course, was that the Daily News was there because the French war was also an American war, with U.S. money and political support backing Paris’s efforts to keep Vietnam from unifying under the popular Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. The News was one of the first U.S. papers to open a Saigon bureau, just as it had been among the first U.S. dailies to establish its own comprehensive foreign news service a half-century earlier. This was the idea of turn-of-the-century publisher Victor Lawson, who saw an opportunity to permanently embed his own reporters in foreign locales, a “man on the spot” rather than the in-and-out “spot reporting” of the wire services. Newsmen (and they were almost all men to start) could then become like locals, covering the world, as the pioneering Chicago reporter Ben Hecht wrote, “with the enthusiasm … brought in Chicago to four-eleven fires, basement stabbings, love-nest suicides and all the other hi-de-ho doings outside the norm of living.” This was reporting where, as Tamarkin writes, “if you listened you could hear the language of Dickens, Twain, Carlyle, and Rabelais, only breezier, like they were drunk.”
It’s hard to escape the romance of all this—a world of Graham Greenes and Martha Gellhorns, trench coats (or in warmer climes like Vietnam, as Tamarkin notes, cotton or linen twill jackets with extra pockets for pens and notebooks), cocktails on the veranda of the hotel where “everyone” was staying, and meetings in humid back alleys with informants whose faces are covered in shadow. All to be tapped out on a typewriter and sent home to a newsroom that prided itself on producing the “writer’s newspaper,” providing the story of the day—the “literature” of the day even—“done in a day,” as the paper’s unofficial motto put it. The daily paper, as Hecht suggested, was “a kind of shrine” that had “to be constructed and worshipped, then forgotten, then built again the next day,” all with a flair for “the whiplash phrase … sonorous syntax and bull’s-eye epithet.”
Bob Tamarkin, as his daughter tells us, was there at the end. Arriving in Vietnam in January 1975, Tamarkin began reporting from Saigon amid what Henry Kissinger allegedly called the “decent interval”: the period after the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in 1973 and the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in April 1975. Saigon was thus already, from a reporter’s perspective, something of a ghost town, emptied of the hundreds of journalists of earlier years, the war now largely fought by Vietnamese, not Americans. Antiwar activists like Rolling Stone editor David Harris—who flew in in January to protest continued U.S. support for the Saigon regime—couldn’t even get themselves arrested anymore, while reporters like Tamarkin demurred in covering their daylong protest in front of the U.S. Embassy. The “story was dead,” said one of the remaining reporters, and no one at home seemed to care.
This changed as winter turned to spring and a new offensive of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam, or PAVN, gathered steam, crushing U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces in the Central Highlands and moving south toward Saigon. Reporters and writers started to pour back in—“tout le monde was there.… Le Monde was there,” noted one—only to have to immediately start flooding back out as the offensive became a rout and the “final” end grew near. Hunter S. Thompson made it a couple of weeks, arriving on April 8 and leaving on one of the last commercial flights on April 24, right before PAVN began shelling the airfield. Tamarkin meanwhile saw his colleague Keyes Beech through the crowd surrounding the U.S. Embassy and over the wall to the waiting Marines on the final day, remaining for a few hours more himself to witness the absurd scene: looters breaking into the embassy grounds as half-burned classified documents were caught up by the rotors of the escape helicopters and then drifted down from the sky to the sound of “White Christmas” (the song signaling to Americans and their allies that it was time to go). Tamarkin made it out on the last helicopter that carried civilians and, upon arriving on the USS Blue Ridge, banged out his “Diary of S. Viet’s Last Hours,” one of the first in-depth accounts of the fall of Saigon to reach American readers.
Within a few years, the decline of the newspaper too turned into a rout. The Daily News closed all its foreign offices in 1976 and then its own doors two years later—meanwhile other papers were cutting their foreign reporting “to the bone,” with international news having “almost reached the vanishing point” (as famed correspondent Peter Arnett put it) in most dailies, and the foreign correspondent “a vanishing species,” according to mid-’70s media scholars. The papers themselves would shutter in alarming numbers as the decades progressed, victims of corporate consolidation and hedge-fund machinations, a process grimly documented in a “morgue of final editions” (images of final font pages running from 1978 to 2025) that Elisa Tamarkin includes at the end of the volume—a visual testament to the crumbling cornerstones of popular literate culture.
It’s a simple enough story—one that, again, would be easy to romanticize—but as Tamarkin notes, that would be to mistake the perspective of the reporters, of the “West,” for the only one. Writing of her father, she describes how “his dispatches,” while honest and critical of U.S. officials, “never rose to an acknowledgment of the cause—of revolution and liberation—of the other side of the fall” of South Vietnam. They were usually just “Reds,” engaged in the various actions of warmaking, right up to and including smashing into Saigon and ejecting the remaining Americans, down to U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin’s little dog, Nit Noy (among the passengers on the final helicopters).
Violence and oppression had, in fact, been behind the news business from the start—this was true of city journalism and its regular beat of murders, sexual assaults, break-ins, and crooked politicians, but part of foreign reporting especially. Lawson’s idea for overseas bureaus, for example, first emerged in 1897 as he contemplated the brutal Cuban war for independence from Spain—a conflict of interest for Americans because the United States would soon join it to deny Cubans full independence—and came into its own thanks to Hecht’s 1918–1920 tour in Berlin, where he covered the aftermath of World War I, another conflict decided by late American arrival. World War II was its heyday: Pyle, Shirer, Gellhorn, and Hemingway on the typewriters, with Capa and Miller clapping home the shutters. The foreign bureau and international reporting for American newspapers and magazines thus emerged and reached their height in direct correlation with the emergence and expansion of U.S. imperial power in the twentieth century, two trend lines tracking up on the graph together, before tumbling back down the chart in 1970s Southeast Asia.
Tamarkin consequently avoids telling the story in a straightforward way, one that might overly valorize the correspondents and their trade, using her father’s time in Vietnam instead as a frame for an impressionistic and nonlinear consideration of one day and the way it was understood—moving in and out of the main story for extended digressions on small details. Central is the image of the telex. She considers Hans Haacke’s News, a contemporary art exhibit featuring an actual telex machine that began churning out page after page of news in 1970, the paper collecting in piles on the floor of the Jewish Museum in New York. This seemingly endless and transient accumulation of information was not unlike, Tamarkin suggests, the endless waves of information and news from Vietnam—news that had made clear to the government by the mid-’60s, and the American public by the early 1970s, that the war was unwinnable.
“Historians” she writes, sometimes “suggest the war was a transformative moment of accountability journalism,” where the press began to truly speak truth to government power—a narrative belied by the billowing piles of telex paper, reporting on a failed war effort that nevertheless kept failing for decades. The press may have raised questions, Tamarkin argues, but these often focused more on the process of the war than on whether or the why. “Journalists,” then as now, “rely on officials to share their perspectives and … leak information, so when there finally was dissent in the press,” it was because that view was shared by many in Washington, the State Department, and the intelligence community too.
Those officials were often leaking because their bosses, like the American public, also seemed impermeable to the waves and waves of news and information that swept over them. Ambassador Martin refused to begin the official evacuation, even as Communist forces closed in on Saigon in early April, and his CIA officers leaked like sieves in the hope press reports would change his mind. He made no plan for getting Nit Noy out—though he did pack his beloved stuffed ocelot and a suitcase full of top-secret documents (meant to help him justify his inaction before Congress). The dog, the ocelot, and the documents ultimately made it to safety, but thousands of the South Vietnamese who had supported the U.S. war effort did not. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, learning in Washington that the final evacuations were underway, chose not to attend a play at the Kennedy Center as planned—though, according to one photograph of that night, at least, he continued to wear his tux.
The remaining Marine guards were the last Americans to leave (nearly left behind, actually, until one last helicopter was sent to their rescue). Among “the last things my father reported seeing in the Saigon embassy lobby,” Tamarkin writes, was one of them: “a young Marine … stuffing a paperback book,” The Fall of Rome, “into his knapsack.” Evidently a copy of a 1971 volume by R.A. Lafferty, the topic seemed well fitted to events from an American perspective. But the view of the PAVN was strikingly different: Official watercolorists depicted in vibrant colors not a “fall” but a glorious rising, a long-delayed but inevitable triumph of the “people” over the machinations of empire.
Those machinations, alas, have outlasted the age of newsprint. While today American power seems too to be in decline—withdrawing, not unlike the Post, from old allies in Europe—it retains enough strength to further an orgy of purposeless and horrific violence in the Middle East. At the same time, the last remaining newspapers have not transcended the flaws of their ancestors, relying on a set of well-practiced euphemisms to cover destruction in Gaza. Still, the successors to the PAVN watercolorists are also present today, bravely posting videos of the war crimes committed against them. These scroll across the screens of viewers and—in most American news and living rooms—accumulate like spools of unread telex paper on the floor.