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Named one of Lit Hub's most anticipated books of the year.

A searing reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the end of foreign reporting in the nation’s daily newspapers. 

Done in a Day turns on a single event: the April 30, 1975, departure of the last helicopter evacuating civilians from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Elisa Tamarkin’s interest in that helicopter begins with the fact that her stepfather, the Saigon bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, was on it—the last American correspondent to leave Saigon as it fell. His report was filed from a naval ship on the South China Sea at a time when no other telexes were going through.

Now, more than fifty years later, Tamarkin offers a social and cultural autopsy of that moment, based in personal history but vividly unfolding amid the vast documentation of America’s obvious defeat, which never seemed to register even as it got out, in the writings of journalists and essayists, in the backchannel cables between US ambassador Graham Martin and Henry Kissinger, in congressional hearings, and in photographs of the war’s end. The story is also set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in city newspapers—and of the newspapers themselves—once proud, in the words of the Chicago Daily News, of bringing readers the “literature of the day” that was “done in a day.”

Done in a Day braids history, criticism, and memoir to tell the paired stories of Saigon’s liberation and the demise of the news. The result is a haunting essay about all that ended in a day—and about what it means to recognize and to write about endings even as we live through them.

This book chronicles the life of Tom Dooley, the American doctor whose much-publicized exploits in Vietnam and Laos during the 1950s helped lay the ideological groundwork for the U.S. military intervention a decade later. The scion of an upper-middle-class St. Louis family, Dooley was an enormously complex and fascinating individual. He was a devoutly religious Roman Catholic as well as a self-styled playboy socialite, a devoted physician to the poor and a tireless propagandist for the “Vietnam Lobby,” a shameless self-promoter and a closeted homosexual, a victim of Navy persecution and a beneficiary of CIA support. Dooley first gained notoriety as a young Navy doctor charged with overseeing the evacuation of Catholic refugees from North Vietnam in the wake of the 1954 Geneva Accords. His celebrity grew after his book Deliver Us from Evil, a fervently anticommunist account of his experiences, was serialized in Reader's Digest. By the end of the decade, as his name became associated (albeit mistakenly) with a ballad popularized by the Kingston Trio, he had achieved the status of “America's first pop star saint.” In addition to exposing the roots of the Vietnam War, Dooley's story illuminates a broad range of developments in post-World War II United States culture—from the “Americanization” of Catholicism to the rise of the mass media.