Done In A Day – Elisa Tamarkin

He is simply incapable of imagining a revolt on board the ship (against the colonial power). So even as he misreads the situation and the captain seems to confirm his misreading as correct—“doubtless, doubtless, Señor”—Delano is also doubtless, that is, he does not doubt his perceived reality of a situation that needs his aid, which is actually a revolution that wants him gone.28 And every seeming validation on the part of Benito Cereno (“doubtless, Señor”) is actually a direct indictment of Delano’s perception which is doubt-less, but he remains impervious to the meaning of the captain’s literal words, just as he is impervious to gloom.

“Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Greene says. People in both the embassy and Washington began to worry that Martin had grown unbalanced. Some suggested he be removed for health reasons. Some, including a number in his own embassy, believed him to be “mad as a March hare and just about as elusive.” The concern was not with his continued “hawkishness, since State was hardly a covey of doves, but with his unshakable, almost eerie optimism,” wrote journalist Robert Sam Anson in New Times just after the end.

Congress was about to refuse aid for the last time and insist on an evacuation, and Martin ignored it. A former aide said Martin ignored everything and “might just as well have been on the moon,” which in fact was just where Martin had said he liked to imagine himself, as a “dispassionate observer viewing Vietnam as from a seat on the moon.”29 On April 13, Radio Hanoi issued a warning that, if Americans wanted to evacuate Saigon, they had better do so immediately.

The PAVN was advancing according to plan, and General Truong admitted that senior levels and all other ranks of the ARVN were “permeated with defeatism.”30 Martin wrote to Kissinger to say it was easy to see how a sense of defeat “would be reached by listening to the broadcasts and reading the newspaper dispatches,” but that “objective observations on the ground in Saigon on both the political and military fronts justify at the very least the Scotch verdict—not proven.”

We should be faithful, he told Kissinger, not so much to the intelligence as to those underlying realities that have been concealed by the information “that has for so long obscured the perception of the actual realities in Vietnam,” suggesting to him that the morale of the ARVN was not likely to suddenly collapse.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2026 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E.

60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2026 Printed in the United States of America 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-84699-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-84702-3 (ebook) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226847023.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of California, Berkeley, toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tamarkin, Elisa, author. | Tamarkin, Bob. Diary of S. Viet’s last hours. Title: Done in a day : telex from the fall of Saigon / Elisa Tamarkin.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2026. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2025039215 | ISBN 9780226846996 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226847023 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Tamarkin, Bob. | Tamarkin, Bob. Diary of S. Viet’s last hours. | Chicago daily news (Chicago, Ill. : 1875) | Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Press coverage—United States. | Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Journalists.

| Foreign correspondents—United States. Classification: LCC DS559.46 .T36 2026 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025039215 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Authorized Representative for EU General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) queries: Easy Access System Europe—Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, [email protected]. Any other queries: https://press.uchicago.edu/press/contact.html. OceanofPDF.com Dusk drifts into dawn . . . the makeup man slips a fresh set of numbers into the dateline . . . life looks at another day. Done in a Day: From the Columns of the Chicago Daily News (1945) OceanofPDF.com Contents One: Done in a Day Two: The Last Helicopter Three: ENDIT Four: Loose Ends Five: Freefall Coda: The Last Newspaper Gallery of color figures “Morgue of Final Editions” Acknowledgments Appendix: Bob Tamarkin, “Diary of S.

Viet’s Last Hours,” Chicago Daily News, May 6, 1975 Notes Index OceanofPDF.com One Done in a Day Finish every day, & be done with it. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to his daughter, Ellen Emerson, April 1854 The story of the fall of Saigon has been told so often, you might think you would have to stop sometime. But there will always be a succession of accounts, more or less new and gathered up with every anniversary as a way of coming around again to the end of the war that was understood to be the war “without end.”

There will be the same sense of surprise every time that the end arrived in a single day after thirty years of US involvement, with the same understanding of its basic inevitability for just as long.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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