The death of Jack Fuller, who at the age of 69 slipped away from cancer this week at Chicago, takes from us one of America’s greatest newspapermen. He rose from copyboy to become editor, publisher, and president of the Tribune. He’d answered a draft call during Vietnam and, later, served as an aide to one of America’s greatest attorneys general at a dangerous hour for our republic. He wrote two classic books on news values just when newspaperdom appeared to be abandoning them.

Fuller was the first person we met when we arrived at the Saigon bureau of Pacific Stars and Stripes, the GI daily. One of its star reporters, he was nursing a canteen cup of bourbon and reading Hannah Arendt’s “On Revolution.” We spent the better part of a year in harness with one of the merriest bands of newspapermen in the war. When America invaded Cambodia, Fuller and a Stripes colleague, Phil McCombs, jumped into a Stripes station wagon and set out on a desperate race to catch up with American armor.

They careered into Cambodia through the Parrot’s Beak. The highway was deserted, an ominous sign. Eventually Fuller spotted a civilian hunched over a radio and some maps. The civilian refused to answer — or even acknowledge — any questions until a frustrated Fuller demanded: “How far can we go until someone kills us?” The civilian looked off into the middle distance, paused, and then replied: “Eight klicks.” Fuller jumped back into the Stripes station wagon and drove 12 kilometers, until catching up with our tanks.

Fuller had been drafted out of Yale Law School. He eventually graduated at the top of his class and landed a job as one of the executive assistants to Attorney General Edward Levi. Fuller was promptly sent over to the CIA to represent the attorney general in a working group trying to untangle the scandals of the day. When it was announced that something was so secret it couldn’t be shared with even the President, Fuller — who but several years earlier had held the fourth lowest rank in the Army — found himself laying down the law to a flag officer.

Jack turned down a chance to go to the New York Times and staked his career with his hometown paper, for which his father, Ernest Fuller, had been an editor. Jack won his Pulitzer for editorials on the Constitution and ended up as editor in chief of the Tribune, then its publisher, eventually president. He wrote novels, composed jazz (he was fluent on the piano), and was a trustee of the University of Chicago. He hosted a conference on war reporting at Cantigny, estate of the Tribune’s late proprietor, Colonel McCormick.

The first of Fuller’s two books about journalism, “News Values,” asserted the old verities when newspapers had begun their decline. “Though I am optimistic that people want us to act in accord with our better angels,” he warned in a classic Fullerian formulation, “they can be tempted.” As the old order collapsed, Fuller brought out another book, “What Is Happening To News?” It examined the challenges of the Internet age through the prism of neuroscience. He wrote several novels, including one, “Fragments,” about Vietnam.

Fuller’s wife, Debra Moskovits, was with Jack as he lay dying, and told us he was at peace. Could that be, we wondered, at least in part because of a truth he glimpsed when, years after the war, he returned to Vietnam in a Tribune jet. He’d been eager to see what had become of the Stripes villa in Saigon. The city had changed so much that it took a while to find it, but Fuller finally did. Before his communist minders could stop him, he bounded inside, only to discover that it had become a preschool. Fuller was welcomed by the schoolmistress, who gave him a tour.

A curtain obscured the room that had once held our maps, radios, whiskey, and typewriters, the room where we’d met Fuller, bourbon and Hannah Arendt in hand. When the schoolmarm pulled the curtain aside, Fuller was stunned. He stood speechless. For there were two dozen little girls, neatly arranged on mats on the floor, asleep for their afternoon nap. The way Fuller told the story illuminated one of the truths about war. It may be the greatest of stories, but even it is transient. Eventually life gathers the survivors and moves on.