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concerts or prayer vigils—but viewers at home aren’t interested. They prefer news, even the same, sad facts, even if they’ve heard them before. The repetition is comforting. TV anchors that weekend, one viewer will later write to NBC’s Chet Huntley, are like “old friends … telling us about the tragedy until we could absorb it.”
    So that’s what the anchors do: tell the country what they know, over and over again. This morning, NBC will replay the same montage, with the same background music, the same pictures, and roughly the same script, at least once every half hour.
    This Saturday morning, when everything is uncertain, this is one thing Americans have. They do not have their president, they do not have normal life, they do not have faith that everything will be okay. All they have for certain is a story:
    The president went to Dallas on a bright autumn day.
    There, a madman shot and killed him.
    He returned to his capital in a coffin.
    In her agony, his widow has shown unimaginable strength.
    The vice president has recited the oath of office and assumed the presidency.
    But that isn’t the point of the story. The point of the story is the first thing the news host told them, the one thing everyone knows for sure: the president of the United States is dead.
    A T 8:40 THAT Saturday morning, two iron gates opened outside an imposing gray mansion in the Spring Valley section of Washington. A black limousine slid down a driveway scattered with dead leaves. Under police escort, the car turned south and sped swiftly through the capital’s near-deserted streets. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the living president of the United States, was en route to the White House.
    Most Americans did not witness this procession. The networks had sent crews to stand outside the Johnson family home, where Johnson had spent the night after returning from Dallas. Earlier in the hour, a host had promised
Today
’s viewers that the program would show the new president leaving his home for the White House. But when the gates opened, NBC was in the midst of its montage, and the program’s producers chose to stick with their scripted story. By the time it was over, Johnson’s car had disappeared.
    A day earlier, the man inside the limousine had been the vice president, touring his home state of Texas with Kennedy. He and his wife, Lady Bird, had planned to host the Kennedys at their ranch in the Hill Country, west of Austin, that Saturday morning.To think of the things they’d been worried about just a day earlier—which champagne and cigarettes to procure for Mrs. Kennedy; how to accommodate the special plywood and horsehair mattress favored by the commander in chief.
    How quickly it had all changed.The Johnsons had been ridingseveral cars behind the Kennedys as the presidential motorcade made its way through Dallas. They were waving at the crowds when they heard a loud explosion. As the smell of gunpowder filled the air, Johnson looked up and saw a body hurtling toward him. It was Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent charged with protecting the vice president’s life. Youngblood ordered Johnson to get down and the vice president obeyed, pressing his face to the floor. Another shot echoed through Dealey Plaza. Johnson wouldn’t know it for another hour, but in that moment, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life ended. As he stared at the floor of the limousine and felt the weight of Youngblood digging into his back, Lyndon Johnson became the thirty-sixth president of the United States.
    For a moment, all was silent, and then a ghostly voice came over the Secret Service radio: “Let’s get out of here.” The limousines careened through the streets of Dallas until at last they reached Parkland Hospital. There, doctors worked over Kennedy’s body, still trying to save his life, but Jacqueline Kennedy, looking on, knew that these efforts were in vain. Her pink suit was covered in her husband’s blood and brain tissue, and she had held