Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev regards President Kennedy as weak. The Soviets continue to take an aggressive approach to the Cold War by, among other things, building the Berlin Wall. On an international tour, Vice President Johnson makes a stop in Beirut, where he enjoys the limelight. Abroad, Johnson often behaves like the powerful man he wishes to be, making grandiose and irresponsible statements, for instance, in praise of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s brutal despot.

Bobby Kennedy immerses himself in the civil rights struggle, exemplified at its most barbaric by the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmitt Till in Mississippi, an event to which O’Reilly and Dugard devote nearly five pages. Till hailed from Chicago, where the code of conduct between Black and white people differs from that of Mississippi. On a dare, the Black teenager made a pass at a 21-year-old married white woman named Carolyn Bryant. A few days later, Till was beaten and murdered by Bryant’s husband, Roy, and an older friend named Big Milam. Till’s mother made sure that his casket remained open so the world could see what the two Mississippi murderers (and the people who enabled such barbarity, including the all-white jury that later acquitted them) had done to her son.