As was usual, Lancette was alone in her office. She had arrived early, knowing that the responses to the ICEMAN inquiry she had dispatched after the assassination awaited her. Through the day, Lancette had been plowing through the material. But the televised images had pulled her away: The noon remembrance, when all traffic ceased and church bells rang across the city and the nation. The service at the National Cathedral. The slow procession through Washington and across the water into Virginia. The mourners lining the route.

Now the President’s family and friends were filing out behind Margaret and Jack. Carefully, they descended the hill, with Lem Jordan wheeling Jack down the incline. As the wife and son were helped into a black van, a news anchor asked a correspondent what was on Margaret Hanover’s schedule for the rest of the day.

“Nothing,” said the correspondent.

The network rolled background footage: Margaret Hanover by the side of her husband-to-be the night he was elected attorney general of Louisiana. Margaret Hanover introducing her husband and declaring victory the night he was elected governor. Margaret Hanover coming out of the hospital to announce to the world that their only child, Jack, had survived the car crash that had occurred when Bob drove the family truck off the road while returning from a father-and-son fishing trip. But, she said between tears, Jack was paralyzed and brain damaged. The accident—Hanover said he had swerved to miss a deer—had left the father uninjured.

Another correspondent reviewed the familiar tale of the Hanovers. When she was a girl, her father, Robert Charles Mason, a prominent financier and political kingpin in Louisiana known as “Chasie,” packed her off to boarding school in Vermont. Her best friend there, a fellow Louisianan, was forever talking about this boy back in Baton Rouge: handsome, she gushed, “smart as paint,” and going places. Years later, Margaret, then a student at Yale, was visiting a friend at Radcliffe. She attended a Harvard production of Romeo and Juliet, and there he was—Romeo—the fellow her girlfriend had raved about. After the show, she waited by the stage door. She introduced herself. They went out for coffee. A romance began. When Hanover was in Vietnam, she wrote every day. When he returned, they both enrolled in law school at New York University.