The President later admitted that he may have made a ‘motivational misjudgement’ in announcing that the goods would be sold to compensate police and supermarket chains. Most people thought of the police as more felonious than the average man in the street; and most people believed that supermarket chains could easily sustain their losses. Apart from that, the supermarkets’ help-yourself technique of selling had convinced most people that the goods on the shelves were pretty much theirs already.

A special NBC film report at mid-afternoon showed a small country store in Forty Four, Arkansas. Looters had ransacked it during the morning, and had beheaded the proprietor with an axe as he tried to stop them. The whole store was splattered with blood, even the light fitting that hung from the ceiling. In an outraged interview, the President’s adviser on National Security said that the United States no longer had any normal right to condemn the barbaric practices of any other country, because the Americans who had committed this crime were ‘Neanderthals.’

Strangely, though, as the sun went down over the eastern seaboard, and the nation settled down for another night, the first shock and the panic began to subside, and were almost immediately replaced by boredom with the subject of looting, and irritation. Viewers began to call the major TV networks to complain that the extended evenings news bulletins were interrupting their regular viewing. A re-run of The Sting had been promised for Monday night’s NBC movie, and many television viewers were afraid they were going to miss it.

So by eight o’clock, most channels returned to normal schedules, except PBS, which doggedly kept on with interviews and analyses of the Sunday night riots. For most people’s attention-span, however, it was probably more than time to change over to something fresh. By eight o’clock, almost every available political commentator had been able to put in his ten-cents’ worth, and the news programmes were reduced to interviewing Naderites, John Birchites, and disaffected evangelists.

Only one major protagonist in the events of the previous night had yet to speak. Senator Shearson Jones, the senior senator from Kansas. He had been unreachable all day, even to Presidential aides. They had tried to telephone him from the White House sixteen times on Monday morning, but each time they had been told that he was ‘still en route to Washington.’ A message was left that the President wanted to speak to him the minute he stepped through his office door.