It is November 1964: there has been a bitterly contested Presidential election; the war in the Midwest has become bogged down in the rain and the cold of the coming winter; the peace conference is deadlocked at the old United Nations building in Manhattan; and the ongoing reverberations of the events of early July seem to overhang everything like some dreadful Biblical blight.
The American people are in shock, divided rather than united by the result of the Presidential race, yearning for strong leadership and a new start. But the slate cannot be so easily, or so painlessly wiped clean, Wisconsin and northern Illinois, and the great ruined city of Chicago are in the hands of rebels whose nihilistic God demands an ‘end of days’, wracking the surrounding states with a bloody, ongoing terrorist insurgency.
A little over two years after the ‘war to end all wars’ the American people are confronting the reality of the altered world. A second war rages in the Korean peninsula, and American and British forces circle each other warily from the North Atlantic to the Straits of Hormuz, while the wounded but still defiant Soviet bear broods menacingly behind its borders.
So, even though the likelihood of a new global thermonuclear war has retreated, nothing has actually been settled. There is no peace or prospect of it any time soon at home or abroad and meanwhile, in Philadelphia the Warren Commission on the Conduct and Causes of the Cuban Missiles War is sitting in open session in City Hall.
Whatever has become of the American Dream?