The 1968 assassinations (canon event)
| Scenario | Johnson 1965 (and a custom president based on it) |
|---|---|
| Era | The Sixties |
| When | March 1968 and May 1968 |
| Outcome | Both are crisis events |
The two killings of 1968 are scripted events: each is written to happen in a specific month of the term rather than being drawn at random. Both plays are set in a Johnson presidency that begins in January 1965. The King event falls in the thirty-ninth month of the term and the Kennedy event in the forty-first month, which puts them in March and May 1968, two months apart. This is roughly a month earlier than the real dates of 4 April and 5 June, though the two-month gap between the events is kept. Each plays once and does not recur.
Memphis, March 1968
The briefing reports that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers, and that the shot was fired from a nearby rooming house. Riots have broken out in Washington, Chicago, Baltimore and Louisville, and the National Guard is mobilising in several states. The briefing states that the moral leader of the civil rights movement is dead, and that the next few hours will decide whether the country descends into chaos or turns its grief into action. Three responses are offered. One is a call for calm and nonviolence in King's memory, paired with a push to pass the Fair Housing Act immediately. Another is to send federal troops into the burning cities alongside an FBI manhunt for the killer. The third is a national day of mourning combined with an emergency meeting of civil rights leaders.
Los Angeles, May 1968
The briefing reports that Senator Robert F. Kennedy has been shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, moments after winning the California Democratic primary, and that he is in surgery with a head wound while bystanders wrestled the gunman down. It notes that this is a second Kennedy shot and a second assassination in two months, and asks whether the country's politics can survive the violence. Three responses are offered. One is an address on political violence paired with a gun control proposal. Another is to focus on a properly handled investigation without politicising the death. The third is a national commission on violence in American society.
Afterwards
The player answers each event in their own words, and the game reacts as it does to any other month. Neither event changes what follows: the pool's other civil rights events, including the split between the movement's nonviolent and Black Power wings, can still come up at random either before or after these two.