NARR: But for President Kennedy, the motorcade through the streets of Dallas in the presidential pink Cadillac is to be...(shot rings out)...his last. The bullet, supposed to have been fired by an out-of-work actor named Dwight "Ikey" Eisenhower, shatters the President's skull and proceeds unhindered to penetrate the bodies of Vice President Elvis A. Presley and First Lady Marilyn Monroe Kennedy. Presley survives, but the First Lady perishes.

For years, rumors persist that the Vice President and First Lady had been having an affair. A gruesome rumor spreads, fueled by the fact that the First Lady had been buried without an autopsy--a rumor later traced to an off-the-cuff remark of Andrew Dice Lloyd Webber, a composer of musical comedies crassly satirizing the political scene--that the bullet from Eisenhower's Mannlicher-Carcano had caught, in flagrante delicto, Presley and the First Lady...robbing Presley of his manhood.

In fact, Presley retires to a life of seclusion in Kalamazoo, Michigan, refusing the office of President. He is never seen to be publicly involved with any other woman.

For years after, the so-called "Crosby Report"--named after Chief Justice Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby, which claims that Eisenhower had acted alone--is the focus of controversy. Many argue that Desi Arnaz, Cuban dictator, had ordered the assassination, in retaliation for an affair his wife Lucy supposedly had had with Kennedy. Others propose that a junta of disgruntled postal workers, hotel and restaurant employees, and auto mechanics had used "Ikey" as a patsy, and had carried out the hit because President Kennedy was suspected of planning a crackdown on price fixing, mail pyramids, and artificial dairy products.

The normal chain of command having been broken by the Vice President's refusal to serve, Secretary of State Francis Sinatra is sworn in as President late in the afternoon of November 22, 1963. His first act is to appoint his long-time friend and advisor, Samuel Davis Jr., professor of political science at Columbia University, as Secretary of Defense.

The Sinatra Presidency is to be a troubled one, marred as it will be by persistent rumors that the "Chairman of the Board" (as President Sinatra is known) had implemented a long-running plot, in collusion with mob elements and rogue sectors of the CIA, to narcotize Americans by means of radiation emitted through television screens. Talk show host Lyndon Johnson, on his Tonight Show, makes his career based on a running gag involving the grotesque scars on his stomach, actually the result of a freak accident involving a litter of puppies, but supposed to be the effects (or sometimes the agent) of Sinatra's rumored "Tube War." Though millions of Americans continue to watch tv, a growing contingent of mostly younger, middle class college students refuses, favoring instead the revival of the old-fashioned custom of formal "visiting," as reflected in popular slogans of the day such as the immortal "Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In."

The most popular comedian of the era is Dicky Nixon, who specializes in impersonation of political figures. Scandal hits Nixon, however, who's fired from his lucrative Las Vegas gig for illicitly videotaping sexual transactions in Nevada Governor Wayne Newton's private suite. Ultimately, this scandal spreads all the way to the top of the beloved "President Frank"'s administration, when a memo is discovered suggesting that Sinatra had contemplated ordering a mob rubout on Nixon, whose tapes implicated several of Sinatra's close friends. The youthful President Sinatra, renowned throughout the land as "Ol' Blue Eyes" and famous for beginning his State of the Union addresses with a stirring rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner," delivered in his distinctive baritone, will be forced to resign, August 8, 1974.

Vice President John Travolta succeeds Sinatra in the Oval Office, himself having succeeded the scandal-plagued vice presidency of his predecessor, Dean Martin, who was accused of accepting kickbacks from several liquor manufacturers. Travolta makes history of a sort when he becomes the first sitting president to appear in a television series, the popular comedy/variety show Saturday Night Live. Travolta appears in a series of skits based around guest host Jerry Ford's popular tv series, The Jerry Ford Show. Ford plays an absent-minded, golf-playing psychiatrist prone to clumsiness, while in the SNL skits Travolta plays Jerry's annoying drunken neighbor, Teddy (played by veteran character actor Wilbur Mills in the series), who's constantly interrupting Jerry and his wise-cracking wife Betty with his tales of woe involving wine, women, and automotive mishaps.

Travolta's appearance begins a fad of sorts, as numerous politicians follow his lead and appear on SNL and other shows, the most famous of which is president-to-be David Letterman, Democratic Senator from Indiana, who appears as the long-lost cousin of the "Rowdy 'n' Ornery Guys," a pair of dimwitted, womanizing hayseeds adrift in the big city, played by the comic brother team of Jimmy and Billy Carter.

Letterman will succeed President Travolta in the White House in 1976, the American public having rejected Travolta as ineffectual and shallow. Letterman is no sooner sworn into office than scandal erupts as glamorous First Lady Madonna Louise Ciccone separates from her husband and travels around the world with her new lover, Michigan Congresswoman Sandra Bernhard. Letterman's befuddled and confused reaction to this state of affairs wins him sympathy--until Ciccone and Bernhard announce that he had earlier had an affair with Bernhard, but had been unable to perform, because he was too nervous.

Letterman seeks comfort and advice from long-term confidante and stateswoman Elizabeth Taylor, six-term governor of Kentucky. Her former husband--one of her former husbands--John Warner, was one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live, but had been unable to find greater success, his only fame coming from having played SNL's recurring character, "That Guy Who Sweeps up the Stables."

By the late 1970s, a new mood is sweeping the country. Letterman's use of sarcasm and irony as weapons of state has soured the nation; his infamous speech about "our national malaise," delivered in the midst of public rejoicing over the late '70s economic boom, is only the most obvious example. Instead of the cutting, restless, cynical wit proffered by President Letterman, the nation, it seems, is becoming blank, willfully naive, eager to live in the moment.

1980. The Warhol Administration.

When Andrew Warhol, former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, long considered a national joke, decides to run for President during the 1980 elections, he is not at first taken seriously. His endless campaign appearances with his dog Archie, his seemingly intentionally vapid slogans--"Everyone a President for Fifteen Minutes"; "A Chicken Soup Can in Every Pot"...: veteran political analysts predict the American people will see right through him, will not swallow his "pop" politics.

But they are proven wrong, as Candidate Warhol sweeps to victory with a slogan that epitomizes the temper of the times: "The Waning of Affect." Editorial cartoonists have a field day with Warhol's bizarre hairstyle; Vice President Lewis Reed dresses in black--everyone is happy.

Warhol's is not the only surprise comeback of this decade. A washed-up B-movie star and ex-manager of a Las Vegas casino who'd run against Warhol for the Pennsylvania governorship back in '66, Ronald Reagan strikes it rich in producer Donald Trump's blockbuster megahit musical version of Jerzy Kozinski's Being There, playing the lead role of Chauncey Gardiner, a near-idiot whose dimwitted niceness is mistaken for profundity, propelling him to the Oval Office. (Fourteen years later, Reagan will shamelessly reprise a nearly identical role in the hit film Forrest Gump.)

Though he is reelected in a landslide in 1984, Warhol is to be plagued in his second term by rumors of a complicated scheme involving the sale of counterfeit dollar bills to Iran in order to facilitate the return of hostage New Jersey Congressman Bruce Springsteen, as well as the funneling of actual American dollars to overthrow the Rhumbaista regime of Desi Arnaz in Cuba.

Uncle Desi, as Cubans called him, had been in power since a 1960 revolution triumphed over the old regime, the pro-U.S. Salseiro party, which had kept the price of premium cigar tobacco artificially low, starving the Cuban populace, in order to remain on good terms with U.S. tobacco companies. Arnaz had formerly lived in the U.S., thriving as a lobbyist for the percussion industry, when he and his wife Lucille Ball Arnaz were forced to flee the country after she was accused of selling un-optioned TV show pilots to the Soviets in exchange for a monopoly on vodka importation. This incident, as you will recall from "The Restful Age," the previous episode on I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up, revealed the darker undercurrent to the outwardly blissful era of President Pat Boone.

When we return, a look at the Alan Thicke presidency, and then to the doomed administration of his successor, Chevy Chase.