The relatively new CNN broadcasted a speech by Ronald Reagan, then two months in office …

… and then about 45 minutes later …

I found out this news between classes at La Follette High School in Madison. I ran into my new girlfriend, told her the news, and, according to her, she said something uncomplimentary about Reagan, and I got mad and didn’t speak to her the rest of the day. That was an overreaction on my 15-year-old part, but it was the first time I had experienced a nearly successful presidential assassination attempt before of someone I supported to be president. (Gerald Ford was the object of two assassination attempts within a month of each other in 1975, but the would-be assassins missed.)

You may notice how rattled ABC-TV’s Frank Reynolds seemed to be. Reynolds covered John F. Kennedy’s assassination from Chicago, home of a mail-order gun dealer from which Lee Harvey Oswald purchased his rifle. Reynolds’ state of mind was likely less because of that and more because his son, Dean, was covering Reagan’s speech for United Press International. The younger Reynolds corrected an earlier mistaken report that presidential press secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head, had died, which prompted his father to yell at his coworkers, live on the air, “Let’s get it nailed down … somebody … let’s find out! Let’s get it straight so we can report this thing accurately!”