In 1977, Massachusetts senator Edward Moore Kennedy is sworn in at noon as the 39th President of the United States of America.

Media coverage features numerous sentimental retrospectives on the 'Camelot' days of Kennedy's brother, President John F. Kennedy, whose assassination in 1963 remains a national trauma. There are plenty of critics of the incoming president, however: he is despised on the Republican right for his liberal views, and has even been criticized by the Catholic Church, of which he is a member, for his support of the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which struck down legal bans on abortion.