Having earned John F. Kennedy's trust with his 1960 campaign-trail film Primary, cinéma vérité documentarian Robert Drew expressed his desire to document a president in crisis. When African American college students Vivian Malone and James Hood prepared to enroll at the all-white University of Alabama in June 1963, governor George Wallace defied a federal court order and vowed to prevent the students' enrollment. Kennedy granted unprecedented access to Drew and his unobtrusive four-team crew, who used handheld cameras to cover both sides of the conflict: Wallace self-righteously clings to segregation, while a flurry of phone calls between the president, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenback reveal a tightly coordinated plan to dismiss Wallace (in Robert Kennedy's words) as "a second-rate figure." Special feature: Drew's short film Faces of November provides an examination of the meaning of John F. Kennedy's death to those at his funeral.