Neville tells the audience that in that morning's newspaper he read of the sudden death of William Lawrence, a TV and newspaper commentator he had followed, who a year earlier had correctly and secretly predicted that President Johnson would not seek a second term. Lawrence had gone to New Hampshire to cover the upcoming primary, seemed fine the evening before, and was found dead in his hotel room by the maid the next morning at age fifty-five. Neville uses the sudden death, alongside the example of an eighty-year-old still chasing another billion dollars, to illustrate that no one controls when they will be called and that worldly ambition offers no real security.