The “split screen” convergence of important news this summer — from Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Ferguson, Mo. — recalls an astonishing day 50 years ago next month. On Thursday, Oct. 15, 1964, the Yankees played the Cardinals at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. It was the deciding game of that year’s World Series, and, off the field, it seemed that all hell was breaking loose.

Before NBC broadcast (“in living color”) the first pitch of Game 7, by the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, the competing dramas had already begun. President Lyndon Johnson’s longtime chief aide, Walter Jenkins, had been jailed in what The New York Times, on its front page, called a “morals case.” It was just three weeks before a presidential election, and L.B.J.'s campaign was doing damage control.

When Johnson’s recordings of his private conversations were released decades later, they revealed the president’s first telephone briefing by his then-consigliere, the Washington lawyer (later a Supreme Court justice) Abe Fortas, about Jenkins’s liaison with another man at a Washington Y.M.C.A. “I just can’t believe this!” Johnson told Fortas. He asked, “Was a fee involved?” Until the day he died, L.B.J. was privately certain that Jenkins had been “framed” by the Republicans.

Capitalizing on Jenkins’s arrest, Johnson’s opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, fulminated that Americans required “clear and constant evidence of the highest morality” in their government. One Goldwater aide told a reporter that the Jenkins case could have a “terrific impact” on the campaign. Others in Goldwater’s campaign warned that the presidential assistant’s secrets had made him susceptible to blackmail by a foreign power.