After the 1929 stock market crash, Kane relinquishes control of his empire to Thatcher's syndicate. In 1898, The Inquirer attempts to draw the United States into war with Spain. He moves into the paper's offices and with the help of his best friend, Jedidiah Leland, who acts as the drama critic, turns it into a lively, muckraking publication, which attacks slum landlords, swindlers and big business. When Kane turns twenty-five, he assumes control of the world's sixth largest private fortune, and while professing disinterest in most of his holdings, writes Thatcher that he intends to run The Inquirer, a small, New York newspaper acquired through a foreclosure. Despite the boy's protests, he is sent away to live with Thatcher.

Kane hands over management of the mine's returns to Thatcher, against her husband's wishes, then grants the financier guardianship over her son. As young Charlie plays outside with his sled, Mrs. Learning that she has become wealthy from mining shares left her by a former boarder, she is determined that her son will be reared and educated in the East. Next, Thompson reads the unpublished memoirs of Wall Street financier Walter Parks Thatcher, Kane's guardian and trustee of the mining fortune left to Kane by his mother: Thatcher first meets young Kane in 1871 at his mother's Colorado boardinghouse. After the drunken Susan orders Thompson to leave, the accommodating bartender reports her claim that she had never heard of Rosebud. Thompson first approaches Kane's second wife, singer Susan Alexander, in the Atlantic City nightclub where she now performs.

Seventy-year-old newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane dies in his palatial Florida home, Xanadu, after uttering the single word “Rosebud.” While watching a newsreel summarizing the years during which Kane built a dying newspaper into a major empire, married and divorced twice, ran unsuccessfully for governor and saw the collapse of his newspaper empire during the Depression, an editor decides they have not captured the essence of the controversial newspaperman and assigns reporter Jerry Thompson to discover the meaning of Kane's last word.

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