Thompson (William Alland)’s Timeline and Summary
- Thompson and his news team discuss their latest production: a newsreel about the life and death of Charles Kane.
- But Thompson's boss thinks the newsreel doesn't offer any original insight, so he tells Thompson to head out and interview people, hoping to figure out what Kane meant by saying, "rosebud" as his final word.
- Thompson tries to sees Kane's second wife Susan, but he can't get a word out of her. So he heads to a library to read the diary of Mr. Thatcher, a bank man who was Charles Kane's legal guardian up to the age of twenty-one.
- The diary recounts the story of how Thatcher first carried Charles away from his parents. Thatcher concludes by saying that Kane was a renegade at heart whose only goal was to disrupt the world around him.
- Thompson goes to see Bernstein, one of Kane's right-hand men from his newspaper days. Bernstein tells him he has no clue what rosebud means, but he gives him some great info about Kane's early days at The Inquirer.
- Once he's given Thompson all he knows, Bernstein tells him to visit Kane's best friend Jed Leland in a hospital.
- Thompson visits Leland and gets some more insight into Charles Kane's huge ego and the reasons his political career went up in smoke. Leland concludes by saying that Kane was a great man, but totally incapable of learning from his mistakes.
- After Leland, Thompson pays another visit to Kane's second wife Susan. This time, she tells him about what it was like to be married to Kane, especially in his older years.
- The older he got, the more isolated he became from the world around him. Eventually, it all became too much for Susan and she left him.
- Finally, Thompson goes to talk to Kane's head butler, Raymond. Raymond recalls how he heard Kane say the word "rosebud" twice, once after Susan left him and once just before he died. But Raymond has no clue what the word means.
- Thompson ends the movie by saying that no one will probably ever know what "rosebud" means. He leaves the Kane residence at Xanadu to catch his train back to New York.