Kennedy, John F
Entry updated 14 September 2026. Tagged: Theme, People.
(1917-1963) During his brief presidency, John F Kennedy arguably made his greatest contribution to sf by committing the United States to placing a man on the Moon by 1969 – a promise that reinvigorated America's space program and surely helped to inspire an increased interest in sf in the 1970s and thereafter. When his sudden assassination shocked the nation on 22 November 1963, the lasting reaction in sf was different from its reaction to Elvis Presley's equally unexpected death in 1977. Both the tabloid press and sf writers favoured stories about Elvis faking his own death and remaining alive incognito; but while there were a few similar stories about Kennedy, sf writers usually employed a different strategy to imagine Kennedy's continuing existence: the creation of Alternate Histories in which Kennedy avoided or survived his assassination.
A few Comic book stories add sf elements to Kennedy's presidency. Superman had two meetings with Kennedy: in Edmond Hamilton's and Curt Swan's "The Superman Super-Spectacular" (February 1964 Action Comics), Superman desperately needs someone to impersonate his alter ego Clark Kent at an event where both men are scheduled to attend, so he recruits President Kennedy to do the job; and in E. Nelson Bridwell and Al Plastino's "Superman's Mission for President Kennedy" (July 1964 Superman) Kennedy asks Superman to encourage young people to become physically fit. (Both stories were prepared before Kennedy's assassination.) Kennedy is a character in the Videogame Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010). In Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's Graphic Novel Watchmen (1986-1987), President Kennedy meets Doctor Manhattan. Footage from Kennedy's speech during the Cuban missile crisis is seen in X-Men: First Class (2011), and in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) (see X-Men Films), the Villain Magneto claims that Kennedy was a Mutant. Kennedy also made 29 appearances in the satirical magazine Mad; according to one reader, when Kennedy appeared on television, his child said, "It's the man from Mad magazine!"
Some stories offer alternate explanations for Kennedy's assassination. J G Ballard's "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" (Autumn 1966 Ambit) bizarrely characterizes the event as a sporting event. In Peter Heath's Assassins from Tomorrow (1967), the killers came from the future. Time travellers are involved in the Kennedy assassination in the first issue of Brian Phillipson's, Alexander Murillo's and Alex Cormack's comic book series Future Proof (2021). In the series Dark Skies (1996-1997), the aliens secretly inhabiting Earth and manipulating humanity are connected to Kennedy's assassination. There are two Doctor Who stories that both affirm that Kennedy's assassination occurred and add fantastic characters: David Bishop and James A Stevens's Doctor Who: New Adventures: Who Killed Kennedy?: The Shocking Secret Linking a Time Lord and a President (1996) and Simon Bucher-Jones's "The Annotated Autopsy of Agent A" (in The Book of the Enemy, anth 2018, ed Bucher-Jones)
There is a tasteless videogame, JFK Reloaded (2004), in which players assume the role of Lee Harvey Oswald trying to shoot Kennedy. Yet many Americans reject the idea that there was a sole assassin, and some stories consequently posit that Kennedy's assassination was not caused by a single shooter, but was the result of a conspiracy. Barbara Garson's Satirical play MacBird (1966) employs the structure and language of William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606) to tell the story of how a thinly-disguised Lyndon Johnson arranged the assassination of Kennedy at the urging of his wife. A larger conspiracy is described in Executive Action (1973), and in Richard Condon's Winter Kills (1974), the assassination of a president similar to Kennedy is attributed to a vast conspiracy. Charles McCarry's The Tears of Autumn (1974) claims that Kennedy's assassination was arranged as payback for Kennedy's murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, while in Don DeLillo's Libra (1988), the CIA was actually behind Kennedy's assassination. There is also a conspiracy involving the Kennedy assassination in the videogame Mafia III (2016) and two comic book series: Ethan Sacks and Elvin Ching's Badlands (1991) and Gary Reed and various artists's The Red Diaries: The Kennedy Conspiracy (2018). The faux documentary Interview with the Assassin (2002) asserts that a second gunman was involved in the assassination. The title of Alex Tarnavsky's novel Masters of Deceit: An Epic Novel of the Monstrous Plot Behind the Kennedy Assassination (2014) is self-explanatory.
But as noted, the favourite scenario was an alternate history in which Kennedy is not assassinated. In Gregory Benford's Timescape (1980), a future Scientist's efforts to warn the past about a coming disaster using Tachyons has the unexpected effect of preventing Kennedy's assassination. An episode of the Twilight Zone written by J Neil Schulman, "Profiles in Silver" (1986), features a historian who uses Time Travel to prevent Kennedy's assassination, with unfortunate consequences (the episode was adapted as a film in 1990); a similar effort also results in disaster in Stephen King's 11/22/63 (2011) (adapted as the miniseries 11.22.63 in 2016). But three other time travellers who do the same thing – in Stanley Shapiro's Running against Time (1990), the film Timequest (2000), and Susna Sloate and Kevin Finn's Forward to Camelot (2024) – bring about better outcomes. In the second season of the series The Umbrella Academy (2019-2024), a team of Superheroes also attempts to prevent Kennedy's assassination.
Sometimes, Kennedy survives the assassination without the assistance of time travellers. In Robert Reginald's The Attempted Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Political Fantasy (1976) Lee Harvey Oswald's bullet misses its target. In George Bernau's Promises to Keep (1988) a Kennedy-like president recovers from an assassination attempt. Kennedy also survives the assassination attempt in Stephen Baxter's Voyage (1996), Donald James Lawn's The Memoirs of John F. Kennedy (2010), and Bryce Zabel's Surrounded by Enemies: What If Kennedy Survived Dallas? (2013).
Other stories show Kennedy still alive after 1963 without offering any explanations. The February 1977 issue of the Humour magazine National Lampoon, positing that he was not assassinated, celebrated on its cover the beginning of Kennedy's fifth term in office. In David Means's Hystopia (2016), however, Kennedy only makes it into a third term. In Mark Brunet's Marilyn, Elvis, and the Reality Blues (in Alien Pregnant by Elvis, anth 1994, ed Esther M Friesner and Martin H Greenberg), Kennedy, escorted by the Secret Service, periodically visits Marilyn Monroe, living in an apartment whose residents also include Elvis. In the same anthology, John DeChancie's "Hitler Clone in Argentina Plots Falkland Reprise" shows Kennedy living in an Argentinian enclave with other supposed dead celebrities; residents also include Elvis and Monroe. Mark Lawson's Idlewild, or Everything Is Subject to Change (1995) features both Kennedy and Monroe surviving until 1993. Jeff Greenfield's If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History (2013) offers informed speculations about events during the imagined continuation of Kennedy's presidency. Marvel Comics's many alternate Earths also feature various versions of Kennedy's presidency.
Other stories involving Kennedy include Nancy Freedman's Joshua, Son of None (1973), and the animated series Clone High (2002-2003), wherein Kennedy is Cloned. and Garth Ennis and various artists's graphic novel Hellblazer: Damnation's Flame (2003), depicting Kennedy as living in a limbo world after his assassination. In the film Back to the Future (1985), the time-travelling Marty McFly startles his grandfather by noting that a street has been renamed "John F. Kennedy Drive", since he was relatively unknown at the time. In Barry N Malzberg's "Close-Up Photos Show JFK Skull on Moon!" (in Alien Pregnant by Elvis) Kennedy finds himself after the assassination alive and lying unharmed without protective garments on the Moon. A story in Matthew Glen Ward's John F. Kennedy Lives in the Future! (2010) portrays Kennedy as a time traveller. In Brian Posehn, Gerry Duggan, and Tony Moore's comic Deadpool Vol.1: Dead Presidents (2013), the Superhero finds that all American presidents, including Kennedy, have been resurrected as Zombies, so he must kill them again. There is an entire anthology devoted to imaginative stories about Kennedy, Mike Resnick's Alternate Kennedys (1992); they are not all alternate histories.
In Robert Silverberg's "After the Myths Went Home" (November 1969 F&SF), a machine that brings human myths to life also produces Kennedy, who protests, "I was no myth .... I was real. I lived." He receives the reply, "You became a myth." As these sf stories affirm, truer words were never spoken. [GW]
see also: Icons.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
born Brookline, Massachusetts: 29 May 1917
died Dallas, Texas: 22 November 1963
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