Assassination of John F. Kennedy in popular culture

Gideon's March (Hodder & Stoughton) by J. J. Marric is fictional novel published in 1962, the year before the Kennedy assassination. In the book, Inspector George Gideon learns of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy during a state visit to London. The assassination is to take place during a parade, by means of a bomb; the assassin, called O'Hara, is a Southern bigot who hates the President for his Roman-Catholic faith and his civil-rights initiatives.

J. G. Ballard wrote a 1967 short-short story titled "The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race."

The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson depicts the assassination scene, with several would-be assassins trying to kill Kennedy simultaneously.

Sherlock Holmes in Dallas (Dodd, Mead, & Co. 1980) by Edmund Aubrey, brings the renowned consulting detective out of his Sussex retirement to investigate the Kennedy assassination.

Libra (1988) by Don DeLillo is a fictional imagining of the assassination, with Lee Harvey Oswald as the protagonist.

The Underworld USA Trilogy (1995-2009) by James Ellroy, particularly the 1995 novel American Tabloid, constructs a fictional narrative involving several characters who have part in the Kennedy assassination.

In Columbo: The Grassy Knoll (1994) by William Harrington, the titular lieutenant solves the Kennedy Assassination after a talk-show host is murdered before an exposé.[1][2]

The 1996 Doctor Who spin-off novel Who Killed Kennedy features the Doctor's enemy the Master attempting to kill Oswald before the assassination as Kennedy's survival would trigger a chain reaction in history that could wipe the Doctor from existence, requiring journalist James Stevens to go back in time and kill Kennedy himself (acting as both gunmen at different points in his life, as Oswald's rifle had a misaligned targeting scope that prevented him delivering the fatal shot from the Book Depository on the first trip). It should also be noted that coincidentally, the TV show this book is based on started the day after the assassination with the first episode delayed by eighty seconds due to news coverage of the killing.[3]

The Star Spangled Contract (1976) by District Attorney Jim Garrison, and Captains and the Kings by Taylor Caldwell, are both based, in part, on a conspiratorial view of the Kennedy assassination.

In The Amnesia Desk by Jim Sullivan, the son of Kennedy's 'real' killer - a CIA assassin - has to flee from the Amnesia Desk, a CIA clean-up team

In the first album of Jean van Hamme and William Vance's comic book series XIII, the title character is shown to be the alleged assassin of fictional U.S. President William B. Sheridan, who was murdered in his car during an official presidential visit to a city. The events are clearly based on JFK's assassination.[4]

In the Ultimate Marvel universe, Kennedy's true assassin is Red Skull, the son of Captain America. Nick Fury muses that the assassination of Kennedy was the Skull's way of showing that he would no longer take orders from America.

In the 2008–2009 series The Umbrella Academy: Dallas by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, the Kennedy assassination is a central plot element. The series initially takes place in a timeline where the assassination never happened, until an organisation of time-travelling assassins go back to 1963 to kill Kennedy. When the Umbrella Academy intercept the gunmen, The Rumour, disguised as Jacqueline Kennedy, uses her powers to make Kennedy's head explode.

In Superman: Red Son, Superman's space pod crash lands in the Soviet Union instead of the United States. Richard Nixon wins the 1960 Presidential Election, and he is the one who is assassinated in Dallas instead of Kennedy, who in this timeline marries Marilyn Monroe, and does not become President until decades later in 1998. In 2004 he is succeeded by Lex Luthor, who with Jimmy Olsen as his Vice President, finally wins this extended version of the Cold War.

In the 1980 novel Timescape by Gregory Benford, Kennedy's assassination was averted by a high school student who interrupted Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository, attacking the shooter and sending the would-be fatal third shot awry. Although seriously injured, Kennedy survived. This interference created an alternate timeline in which William Scranton was the US President in 1974, having defeated Robert F. Kennedy due to a telephone tapping scandal.

In the 1992 anthology Alternate Kennedys, edited by Mike Resnick, 25 science fiction authors imagine alternate histories involving the Kennedys, including speculating upon different outcomes of November 22, 1963.

In Stephen Baxter's novel Voyage (1996), the Dallas assassination attempt only succeeds in crippling Kennedy, but Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy is killed. Kennedy is re-elected in 1964 and commits the United States to landing a manned vessel on Mars, which occurs in 1986. The novel uses the assassination attempt only as the impetus for an alternate history US space program.

Jeff Golden's 2008 novel Unafraid: A Novel of the Possible speculates on what would have happened had the assassination attempt been unsuccessful, with Kennedy serving two full terms as President. (ISBN 0595471927) Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle jams during the assassination attempt, leaving Kennedy wounded and Governor Connally dead.

In the 2010 book, TimeRiders, a training mission involves going back to November 22, 1963, to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK. This results in a new timeline in which a large space program sends a mission to Mars on September 10, 2001. The trainees learn that history corrects itself, and Oswald, who was originally a lone gunman, was no longer alone when he shot the President but was part of a conspiracy, thanks to their interference with the timestream.

Stephen King's novel 11/22/63, published in 2011, tells about a time traveler trying to stop the assassination. The novel was adapted into a TV series, 11.22.63, in 2016. In both versions, the protagonist succeeds in saving Kennedy and kills Oswald with his own rifle in the Texas Schoolbook Depository after distracting him on the day of the would-be assassination after Oswald fired the first shot at the motorcade, but returns to a dystopian future brought about by his actions, prompting him to return to the past to "reset" the results of his intervention. The protagonist also attempts to prove Oswald was assisted by a Soviet agent when he attempted to kill Kennedy and General Edwin Walker.

In the 2012 book The Man from 2063, written by Jack Duffy, a lawyer living in 2063 travels back in time prior to November 22, 1963 to prevent the assassination. Unlike Stephen King's novel which has Lee Harvey Oswald killing JFK alone, The Man from 2063 portrays the assassination as a conspiracy.

In the Space: 1999 graphic novel, Aftershock and Awe (2013), the events of the television series are set within an alternate history. That history diverged from our own when Kennedy escaped assassination by visiting Cape Canaveral instead of Dallas. His survival led to an accelerated space race and diminished Cold War tensions, although a limited nuclear exchange occurred between the United States and North Korea in 1987.[5] During the 1970s, when the TV show was made, 1999 was the future. Placing the show in an alternate timeline allows the graphic novel to ignore the events of real life history as the series has spacefaring technology advanced beyond that of the real 1999 (or indeed the late 2010s).

In Ken Davenport's 2017 novel The Two Gates, Kennedy survives the Dallas shooting with the back-to-throat wound he actually received, but First Lady Jackie is killed by the fatal third shot. The novel deals with speculation as to how Kennedy would have dealt with the Vietnam War had he lived.

• The 1966 Emile de Antonio documentary Rush to Judgment, based on Mark Lane's book of the same name, shows Lane interviewing witnesses who claim the shots came from the grassy knoll instead of the Texas School Book Depository.
• Andy Warhol's 1966 film Since recreated the assassination from multiple perspectives with participants from The Factory.[6] Since is heavily improvised and explores the media portrayal of the assassination.[6]
• Tonino Valerii's 1969 Spaghetti Western film The Price of Power, starring Giuliano Gemma and Van Johnson, was the first filmed drama to present a critical perspective on the Kennedy assassination; although it dramatises the assassination of James A. Garfield, it reflects the events and conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy's death.[7]
• David Miller's 1973 film Executive Action is the first conspiracy theory-based Hollywood-made dramatization of the Kennedy assassination.[7]
• The 1978 made-for-television movie, Ruby and Oswald, generally followed the official record as presented by the Warren Commission of the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby on the weekend of the assassination.
• French director Henri Verneuil's 1979 movie I as in Icarus (the story is based in a fictional country with fictional characters but the events are clearly linked with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, including amateur footage similar to the Zapruder film)
• In the 1984 movie Flashpoint, a United States Border Patrol agent finds a car containing the body of a man he believed participated in a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy and was murdered and robbed of the money he received for doing so.
• Oliver Stone's 1991 dramatic film JFK,[8] based in part upon the book On the Trail of the Assassins by former Orleans Parish (Louisiana) District Attorney Jim Garrison, who unsuccessfully prosecuted Clay Shaw for conspiracy relating to the assassination in 1969.
• The 1992 drama film Love Field features Michelle Pfeiffer as Lurene Hallett, a Dallas hairdresser, attempting to travel to Washington to attend John F. Kennedy's funeral. Though the movie encompasses other issues besides the assassination, it portrays one facet of the public reaction to the event.[9]
• The 1992 film Ruby is an exploration of certain conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination from Jack Ruby's perspective.
• The 1993 thriller film In the Line of Fire, starring Clint Eastwood, hinges around the JFK assassination. Set in present-day 1993, the film is about a psychopath who plans to assassinate the current President of the United States. Eastwood's character is Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan, the last remaining active agent who was on duty in November 1963, guarding Kennedy in Dallas. Horrigan is consumed with guilt over his failure to react quickly enough to the first shot in Dallas, and becomes obsessed with defeating a young man who has resolved to become a new assassin on the same level as Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth.
• The 1993 TV movie Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald is a biopic about Marina Oswald Porter, the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald.
• The 1997 comedic short film My Dinner With Oswald, directed by Paul Duane and written by Donald Clarke, focuses on a re-creation of the assassination at a Dublin dinner party.
• The 1997 dark-comedy dramatic film The House of Yes stars Parker Posey and Josh Hamilton as twins Jacqueline, nicknamed "Jackie-O", and Marty. She has the same old mental health issues and he brings home a new fiancée for Thanksgiving. Mayhem ensues including adding incest to their favorite childhood "game" of obsessively re-enacting the John F. Kennedy assassination.
• The 2002 comedy horror film Bubba Ho-tep (based on the 1994 novella of the same name) features Ossie Davis playing an assassination-obsessed character with a scale model of Dealey Plaza, and photos of the various players on his wall who claims he is Kennedy. He also claimed that after he recovered from the assassination attempt, his skin was dyed black and was abandoned by Lyndon B. Johnson in a nursing home.
• The 2002 mockumentary film Interview With the Assassin presents the assassination and resultant conspiracy theories with a terminally ill former Marine named Walter Ohlinger who claims that he was the second gunman behind the fence on the grassy knoll and was paid by unidentified government agents for doing so, who are now attempting to silence him for exposing the truth. His ex-wife then tells the interviewer he was also mentally ill and was nowhere near Dallas on the day of the assassination.
• Kennedy's assassination is briefly referenced, in the 2007 Disney film National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The title refers to a book supposedly written and maintained by every American President, containing hidden knowledge from U.S. history. Upon being found, a brief section of the book contains photos and handwritten notes, hinting at a government conspiracy.
• The 2007 film Shooter, features Levon Helm's character Mr. Rate talking to Mark Wahlberg and Michael Peña about conspiracies. He tells them, "Them boys on the grassy knoll, they were dead within three hours. Buried in the damn desert, unmarked graves out past Terlingua". When asked how he knows this, he replies, "Still got the shovel!"
• Zack Snyder's 2009 movie Watchmen, based on the 1986–87 DC Comics limited series of the same name by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, during the opening credits sequence portrays The Comedian, one of the members of the Watchmen, as Kennedy's assassin; he is shown firing the fatal headshot from the grassy knoll behind Abraham Zapruder.
• The 2013 docudrama Parkland follows the actions of several people closely related to the assassination from November 22–25, 1963, including the Presidential limousine, the staff of Parkland Memorial Hospital's trauma room, the Secret Service and FBI agents, Abraham Zapruder, and Lee Harvey Oswald's family.
• The 2013 TV movie Killing Kennedy, an adaptation of the Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard book Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot, dramatizes the presidency and assassination of Kennedy, as well as the life of Lee Harvey Oswald in the years leading up to the assassination.
• In the 2013 movie The Bystander Theory, a woman discovers her late grandmother was the Babushka Lady and finds her film of the assassination, which purportedly also shows a second gunman on the grassy knoll. Her failure to come forward with her film was explained by her husband accidentally killing her and secretly burying her body the day after the murder of President Kennedy, thinking she was having an affair.
• The 2014 movie X-Men: Days of Future Past featured some scenes set in 1973 which reveal that Magneto has been in prison beneath the Pentagon since 1963 for his apparent role in the Kennedy assassination. Magneto maintains his innocence by claiming he was trying to save Kennedy's life because he claims that Kennedy was one of them (mutants) but his efforts were interrupted by the police who arrested him. Xavier held his assassination against Magneto for a while due to a similar incident involving the loss of his legs back in X-Men: First Class and even claimed to Logan that Erik always had a way with guns.
• The 2016 film Jackie follows the aftermath of the assassination from Jaqueline Kennedy's (played by Natalie Portman) perspective.
• In the 2016 film The Umbrella Man, a father grieving the death of his son who was killed in a hunting accident becomes obsessed with the assassination and derives a theory that Louie Witt was the second shooter in Dallas and was urged to do so by the Mafia.

A pair of alternate history films called The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald made in 1964 and 1977 have the accused assassin not being killed by Jack Ruby and standing trial for the murder of President Kennedy. Neither film ends in a verdict: the earlier movie ends after jury instructions, imploring viewers to debate among themselves; while the latter one has him being shot to death while being escorted from his jail cell to the courtroom just after the jury came back from deliberating.

The 1990 TV movie, Running Against Time, depicts a contemporary schoolteacher (Robert Hays) who continues to lament the 1966 death of his brother in Vietnam. He is given the chance to go back in time and seeks to prevent the November 1963 assassination, based on the belief that it would prevent Lyndon Johnson from beginning an escalation of the conflict. However, his attempt results in him being accused of the crime and the subject of a nationwide manhunt. The film is based on the 1986 Stanley Shapiro book.

In the 2000 film Timequest, a time-traveler prevents Kennedy's assassination and history takes an alternate course, including the birth of a second son, James Kennedy, who was conceived on the night of November 22, 1963, when Kennedy and his wife return from Dallas. It also has Robert F. Kennedy becoming President in the late 1970s, with Martin Luther King Jr. as his Vice President, after both men were saved from their assassinations in 1968 by the same time traveler. The film's makers support the idea of a conspiracy by having Clint Hill shooting two would-be assassins hiding at the grassy knoll and later Jack Ruby to prevent him from killing Oswald.

• The 1983 NBC TV mini series Kennedy, which focuses on the Kennedy Presidency, showed the assassination in graphic detail.
• The 1985 Twilight Zone episode "Profile in Silver" depicts a time traveler who is a descendant of Kennedy attend and meddle in the timeline continuum by accident.
• Nigel Turner's 1988, 1991, 1995 and 2003 continuing documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy explores conspiracy theories of the assassination.
• The 1991 TV mini-series A Woman Named Jackie showed the assassination from Jackie Kennedy's perspective.
• The Boyfriend (Seinfeld): This 1992 episode of the series featured a pastiche of the assassination featuring the "single bullet theory" made famous in JFK and an essential part of the assassination. In the episode Kramer and Newman accuse former Mets player Keith Hernandez of spitting on them following a 1988 loss at home.
• The X-Files episode "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" (1996) places a young cigarette smoking man as the assassin, shooting from a sewer drain located near the grassy knoll after setting up Oswald as his patsy. He also assassinates Martin Luther King Jr. while framing James Earl Ray in the episode.
• The two-part 1997 Early Edition episode "The Wall" has Gary Hobson involved in trying to prevent a presidential assassination plot that bears much resemblance to President Kennedy's assassination. During the course of the episode, Gary (who receives tomorrow's newspaper today) finds information about the murder of JFK that has a tie to the current day plot he is trying to stop through finding a copy of the November 23, 1963 newspaper that belonged to his predecessor.
• In The Simpsons episode Mayored to the Mob, the character Leavelle who trains Homer Simpson at "Leavelle's Bodyguard Academy," is based on Texan detective Jim Leavelle, as he appeared when escorting Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby.[10] Leavelle trains the bodyguards by pretending to shoot their protectee from a grassy knoll on a cart. This is a reference to the grassy knoll at the site of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Dealey Plaza and a scene from the Kennedy assassination film Executive Action (1973).[10] In the episode "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", Homer and Marge Simpson decide to make their own novel: "Who Really Killed JFK", with Homer's theory being that Lee Harvey Oswald wanted to steal "the Jack Ruby", but then refutes his own idea when Marge tells him that Jack Ruby was a man, not a jewel.
• The 2009 Mad Men episode "The Grown-Ups" focused on the characters' reaction to JFK's assassination and the subsequent events in their personal lives.
• The 2010 Bones episode "The Proof in the Pudding" has the characters being forced by the Secret Service to identify cause of death on a highly classified skeleton they later identify as JFK. They determine that JFK was shot twice in the head from two different angles suggesting a second shooter. At one point Booth recreates the assassination in the lab, using a water melon on a remote controlled car to establish essentially a scale model of the crime, with Hodgins observing that Booth's ability to make the shot doesn't prove anything as Oswald was in much worse physical condition than Booth and would have had more trouble making such a shot. The idea of a conspiracy causes Booth to question his trust in the government until Bones performs another test that determines this skeleton suffered from a bone disorder JFK did not suffer from, meaning this was not JFK. After the skeleton was returned Bones admits in private that JFK had Scarlet Fever as a child and that could have created a false-positive on her test but they were all better off not knowing for certain if that really was JFK.
• "The Suspicious Assassination of JFK", released September 29, 2017, was episode 10 of season 2 of BuzzFeed web series, BuzzFeed Unsolved: True Crime in which the various theories surrounding the assassination were discussed.
• Second season of Netflix series The Umbrella Academy, based on the comic book of the same name and released in 2020, is centered around the assassination of JFK, which time travelling protagonists have to investigate to prevent a nuclear war. In the series the assassination is carried out on the orders of shadow government, members of which see Kennedy as an obstacle to their plans.

"Lee Harvey Oswald", the 1992 season opener for the TV series Quantum Leap, finds Sam Beckett leaping into Oswald's body, but various glitches in the Leaping system result in Beckett's mind becoming 'mixed-up' with Oswald's, to the extent that Beckett starts acting like Oswald as he leaps through Oswald's life and gets closer and closer to the date of the assassination. At a critical moment, Al Calavicci prompts him to leap into Secret Service Agent Clint Hill. Hill attempts to reach the President's car before the shots are fired, but he fails to prevent Kennedy's death. Calavicci later reveals that he and Beckett have saved one life – that of Jackie Kennedy, whom Oswald had killed along with the President in the original timeline. This episode was written by series creator Donald P. Bellisario, in response to the Oliver Stone film JFK. Bellisario (who served with Oswald in the Marine Corps) does not believe in a conspiracy; he used supporting evidence from the Warren Commission Report, and had Calavicci speculate that people find it comfortable to believe in a conspiracy, reasoning that if any one person can kill the President of the United States then nobody is safe.

In the Red Dwarf 1997 episode "Tikka to Ride", the characters accidentally knock Lee Harvey Oswald out of the fifth-floor window of the Book Depository when they travel back in time to 1963 by mistake, creating an alternate timeline where Kennedy is impeached in 1965 for sharing a mistress with a mafia boss. Jumping forward in time to 1966, the crew learn that, due to Kennedy's impeachment, J. Edgar Hoover was blackmailed into running for President by the mob and allows Russia to establish nuclear missiles in Cuba, while Kennedy's impeachment traumatised the nation and allowed the USSR to win the space race while the southern states flee due to the fear of missiles from Cuba. Fearing the repercussions of this timeline, the crew go back to 1963 and redirect Oswald up to the sixth floor before their past selves can kill him, but realise that at that angle Oswald's trajectory is now too steep for him to do more than wound Kennedy. Unwilling to kill Kennedy themselves, the characters travel to 1965 and convince the alternate John F. Kennedy to go back in time and shoot his past self from the grassy knoll, arguing that this action will restore his historical position as a liberal icon ("Timeslides", an earlier episode of Red Dwarf, also jokingly mentions the possibility of preventing the assassination).

In American Heroes Channel's What if? Armageddon 1962, Richard Pavlick succeeds in assassinating President-elect Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson is sworn in on January 20, 1961. While the Bay of Pigs invasion goes as it historically did, the Cuban Missile Crisis is different. Having more confidence in his military advisers than Kennedy did, Johnson authorizes military air strikes to take out the missile sites. However, some missiles were hidden from sight and the United States, Cuba and the Soviet Union engage in a nuclear war.

In a 2018 episode of the TV series Timeless, a young Kennedy is transported to 2018, and before he can be returned to 1934, he is warned not to go to Dallas in 1963. When the time travelers return to 2018, they are told he was killed in Austin, Texas after two years as president.

The 1967 satirical play MacBird! by Barbara Garson superimposes the events of the assassination on the general plot structure of Shakespeare's Macbeth, with Kennedy becoming murdered king "Ken O'Dunc" and Lyndon Johnson the treacherous title character. The mockery of the play's name is derived from Johnson's propensity to refer to his wife Claudia as "Lady Bird" and his elder daughter as "Lynda Bird." Garson insisted that her play was a satire and not intended to suggest seriously that Johnson had had a hand in the assassination.[11]

In 1975, a San Francisco-based group of artists called Ant Farm reenacted the Kennedy assassination in Dealey Plaza, and documented it in a video called The Eternal Frame.