Useful Notes / John F. Kennedy

"Ask not what your country can do for you;
ask what you can do for your country."

"... we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils— a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats."

— John F. Kennedy, accepting the Democratic Party nomination for the Presidency of the United States; July 15, 1960

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials of JFK,^note  (to his friends, family, and in any less formal setting, he was "Jack", as Frank Sinatra pointed out in a 1960 campaign song, and as Lloyd Bentsen memorably reminded Dan Quayle in 1988) was the 35th President of the United States (1961–63), succeeding Dwight D. Eisenhower and followed in office — after his assassination, which gave rise to a million conspiracy theories — by Lyndon Johnson. The first president to be born in the 20th century^note As measured by term in office. Of the five presidents who succeeded JFK, four were already alive when he was born, with Jimmy Carter the only exception. and the 12th from the Democratic Party, JFK was known for his particularly inspirational turns-of-phrase in his speeches and overseeing an era of American history rife with social and political turmoil. Kennedy was not only the youngest-elected president, at the age of 43 (the youngest to become President was Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 at the time), but also the first Irish-American and the first Roman Catholic to hold the office (and the only one until Joe Biden, just over 57 years later), as well as the last US president (thus far) to die or be killed in office. His presidency lasted for just over one thousand days.^note 1,036. Although a book by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. chronicles it as A Thousand Days.

A youthful-looking,^note  (Kennedy at 43 was eleven years younger than the average median age for an American president) , glamorous and invigorating figure, JFK — along with his intelligent, attractive, and stylish wife Jacqueline Bouvier and their two young children — was seen as introducing a new and liberating era to American political and cultural life after the stifling and stuffy days of The '50s, and his time in office was dubbed "Camelot" shortly after his death. Despite this, his short term was filled with crises and political upheaval, such as the CIA-directed 'Bay of Pigs' invasion of Communist Cuba, which went belly-up. This failed invasion soured relations with Cuba (never that strong to begin with) and eventually led in 1962 to the Cuban Missile Crisis, a two-week standoff between the US and USSR that, in hindsight, is widely considered to be the closest humanity has come to a nuclear war. Meanwhile, and similarly to Franklin D. Roosevelt's bout with a paralytic illness, JFK was constantly struggling to hide and cope with his Addison's Disease and hypothyroidism, which almost jeopardized his 1960 election campaign. He had his successes as well, such as when he called for the formation of a small maritime unit that would be known as the Navy SEALs. He is the reason US Army special forces wear green berets. Also similarly to FDR, Kennedy was at home talking with the press like almost no other president before or since — the difference being that JFK's weekly press conferences and displays of immense charisma were all caught on film.

Kennedy was in truth a Handicapped Badass on par with (and possibly even surpassing) FDR, and a Determinator on the same scale, as he possibly suffered from an autoimmune disorder.^note  Now hypothesized to be Type-2 Autoimmune Polyendocrine Syndrome, known for short as APS-2, a symptom of which is Addison's Disease, with which he struggled as an adult. He was incredibly sick as a child and frequently hospitalized, which continued through his adolescence and into adulthood. This, coupled with chronic lower-back problems and being permanently underweight, led to his being medically disqualified when he attempted to enroll in the US Army's Officer Candidate School. However — thanks to his father’s connections and a grueling, months-long exercise regimen to strengthen his back — he managed to join the US Naval Reserve in 1941, a few months prior to Pearl Harbor. Ultimately he would serve aboard a handful of Motor Torpedo Boats in the Navy, most famously aboard PT-109, due to his successful effort to rescue his crew after that vessel was rammed and broken in twain by the Japanese Destroyer Amagiri. The ramming killed two crew but Kennedy managed to get all the surviving hands to an island, including one he had to tow while swimming with a life-jacket strap clenched between his teeth. He re-injured his back while performing that rescue. He later underwent spinal fusion surgery as a Senator in order to continue walking, almost dying from an infection afterwards. In the White House he needed a rocking chair in the Oval Office to deal with the pain, as well as a Dr. Feelgood pharmaceutical regimen, and he could not bend over to pick up his own children.^note  In a Mathematician's Answer, having to wear a back brace due to the steroids he took to treat Addison's Disease causing issues with the bones in his back is exactly the explanation to why JFK died in Dallas — it meant he was quite literally a sitting target who couldn't duck— or even crumple forward — after Oswald's first shot. There is a good bit of modern speculation as to just how long JFK would have lived, and/or been able to cope with the rest of his presidency and a potential second term, had he not been assassinated — his health was that bad. His Catholicism illustrates just how often he danced with death — he was given the Last Rites four times prior to Dallas.

Domestically, the Civil Rights Movement proved a vexing political problem for his administration. The Democratic Party's power base was then in the South, so Kennedy was reluctant to risk alienating his white supporters there. However, Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellows were not about to let this stop their crusade for racial equality and justice. To that end, they forced the issue by staging non-violent protests and similar actions to provoke white racist authorities and mobs to go berserk against them. Although this was of course dangerous and led to casualties, Kennedy could not ignore the resulting footage of such white supremacist brutality and eventually moved to support their cause.

Kennedy had a very close relationship with Harold Macmillan, who was the British Prime Minister for all but the last month of his time in office, to the point of viewing Macmillan as something of a mentor figure. (It probably didn't hurt any that Kennedy's late sister Kathleen had been married to Macmillan's nephew by marriage.) In stark contrast, JFK had an absolutely horrible relationship with the Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker for most of his time as President, mostly over the issue of putting US missile defenses on Canadian soil. Things got so bad that Kennedy even wound up lending staff and financial support to rival Lester B. Pearson, helping him to dethrone Diefenbaker as Prime Minister in early 1963. Technically, Kennedy might have broken a few laws by doing this, but — considering that Pearson was way more cordial towards him, and the US, than Diefenbaker — nobody cared enough to make much of an issue over it.

Similarly, the press had a "gentleman's agreement" not to mention Kennedy's rampant womanizing, as it wasn't considered to be in the public interest at the time. (To illustrate the strength of the agreement, consider: JFK once told White House press pool reporters that he wasn't "done" with a woman until he'd had her "three different ways.") Suffice it to say that being handsome, witty, charming and death-defying before getting elected President, JFK Really Got Around his whole life long, and only partly due to the steroids he took later. Kennedy's most famous extramarital affair was probably with Marilyn Monroe.

On November 22, 1963^note Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis died on the same day., Kennedy visited Dallas, Texas as part of campaigning for his upcoming run for re-election. As his motorcade passed the Texas Book Depository at Dealey Plaza, shots were fired; Kennedy was hit in the head and torso, and rushed to hospital where he was later pronounced dead. Although a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was later arrested and identified as the main suspect of the assassination, numerous irregularities in the record — not to mention Oswald's own murder two days later, by a distraught mob-connected nightclub owner from Chicago named Jack Ruby — soon gave rise to numerous conspiracy theories about who had really killed Kennedy, and did more to set off unanswered questions. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s assassination was recorded in what is known as the Zapruder Film, which gives him the tragically sad distinction of being the only president to ever be murdered on camera.^note Ronald Reagan was hit by a ricocheting bullet while being filmed, but survived.

Due to his iconic status, Kennedy is still liable to be invoked by fanboys and wannabes, who thereby tend to make themselves very much liable to the Pretender Diss - just ask Dan Quayle.

When he's portrayed in fiction (and isn't there purely to be killed), expect to hear a highly exaggerated version of his quite distinctive New England accent. He was famous for his harnessing of mass media to rally support, and as a result, he remains somebody who can be recognized simply by the sound of his voice. To this day, many attempts at "Bawstin" accents will try to simply copy Kennedy's speaking patterns, even though many New Englanders will be among the first to tell you that the Kennedys are the only people who actually speak like that. For an example of JFK's accent from the man himself, here is an audio clip of the President chewing out a USAF general over the phone, about the press getting access to Jackie's maternity suite at an Air Force base in 1963.

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Kennedy in fiction:

Note: Please only add examples where Kennedy appears as a character. If he is only shown in order to be assassinated, put the entry under Who Shot JFK?.

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Comedy

• Comedian Vaughn Meader made his name as a spot-on impersonator of JFK; his album of Kennedy skits The First Family was very successful, until Kennedy's assassination killed it, along with Meader's career.
  • Though JFK himself once said in a press conference, "I've listened to Mr. Meader's record but I think it sounded more like Teddy than it did me."
  • Lenny Bruce's first comment upon JFK's death, at a nightclub show hours after the event: "Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked."
    • JFK (well known for his self deprecation) once addressed a meeting of the Democratic National Committee group by saying “Vaughn Meader couldn’t make it tonight, so here I am.”

Comic Books

• In Watchmen, JFK is seen, meeting Dr. Manhattan on the White House lawn. He asks what it's like to be a superhero and is told, "You should know, Mr. President." Attention is drawn briefly to the oddity of his assassination by Manhattan. The Comedian was in Dallas that day, as the bodyguard for Nixon, and Ozymandias briefly implies he either knew about the shooting beforehand or was actually the one who carried it out. The movie adaptation drops the ambiguity and outright shows the Comedian sneaking away from the grassy knoll after making the shot.
• A 2007 Teen Titans comic book written by Silver Age author Bob Haney and deliberately emulating that era's wacky hijinks has the team rescuing JFK from alien mods who kidnapped him, replaced him with one of their own, and made them their ruler to fight a tribe of savage space hippies. In the end, JFK and the Titans convince the two warring races to work through their differences, our young heroes return to Earth to find that the alien impostor had solved the Cuban Missile Crisis and been assassinated, and swear to keep JFK's true whereabouts a secret while the President leads the mods and hippies in a war against evil robots. Whew!
• In the "Damnation's Flame" arc of Hellblazer, Kennedy appears, complete with head wound, in a bizarre afterlife filled with twisted versions of American symbolism, trapped there by the American people's reverence for him. He partners up with John Constantine in exchange for help with ousting the "incumbent President": Abraham Lincoln.
• Superman met President Kennedy on several occasions in the Silver Age. For instance, there was a story where Kennedy impersonated Clark Kent to help Superman hide his Secret Identity. This also include the classic tale "Superman's Mission For President Kennedy," which was originally to be published in late 1963 but was pulled after JFK's assassination. The story was finally published several months later, per the request of President Johnson and the Kennedy family. Thanks to comics' sliding-scale timeline, the above tale was rewritten in The '80s as "Superboy's Mission For President Kennedy."
  • This was actually a case of promoted fanboy. In real life JFK was a HUGE Superman fan, and continued to read the Superman comics well into adulthood. Supposedly, while in the White House, one of the maids told Jacqueline “Your kids left their comic books out.” And Jackie replied “They don’t belong to the kids.”
• Supergirl also met President and Mrs. Kennedy soon after her existence was revealed to the world in February 1962. Jack said "I know you'll use your super-powers not only to fight crime, but to preserve peace in our troubled world!" She said, "Thank you, Mr. President, I will," but what she was thinking was "The President's wife looks ... gorgeous!"
• Deadpool: During the Dead Presidents arc, all the dead American Presidents are resurrected as insane zombies out to destroy the world. For Kennedy, this means staging an invasion of Cuba, though Wade (disguised as Marilyn Monroe to distract him) intercepts and re-kills him before he can do so.
• JFK Secret Ops is set in an Alternate History where Kennedy survived the assassination, and is on a mission to track down everyone involved in it.

Fan Works

• In the Gate fanfiction, The Fight we Chose, Kennedy survives his assassination due to the opening of the titular Gate at Dealy Plaza while Air Force One was still in the air; as a bonus, Oswald dies a hero while saving civilians from being kidnapped by the otherworldly invaders. JFK continues his tenure focusing on dealing with the Gate issue as well as helping to de-escalate the Vietnam War early and addressing the Civil Rights Movement. He even tours beyond the Gate to visit wounded soldiers and the demi-human refugees at Anlus Hill to boost his public image in preparation for his re-election campaign.

Films

• Two Robert Drew documentaries: Primary (1960), which records the contest between Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic primary, and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, which is about JFK sending the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama in 1963. Both films feature behind-the-scenes "fly on the wall" access that was very unusual for the era.
• PT 109 tells the story about Kennedy's rescue of his men during the Second World War, and was released in 1963, while he was still in office. The film is also notable for starring Cliff Robertson as Kennedy, while Not Even Bothering with the Accent, and doubly notable since Kennedy signed off on Robertson's casting, essentially picking him himself.
• Thirteen Days focuses on the Cuban Missile Crisis from the point of view of Kennedy and his senior advisors.
• Forrest Gump meets him when he becomes a member of the All-American team, just after drinking 15 bottles of Dr. Pepper, and tells him that he really has to pee on live TV.
• C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America features JFK as the first Northerner elected since the American Civil War. He supports the abolition of slavery as well as giving women the vote. Ultimately, he gets shot in this timeline as well for those views, essentially killing any progress he made toward his goals.
  • Somewhat interestingly in this alternate timeline, the major political party realignment in the 20th Century^note In which the Democratic Party switched from being a largely conservative party to a largely liberal one and vice versa for the GOP never happens, so in the 1960 election, Kennedy is the Republican candidate while Nixon is the Democrat.
• In Timequest a time traveler goes back to November 22, 1963 to save his life.
• In An American Carol a political comedy that uses the structure of A Christmas Carol, he shows up as a Jacob Marley Expy.
• Is played by James Marsden in Lee Daniels' The Butler
• Parts of the JFK assassination was featured in the movie The House of Yes. One of the main characters modeled herself after Jackie O.
• Played by Caspar Phillipson in Jackie, which is focused on his wife, Jackie, and revolves around one week after his death.
• In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Magneto claims Kennedy was a mutant, and no, Magneto had nothing to do with his assassination.
• JFK is the deuteragonist of the comedy-horror B-Movie Bubba Ho Tep... well, sorta. The character is an elderly African-American man who claims to be the real Jack Kennedy, having miraculously survived his assassination. The Secret Service plugged up his bullet wound, dyed his skin black so he'd be unrecognizable, and dumped him in a Texas nursing home to be forgotten about. It's deliberately left ambiguous whether he's really who he says he is or if he's just a delusional old man, but either way, he proves to be an invaluable ally in the fight against the titular villain.
• Caspar Phillipson plays him again in Blonde.

Literature

• The Last Hurrah has a character named Kevin McCluskey, who runs against the incumbent mayor, Frank Skeffington. McCluskey is a telegenic but politically inexperienced candidate with a fancy education, a pretty wife, smiling kids, a respectable war record from his service in the Navy, and more good looks than brains. It should be noted that James Michael Curley, the alleged real-life basis for Skeffington, served briefly in the United States Congress, and the person who replaced him in his Congressional seat was a young but ambitious neophyte politician named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It should also be noted that the original novel was published in 1956, four years before Kennedy became President, making this a strange real-life case of Retroactive Recognition.
• Kennedy appears in The Two Georges (which also features his old enemy Richard Nixon in a prominent role) as a newspaper publisher sympathetic to an extremist 'liberation' movement operating within a North America which, after a peaceful resolution to what would have become the American War of Independence, remains subject to a British hegemony. He tries his legendary charms on the main female character — who, notably (and apparently rarely) is actually discomforted and repelled by his advances, considering them borderline sexual harassment.
• Stephen King's novel 11/22/63 deals with a man traveling back in time to 1958 to stop the Kennedy assassination. It ends rather badly. The Vietnam War ends with Saigon being nuked, India and Pakistan have a limited nuclear exchange. Russia collapses, and Maine ends up becoming part of Canada. Also, due to terrorism, and the aforementioned nuclear exchange, most of the planet has to deal with terrible radiation poisoning. Even worse, due to the amount of times history has been changed by the protagonist, and others, going back in time, the entire universe is in danger of destroying itself. Luckily, he hits the Reset Button.
• Alternate Kennedys, a 1992 anthology of 25 Alternate History stories revolving around the Kennedys; David Gerrold contributed "The Kennedy Enterprise", which has an alternate JFK as an actor who went on to portray the captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
• Kennedy appears in the backstory of the alternate history novel Resurrection Day and is at the center of yet another conspiracy. Most of the world reviles Kennedy as the insane monster who started the Cuban War, obliterated the Soviet Union, and reduced the United States to a third world pariah reliant on British foreign aid. Most people believe Kennedy died when Washington was bombed, while a few more assume he's incarcerated by the ruling military government as a war criminal along with his surviving administration. A small minority of conspiracy theorist thinks Kennedy is innocent and that he's just hiding, waiting to come out and lead America back to greatness. Turns out the conspiracy theorists are only partially right. Kennedy did die during the bombing of Washington, but only because he refused to leave, working to the very last second to try to broker a cease fire with the Soviets and Cubans after one of his more hawkish generals went over his head and invaded Cuba.
• In the President's Vampire series, it's established that Kennedy was assassinated by the Shadow Company, with Oswald as a patsy, as part of a larger scheme aimed at starting World War III. Fortunately, Cade's resultant Roaring Rampage of Revenge managed to prevent the second phase of the plan (blowing up Air Force One while LBJ was being sworn in onboard, and pinning the blame on Cuba) from being carried out.
• In the Alternate History of The Proteus Operation, Kennedy is the President in 1975 who sends the Proteus team back to 1939 in an attempt to fix history.
• In Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline, part of the change in timeline, sees the young Kennedy takes up an interest in left-wing politics. He gradually starts to come to resent his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, for the domineering and controlling manner in which he runs the Kennedy family and especially his Parental Favoritism of his older brother Robert, and becomes increasingly politically active, rebelling in both subtle and overt ways against the oppressive, elitist norms on his prestigious boarding school, founding the Muckers Club, a secret society of local leftist students, and distributing Socialist literature amongst the broader student body, the later of which he gets into trouble with the school's administration for several times. When General Douglas MacArthur launches a coup to seize power against the democratically elected Socialist government and the American left-wing stages a revolution in response, Kennedy himself leads a local revolution by leading the Muckers Club in an assault on the headmaster's office, overthrowing the yoke of student oppression at his boarding school. Following the victorious left-wing revolution, Kennedy journeys back to the Kennedy Massachusetts estate to confront his father, only to discover that his family, like many other members of the American elite, has evacuated to join MacArthur's exile government in Cuba. This event inspires Kennedy to decisively distance himself from his family, as he discards his American name and instead adopts the Gaelic version of it, Sean Cinnéide, which becomes his nom de guerre, and later, full legal name. Cinnéide goes on to join the American Red Guard, becoming a war hero of this timeline's version of World War II. When he is injured and hospitalised during the war in 1942, he is interviewed by a certain Norma Jean Mortensen for a propaganda piece named Why We Fight. Cinnéide falls in love with Mortensen, and eventually marries her in 1953. Following the war, Cinnéide serves as military advisor on this timeline's version of Star Trek: The Original Series, even appearing occasionally as a guest star, and playing a starring role in this timeline's version of M*A*S*H. He eventually dies peacefully in his sleep at the old age of 85 in 2002.

Live-Action TV

• Played by Martin Sheen in the 1983 TV miniseries Kennedy.
• Red Dwarf presents an unusual solution to the mystery of his assassination: Kennedy himself did it. From the Grassy Knoll. Or rather, Kennedy from an Alternate History in which he survived his assassination attempt and was later impeached due to his affair with the mistress of a mob boss, which led to the Soviets winning the Cold War.
• In the episode "Profile in Silver" of the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone (1985), a distant descendant of JFK who is a professor of history uses a time machine to travel from the 22nd century to 1963 to "witness" Kennedy's assassination. He prevents it instead, which in turn triggers World War III. At the end of the show the professor ends up taking Kennedy's place at Dealey Plaza and is assassinated, while Kennedy ends up in the 22nd century and teaches history.
• A MADtv skit showed him encouraging Bill Clinton to continue with his philandering.
• The Kennedys, a 2011 miniseries looking at the Kennedy family's rise to public prominence and their Glory Days during the 1960s, focuses heavily on JFK, played by Greg Kinnear. It received a certain amount of controversy because of allegations of historical inaccuracy and highlighting some of the negative aspects of the family, which was helped by the fact that several of the producers (including Joel Surnow) are outspoken conservatives).
  • That being said, the series actually ended up portraying the family—and in particular Robert F. Kennedy, played by Barry Pepper in an Emmy-winning performance—rather sympathetically. Though JFK's philandering is obviously there and alluded to, the series doesn't actually include any sex scenes, and it makes it clear that he does love Jackie. (Which is ironic, as one of its early critics' main concerns was that it would be an overly sexed-up version of history.) It's also fairly accurate, compared to many other works of historical fiction.
• In the Alternate Universe in Fringe, Kennedy is still alive (having served a full two terms as President) and is just preparing to resign as US Ambassador to the United Nations.
• Played by Michael C. Hall in the second season of The Crown (2016). He's portrayed as jealous and abusive towards Jackie, forcing her to share his painkiller drugs to keep her under control, which many Americans found disgusting and not based on any historical evidence.
• Shown via archive footage several times in From the Earth to the Moon delivering key speeches. The one about "putting a man on the Moon before the end of the decade" before Congress and the one famous for the line "We choose to go the moon", which marks the tone of the series, is featured during the initial credits and an excerpt of the speech is chosen to close the series.
• Legends of Tomorrow: In "Bay of Squids", the Cuban Missile Crisis threatens to go hot when a time-displaced alien crashes into Cuba, and Castro mistakes it for a CIA assassination plot and threatens to nuke DC over. To try and prevent this, Nate and Zari are sent to the White House to try and talk Kennedy down from conflict, even as his Generals are encouraging him to preemptively attack Cuba. Ultimately, Kennedy stands down and chooses peace.
• In American Horror Story: Double Feature, it's all but outright stated that Eisenhower and Nixon had Kennedy killed after he learned about the treaty they signed with the aliens that allows them to abduct thousands of Americans every year in exchange for technological advances and threatened to go public with it.
• Timeless: Season 2, Episode 5 is called "The Kennedy Curse" and shows a confused young Kennedy who isn't president yet stranded in the 21st century before being sent back at the end of the episode.
• Godfather of Harlem: Kennedy's assassination is a major part of the backdrop in the Season 1 finale. The theory that the Chicago and New Orleans mobs arranged it is discussed by characters on both sides of the law.

Music

• He is the "John" from Dick Holler's 1968 song "Abraham, Martin, and John" about the three slain leaders. In the final chorus, the three are seen together "walking up over the hill" welcoming his brother Bobby.
• One man, once died, but did you know that he could read all our minds?

Tabletop Games

• The Big Bad in superhero role-playing game Brave New World: after managing to avoid getting assassinated in November 22nd 1963 to a group of supervillains (among which was Lee Harvey Oswald), the government passed the Delta Registration Act (Delta being the name given to superheroes in this game, with Alphas being a superior category of Delta), and after a fight in New York destroyed four blocks of buildings Kennedy took over as President For Life, turning the United States into a neo-fascist personal dictatorship, which gets even worse when all the Alphas disappear after a fight in 1976 between supervillain Devastator and Superior (the most powerful Alpha in the world) goes awry when the former detonates a "doomsday bomb". Actually, Kennedy did die in November, and the man everyone knew as Kennedy was actually a shapeshifter Alpha known as Facade, whom Superior convinced to impersonate Kennedy to ensure a more orderly transfer of power. The "doomsday bomb" was actually a device developed by powerful beings from another universe, who gave it to Facade, warning him that the constant presence of Alphas on that universe was a threat to the fabric of reality: Facade proceeded to hand it over to Devastator and protected himself from its effects.

Theater

• The 1960 scene from the musical Merrily We Roll Along has the number "Bobby and Jackie and Jack," sending up the extended Kennedy family and JFK's cultural aspirations.
• Kennedy's Children uses his death as a premise. The play tells the stories of five different Americans during, and after his presidency, their hopes, and their eventual disappointments. One of the characters has dedicated her life to his memory.
• The climax of Assassins sees John Wilkes Booth and his allies convincing Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot JFK. Booth goes as far as to summon the voices of Arthur Bremer, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan.

Video Games

• In Assassin's Creed II, it's implied that JFK was part of the Assassins. And it is all but outright said that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Templar who shot him, apparently to recover a Piece of Eden, then used another one to make a hologram of the two guys on The Grassy Knoll.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops, being set in the 1960s, naturally features JFK. In the regular story mode, Kennedy meets Alex Mason, the player character, and authorizes the assassination of the Big Bad. Later, it's revealed that Mason was brainwashed to kill Kennedy by the Big Bad, which he may have actually done. In The Stinger of story mode, Kennedy and Robert McNamara, along with Richard Nixon, interrogate Castro on the recent missile crisis. Then, zombies invade the Pentagon. And you get to kill them as Kennedy.
• You can unlock JFK in the second game in the Civilization series.
• In The New Order Last Days Of Europe, an Alternate-History Nazi Victory mod for Hearts of Iron IV, Kennedy is Vice President under the Richard Nixon administration who ascends to the Presidential office after Nixon resigns in the face of impeachment. Kennedy's presidency lasts mere weeks before he is assassinated by a white supremacist (a Guyanese nationalist, in the older versions).

Webcomics

• Hark! A Vagrant manages to accurately portray the male Kennedy dynamics with a young JFK, his dad, and his brothers, in just a couple of panels.

Western Animation

• JFK's clone is a Jerk Jock and one of the main characters of Clone High. Foa suppah, he, er, uh, wants a pahty plattah.
• Inside Job (2021): In Clone Gunman, multiple clones of JFK wreak havoc in Cognito Inc. after one that Reagan released for Grassy Noel to kill ends up awakening the other JFK clones. Upon being exposed to fire, they fuse into a flesh-blob monster.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Simpson Tide", Abe Simpson beats up Kennedy after mistaking him for a Nazi ("Ich Bin Ein Berliner").
  • In "Little Girl of the Big Ten," he appears in a fantasy sequence for Lisa.
  • Not to mention the fact that Mayor Quimby's character is based off of Kennedy, from accent to womanizing to mob ties, even "Ich bin ein Springfielder." More likely, Quimby is meant to be a parody of Ted Kennedy although one could argue that he is a Composite Character of all three Kennedy brothers.
  • In "Duffless", a flashback shows a young Homer watching a Duff Beer commercial with Kennedy endorsing it, prompting him to briefly impersonate him.
  • A flashback in "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy" shows a young Homer watching a White House press conference with Kennedy, and impersonating Kennedy in front of his parents. While his mother Mona praises Homer, telling him that he could become president one day, his father Abe puts him down, saying "We've got a whole system set up to keep people like you from ever becoming President."
• Justice League: The New Frontier, part of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies line and set mainly during the 1950s (it covers events during transition from DC's Golden Age to the Silver Age), concludes with a montage of new and old heroes and villains, including the formation of the Justice League, while archive audio of Kennedy's "New Frontier" speech plays in the background.

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