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Historical person
1917–1963
John F. Kennedy served as president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in Dallas in 1963. His administration endured the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, confronted the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis and increased American involvement in Vietnam. Kennedy supported civil-rights legislation more strongly in 1963, though activists had long pressed him to act. His youth, family image and unresolved assassination controversies created an unusually powerful public mythology.
Stephen King’s 11/22/63 uses time travel to centre the plot on an attempt to prevent Kennedy’s assassination, while James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy offers a darker fictional world of politics, crime and intelligence around his presidency. Historical fiction often treats Kennedy less as a fully known individual than as the symbol of an alternative future supposedly lost in Dallas.
In Jeff Shaara’s The Shadow of War, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy confront military advice for air strikes or invasion, while Robert McNamara helps organise a naval quarantine intended to stop additional equipment without triggering an immediate war. Ken Follett’s Edge of Eternity places John F. Kennedy within a narrative shaped by political ambition and government and crime, espionage and covert power.
Series
The Century Trilogy follows five interconnected families from Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States from the years before the First World War to the collapse of Communist rule in Europe. Across three generations, miners, aristocrats, diplomats, political organisers, soldiers and journalists experience public events through marriages, rivalries…
All books in this series
Standalone books
