Assassination of John F. Kennedy

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The Ninth Doctor in the crowd as John F. Kennedy's motorcade passes by. (WEB: Who is Doctor Who?)

The Kennedy assassination refers to the murder of the American President John F. Kennedy at Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963.

The assassination

The Master mentally programmed UNIT Private Francis Cleary and sent him from the near future to prevent the assassination. This would change history and possibly enable the Cuban Missile Crisis to proceed in a way that would lead to a nuclear war. James Stevens, a journalist obsessed with the assassination attempt, went to 1963 using a time ring to stop Cleary. Stevens discovered the actual gunman who had killed Kennedy and recognised him as an older version of Stevens himself, travelling back from the future a second time. In order to preserve the course of history, in 1996, after writing a book revealing the truth, he used the time ring again to carry out the assassination (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy).

Minor links

• The Third Doctor mentioned to James Stevens in a telephone call that the prevention of the assassination would cause an historical embolism, which would result in the Doctor himself being erased from existence. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
• The Seventh Doctor implied to Ace that the proximity of Nemesis to Earth had caused or influenced the assassination. (TV: Silver Nemesis)
• A contemporary photo found by Clive Finch seemed to show the Ninth Doctor as a spectator to the assassination (TV: Rose, WEB: Who is Doctor Who?).
• Darius Pike showed K9, Starkey and Gryffen an issue of the Daily Standard, with the latest news on the Kennedy assassination as the headline. (TV: The Cambridge Spy)
• Ian Chesterton pondered the possibility of Russian invasion during the turmoil after Kennedy's death. (AUDIO: 1963)
• The crew of the Teselecta stated that the Kennedy assassination was an example of how time could be rewritten. (TV: Let's Kill Hitler) This is generally presumed to reference some aspect of this event, although it was possibly in reference to the assassination of Kennedy's brother Robert four and a half years later, to imply that their older brother Joe's death in the Second World War had actually been deliberate, or suggesting that re-writing time had prevented the assassination of another Kennedy such as their youngest brother Ted or their father Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy.

Behind the scenes

The première of Doctor Who on 23 November 1963 happened just one day after the Kennedy assassination, a fact frequently mentioned in media overviews and non-fiction literature on Doctor Who.

A persistent, but untrue, rumour states that Doctor Who had been scheduled to première on 22 November but was postponed due to news coverage of the assassination. In fact, the premiere had always been scheduled for 23 November.[1]

The Kennedy assassination happened during the recording of an episode of The Daleks, interrupting shooting as the cast and crews learned of the news. A common rumour states that news coverage of the killing caused the interruption of the normal television schedule, too, so that on 23rd November, 1963, one day after the assassination, the first episode of the first Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child, aired five minutes late; however it actually went out only ninety seconds later than scheduled. As the episode was not seen in parts of the country due to a power outage, it was rebroadcast the following week; it is often stated that it was replayed due to the assassination coverage, but this too has been debunked.

Other connections

• The charity special TV: Dimensions in Time, which took place on 23 November in 1973, 1993 and 2013, includes a 1973 mention of the assassination having occurred ten years earlier.
• In Doctor Who and the Crusaders, a philosophical discussion at the beginning of the book makes note of the Kennedy assassination.