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Historical person

John F. Kennedy

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.

James R. Benn’s The White Ghost meets John F. Kennedy before the presidency as a young naval officer in the Solomon Islands, where suspicion surrounding a murdered coastwatcher draws Billy Boyle into Kennedy’s wartime world. Ken Follett’s Edge of Eternity carries Kennedy into the domestic and international crises of the early 1960s, including civil rights, Berlin and Cold War confrontation. Jeff Shaara’s The Shadow of War concentrates on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the choices Kennedy faces as military pressure for an attack competes with efforts to avoid nuclear war; Max Hastings’ Abyss reconstructs that same thirteen-day confrontation from Washington, Moscow and Havana. William Boyd’s The Predicament uses Kennedy as the political centre of a Cold War conspiracy, bringing its fictional intelligence plot into the atmosphere of danger surrounding the young president.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring John F. Kennedy (3 series)

A Billy Boyle WWII Mystery in Order

by James R. Benn 21 books 4.3(37,288)

Boston police detective Billy Boyle expects a safe wartime posting when family connections place him on the staff of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Instead, Eisenhower uses Billy as a military investigator, sending him to solve murders, thefts and intelligence failures that could damage Allied operations or expose politically…

All books in this series

The Century Trilogy in Order

by Ken Follett 3 books 4.3(838,293)

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

Gabriel Dax in Order

by William Boyd 2 books 4.2(41,893)

The Gabriel Dax novels follow a British travel writer whose work takes him into the political fault lines of the early 1960s and gradually turns him into an unwilling intelligence asset. Beginning with the Congo Crisis and widening into covert operations across Europe and the Americas, the sequence…

All books in this series

Standalone books

Standalone books featuring John F. Kennedy (3 books)

Non Fiction

Non Fiction featuring John F. Kennedy (1 book)

Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.