The following is a list of real or historical people who have been portrayed as President of the United States in fiction, although they did not hold the office in real life. This is done either as an alternate history scenario, or occasionally for humorous purposes. Also included are actual US Presidents with a fictional presidency at a different time and/or under different circumstances than the one in actual history.
E Thomas Edison Thomas Edison is elected as the 27th president in 1908 in the novel And Having Writ... by Donald R. Bensen. In this book, the aliens whose ship crashed in the Tunguska event on June 30, 1908 instead land safely in San Francisco. They create an effective hearing aid for Edison and cure the infirmities of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsarevich Alexei, the son of Tsar Nicholas II. Edison is nominated by the Republicans over Secretary of War William Howard Taft and elected by a technology-enthused public. After pursuing the aliens and their companion, H. G. Wells, across Europe, he briefly tries to imprison them in order to obtain more of their secrets, but later relents. President Edison chooses not to run for a second term in 1912 and would rather go back to inventing. Later that year, former president Theodore Roosevelt would be reelected and would serve as the 28th President until 1921.
David Eisenhower David Eisenhower, the grandson of the real-life president Dwight D. Eisenhower, was president in the 1976 film Tunnelvision (set in 1985), and a former president in 1997 in Americathon. Both films were directed by Neal Israel.
Dwight D. Eisenhower In Poul Anderson's The Psychotechnic League, Dwight Eisenhower died from surgical complications in June 1956 and was succeeded by his 43-year-old vice president Richard Nixon, who became the 35th president. Only a few years removed from his active participation in the House Un-American Activities Committee and with his anti-Communist zeal untampered by the pragmatism which he might have gained in later life, President Nixon embarked on a wild, provocative and confrontational policy with respect to the Soviet Union. By 1958, this resulted in a worldwide nuclear war, in which Nixon himself was killed along with hundreds of millions of other people. In one of the alternate timelines featured in Michael P. Kube-McDowell's novel Alternities, Dwight Eisenhower was killed in a plane crash in 1951. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio was elected as the 34th president in 1952. President Taft pursued a policy of isolationism which allowed the Soviet Union to emerge as the dominant superpower. Taft subsequently died shortly into his term in office. In another of the alternate timelines featured in Michael P. Kube-McDowell's novel Alternities, Dwight Eisenhower lost his bid for re-election in 1956 to Adlai Stevenson. President Stevenson was re-elected in 1960, though he would later describe his second term as a curse. In the alternate history short story "We Could Do Worse" by Gregory Benford, Senator Robert A. Taft secured the Republican presidential nomination at the 1952 Republican National Convention, narrowly beating Dwight Eisenhower, with the support of the California delegation which was delivered by Senator Richard Nixon. In the election the following November, Taft defeated Adlai Stevenson and was inaugurated as the 34th president on January 20, 1953. However, after only six months in office, President Taft died of a heart attack on July 31, 1953, as occurred in reality. He was succeeded by his vice president Joseph McCarthy, who went on to create a brutal dictatorship in the United States. In the alternate history short story "The Impeachment of Adlai Stevenson" by David Gerrold included in the anthology Alternate Presidents edited by Mike Resnick, Dwight Eisenhower was defeated by his Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson, the Governor of Illinois, in 1952 after he made the mistake of accepting Joseph McCarthy as his running mate instead of Richard Nixon. He successfully ran for re-election in 1956, once again defeating General Eisenhower. However, Stevenson proved to be an extremely unpopular president. As the title of the story implies, Stevenson, the 34th president, was impeached during his second term in August 1958 and resigned, leaving his untested 41-year-old Vice-President, John F. Kennedy, as his successor. Kennedy was considered something of a laughing stock, having recently married the Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe. This lead satirists to dub the marriage "the new Monroe Doctrine." Although the story ends immediately after Stevenson has decided to resign, it is heavily implied that Nixon, already the front runner for the next Republican nomination, will defeat Kennedy in the 1960 election. This is due to the public's antipathy towards the Democrats and the fact that Kennedy is a much derided figure due to his marriage to Monroe. In the HBO television adaptation of the alternate history novel Fatherland by Robert Harris, General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, oversaw the landing operations of the Allied invasion of Normandy, the first phase of Operation Overlord during World War II, on June 6, 1944, which were successfully defeated and repelled by Nazi Germany's forces. Consequently, the United States turned its back on the Western Front and focused its attention on defeating Japan, allowing Germany the necessary time to regroup, annex Western and Southern Europe and therefore win the war. After the failure of the D-Day invasion, Eisenhower returned to the United States and retired in disgrace. In Eric Norden's Dystopian Alternate History novel The Ultimate Solution, Nazi Germany developed nuclear bombs while the US did not have them. Germany demonstrated the terrible power in its hands by bombing and destroying Chicago. General Dwight Eisenhower was part of the faction favoring a surrender to the Germans, in order to prevent more American cities being destroyed. When Generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur opposed the surrender and tried to continue resistance to the Germans at whatever price, Eisenhower oversaw the arrest of Patton and MacArthur, who were court-martialled at the Saint Louis Trials and executed by firing squad. The book does not mention Eisenhower's later fate in Nazi-occupied America. A handful of diehard anti-Nazi fighters nicknamed "The Patties" continued a decades-long underground struggle against the extremely harsh Nazi occupation regime, with covert support from Imperial Japan which entered a tense cold war with its erstwhile Nazi ally; The Patties recalled Eisenhower as the most despicable of traitors, on a par with Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold. In a parallel universe featured in the Sliders Season Five episode "The Return of Maggie Beckett", the German forces broke through the Allied lines at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, which caused World War II to drag on until 1947. General Eisenhower was relieved as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and returned to the United States in disgrace. Consequently, Adlai Stevenson became president. The Stevenson administration made the Roswell incident in July 1947 public knowledge and signed the Reticulan-American Free Trade Agreement (RAFTA), giving the US access to advanced Reticulan technology. This led to a human mission to Mars in the 1990s. In the 2015 alternate history novel Joe Steele by Harry Turtledove, Dwight Eisenhower was a prominent American military leader, who rose to the rank of general during the dictatorial reign of President Joe Steele, and proved instrumental to the country's victory over Japan in the Pacific Theater during World War II. In 1934, Major Eisenhower came to prominence as part of the military tribunal that presided over the trial of the Supreme Court Four. After surviving the purges of the 1930s, he and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz planned and executed the operation that took control of the Solomon Islands from the Japanese during World War II. He then planned and executed the capture of Tarawa, Saipan, Angaur, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Eisenhower then planned and executed Operation Downfall which was executed in two parts: Operation: Olympic and Operation: Coronet. The war ended with the death of Emperor Hirohito and ascension of his twelve-year-old son Akihito who, while nominally the head of state, became a puppet to Eisenhower. Eisenhower remained part of the Steele Administration during and after the Japanese War. The Republican Party tried to recruit both Eisenhower and Omar Bradley as potential presidential nominee in 1952, but both Bradley and Eisenhower (after some prompting from Joe Steele's allies) declined with Eisenhower stating that politics was no place for soldiers. The Republicans chose Robert Taft as their candidate, who in turn lost to Steele in the general election. In the Worldwar series novel Upsetting the Balance by Harry Turtledove, Dwight Eisenhower was a prominent general during World War II and the war against the Race's Conquest Fleet. In 1944, he traveled through Missouri with Albert Einstein, Benito Mussolini, Robert Goddard, Sam Yeager, Ullhass, and Ristin. As the war wound down, Eisenhower led a successful counter-offensive against the Race's toehold within the state. In Harry Turtledove's alternate history novel The Man with the Iron Heart, General Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower became the senior United States Army official on the ground in Allied-occupied Germany after the end of World War II. He was firmly in favor of a continued American occupation of the country, even after the German Freedom Front began inflicting massive casualties upon Allied troops, and the will of the American people began to erode. Nonetheless, the possibility that Eisenhower might be the Republican Party's choice to run against President Harry S. Truman in 1948 was already being floated in 1946 around the time he was transferred back home and was succeeded by General Lucius D. Clay. In Harry Turtledove's Hot War series, where the Korean War escalates into World War III, Dwight Eisenhower was being bandied about as the Republican presidential nominee for the 1952 election. In May 1951, as World War III was underway, incumbent President Harry S. Truman reflected on Eisenhower as possible president, finding him an amiable but lightweight executive better fit to run a car company rather than a country. Despite this, Truman found Eisenhower a more palatable choice than Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was slowly getting his own campaign underway. Throughout the remainder of 1951, Eisenhower still seemed to be viable, but McCarthy's increasingly heated rhetoric seemed to be gaining support. Still, Eisenhower's role in World War II did seem to give him an edge over many of his Republican rivals such as McCarthy and Robert Taft, to say nothing of the Democrats as a whole. The course of the war changed the political calculus completely, when most of the contenders for the presidency were killed by the Soviet atomic bombing of Washington, D.C. in May 1952. As Eisenhower was not in Washington at the time, it seemed likely he would become the Republican nominee by default. In the short story "An Old Man's Summer" by Esther Friesner in the anthology Alternate Generals edited by Harry Turtledove and Roland J. Green, President Dwight D. Eisenhower travels through a time portal to 1863 and witnesses the Battle of Gettysburg. In the short story "I Shall Return" by John Mina in the anthology Alternate Generals III edited by Harry Turtledove, General Dwight D. Eisenhower alongside George Patton and Jimmy Doolittle end up garrison in the Battle of the Philippines in December 1941 rather than in Europe.
Joycelyn Elders