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 U.S. presidents with a fictional presidency at a different time and/or under different circumstances than the one in actual history.
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Kim Kardashian In the episode "Time Travel" of the BBC Radio 4 comedy series Daphne Sounds Expensive, the troupe unsuccessfully attempted several schemes involving time travel to pay off the debt incurred buying their time machine. This indirectly resulted in a reality television star becoming President of the United States: President Kardashian. She is mentioned as announcing a 'Muslin ban' as it was one of her least favorite fabrics.
Estes Kefauver Kefauver is president in The New Order: Last Days of Europe. Kefauver is elected as the 35th president of the United States from 1957 to 1961. He took office following the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and was succeeded by Richard Nixon by way of contingent election.
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In Fatherland, a novel by Robert Harris (later adapted into a movie by HBO and radio dramatisation for BBC Radio), Nazi Germany won World War II resulting in a far different world by April 1964. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. had been elected President in 1960, likely because of his support for appeasement during his tenure as US Ambassador to Great Britain, and was seeking re-election in 1964. With tensions easing between the world's two major superpowers, a 75-year-old Adolf Hitler welcomes President Kennedy to a Berlin summit supposedly in the interest of fostering détente. However, the novel's protagonist Xavier March is told by Arthur Nebe that it is hoped that the summit will end American support for the Soviets' guerrilla war against Nazi Germany fought since the late 1940s, the motive for a cover-up of any evidence of the Holocaust including the covert assassination of all surviving attendees of the Wannsee Conference. Kennedy was believed by one of the main characters to be a shoo-in for re-election. President Kennedy was played by Jan Kohout in the movie. In the novel K is for Killing by Daniel Easterman, he becomes the 34th president in 1940 following the assassination of President D. C. Stephenson. Stephenson was elected vice president under Charles Lindbergh in 1932, and became president upon arranging for Lindbergh's assassination to prevent him from discovering a secret nuclear weapon collaboration plan with Nazi Germany. In the novel, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. is Speaker of the House and becomes President when Stephenson is killed by his own wife, but blames it on German agents and uses it as a pretext to sever all ties with Germany.
Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. In Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I (2014) by Richard Ned Lebow in which neither World War I nor World War II took place, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr was elected president in 1960 and served two terms. His First Lady was the former model, Broadway actress and Winner Take All hostess Athalia Fetter. She became a prominent activist in the civil rights movement, which resulted in a rapid decline in her husband's popularity. Although they were portrayed as a fairy tale couple, they often had extremely heated arguments in the White House. JPK's Attorney General was his younger brother John F. Kennedy. During an argument with the First Lady, JPK once remarked that he wished that he had married Jack's wife Jacqueline Kennedy as he was certain that she would have been a vacuous First Lady who would remain out of politics.
John F. Kennedy In the parallel universe featured in the film Quest for Love, John F. Kennedy likewise served as the US president but he was never assassinated. In 1971, he was elected Secretary-General of the League of Nations, which still existed as World War II never happened in that universe. In the 1980 novel Timescape by Gregory Benford, the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was averted by a high school student who interrupted Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository, attacking the shooter and sending the would-be fatal third shot awry. Although seriously injured, Kennedy survived. This interference created an alternate timeline in which William Scranton was the US president in 1974, having defeated Robert F. Kennedy due to a telephone tapping scandal. In James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation, John F. Kennedy is elected president in 1972, in an alternate history where Nazi Germany won World War II and the German-Japanese Axis rules all the world except for North America and Australia. President Kennedy vows "not to give up a single inch of free soil" and engages in an increasingly tense Cold War with the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, facing the bleak possibility of either defeat in the coming hot war or the destruction of the world in a nuclear holocaust. In 1974, Kennedy sponsors a secret time travel project to send a special commando unit back to 1939, whose intervention eventually creates our own history. In Brad Ferguson's The World Next Door, John F. Kennedy was still alive and still legally the president in the 1990s as the US and the whole world were completely devastated in 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into all-out nuclear war and no further elections were ever held. Kennedy is hated and detested by the remnants of the American population, starting to revive by their own efforts in small pockets here and there. Generally considered "The man who destroyed the country", Kennedy's exact whereabouts are unknown, and he is rumored to be "hiding out in a bunker somewhere." Also in Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Kennedy married Marilyn Monroe. In this version, he managed to avoid the 1963 assassination. The book makes a reference to the US becoming mired in a prolonged 'Cuban War', which might have started with Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion. However, no details are given, as Chabon's book is focused on a fictional Jewish territory in Alaska and other issues are peripheral to its plot. In "Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy", by Bryce Zabel (originally written on collaboration with Harry Turtledove, but completed by Zabel alone), President John Kennedy survived an assassination attempt in Dallas and went on to be re-elected in 1964. However, in 1966 two investigative reporters, Chuck Duncan and Alan Lefkowitz, published sensational revelations on misdeeds in the Kennedy Administration. This led to Congress eventually impeaching Kennedy and removing him from office. In one of the alternate realities featured in The Coming of the Quantum Cats by Frederik Pohl, John Kennedy was a Senator from Massachusetts in 1986 who was married to a woman named Marilyn. At the time, Nancy Reagan was President of the United States. She was considered a strong and assertive president, who successfully guided her version of the United States through the major crisis of an invasion from a different reality. Her husband Ronald, known as the First Gentleman, was mostly disregarded. In the alternate history novel Voyage by Stephen Baxter, John Kennedy was the victim of an assassination attempt in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. While Kennedy survived, his wife Jacqueline Kennedy was killed and he was left crippled and incapacitated. His condition forced him to resign and Lyndon B. Johnson became the 36th President. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 and, on July 20, 1969, he conducted a widely broadcast phone caljl with the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Joe Muldoon, the first men to set foot on the Moon. During the phone call, former President Kennedy committed the United States to send a crewed mission to Mars, which Nixon eventually took up and started implementing in practice. The Mars flight was launched from Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center, which was named for the late First Lady, in 1980. In the alternate history Dark Future wargame series by Kim Newman, John Kennedy was defeated by Richard Nixon in the 1960 election after it was discovered that he was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe. In the short story "The Impeachment of Adlai Stevenson" by David Gerrold included in the anthology Alternate Presidents edited by Mike Resnick, the title character defeated Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 after Eisenhower made the mistake of choosing Joseph McCarthy as his running mate instead of Richard Nixon. However, Stevenson proved to be an extremely unpopular president, leading to his impeachment and subsequent resignation in August 1958. Stevenson was succeeded by John Kennedy, his untested 41-year-old vice-president who becomes the 35th President. 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 recent marriage to the Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe, referred to derisively as "the new Monroe Doctrine." In the short story "The Kennedy Enterprise" by David Gerrold contained in the anthology Alternate Kennedys edited by Mike Resnick, John Kennedy was raised in Hollywood and eventually decided to become an actor. Although he was cast in numerous films in the 1940s and the 1950s, roles began to dry up by the time that he had reached his mid 40s. However, in 1966, he was cast in what would become his best known role, namely Captain Jack Logan of the U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701) in the hugely popular science fiction television series Star Track. In the short story Them Old Hyannis Blues by Judith Tarr also contained in the anthology Alternate Kennedys edited by Mike Resnick, Jack Kennedy and his brothers are a famous rock group while Elvis Presley is President of the United States. Meanwhile Mick Jagger is an underground leader and John Lennon is the United States Secretary of State. The front cover of the anthology depicts a stack of vinyl records with a record showing the Kennedy brothers on top, referencing the story. In the alternate history novel The Two Georges by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss, John Kennedy was an editor in Boston, Massachusetts in 1995. Although born and raised in the North American Union, Kennedy had a strong sense of his Irish heritage and hated the British Empire for its past and continued transgressions against Ireland from the Great Famine (1845–1852) to the abject poverty and brutal exploitation of the NAU's Irish miners in the present. He adopted a separatist stance, which he expressed through the magazine Common Sense, frequently skirting the edge of legality. He was suspected of being a member of the terrorist organisation, the Sons of Liberty. When the Thomas Gainsborough painting The Two Georges was stolen from the Provincial Governor's mansion in New Liverpool, Upper California in June 1995, Royal American Mounted Police officers Thomas Bushell and Samuel Stanley and the painting's custodian Dr. Kathleen Flannery followed suspected Sons member Joseph Killbride to Boston, they met with Kennedy, who proved combative in dealing with Bushell and made very subtle and inappropriate advances towards Flannery. His brother was a Catholic archbishop.