Virgin Adventures Reviews: Who Killed Kennedy by David Bishop (or, “A Nightmare on Elm Street”)

You’re a cautious man. Trust no one. Very wise. After what happened to JFK I understand completely.

~ Max Fenig, The X-Files: Fallen Angel (1993)

The facts of the case are simple enough. At 12:30 P.M. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, former Senator for Massachusetts and the 35th and incumbent President of the United States, was assassinated. He was quickly rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, to be pronounced dead just half an hour later.

Of course, when such a prominent figure is assassinated, and in such a shocking and attention-grabbing way, you very quickly find yourself grappling with something beyond the facts: the myths. One week later, widowed First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy gave an interview with Life magazine’s Theodore H. White wherein she quoted the closing lines of Loewe and Lerner’s Camelot, a favourite of her late husband. The ill-fated administration of the young President thus became inextricably linked in the popular imagination with the court of Arthurian legend.

As time passed and more great events happened, as events are wont to do, this mythos only further intertwined itself with a general feeling of pessimism and a sense that the idealistic, forward-looking spirit that Kennedy had symbolised for so many had been slowly crushed.  The United States began to step up its involvement in Vietnam, particularly from 1965 onwards. In February of that same year, prominent civil rights activist Malcolm X was also assassinated in New York City.

However, these anxieties really boiled over with the coming of 1968. Two prominent assassinations took place in rapid succession, with the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr. sparking riots across the country. The death of the vaunted Kennedy Era romanticism was then all too violenty confirmed just two months after that, when the President’s younger brother Robert was shot at a campaign function for the upcoming Democratic Party primaries. With his death, the nomination was ultimately secured by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but come polling time in November, the presidency was won by Richard Nixon, who Kennedy himself had beaten in 1960.

There was a sense that the 1960s were, in some sense, dying. The hippie subculture which had been so influential in the 1967 Summer of Love rapidly found itself becoming unpalatable in the aftermath of the Manson Family’s gruesome murders in August 1969. Human beings landed on the moon one month earlier, fulfilling a promise made by Kennedy in 1962, but NASA announced the closure of the Apollo program in September 1970 and there would be no further manned landings after the return of Apollo 17 in December 1972.

And then there was Watergate.

The saga of Richard Nixon’s dodgy dealings and efforts to cover up his administration’s involvement in the break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters was another one of those moments that really shook up the American people’s faith in the government.

What’s even more relevant to the content of this review, however, were the investigations by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into the scandal. Published in the form of a book, All the President’s Men, it rapidly became a best-seller and was subsequently adapted into a critically-acclaimed film.

I bring all of this background information up for two reasons. For one, I do think that it serves as relevant historical context in explaining the tone and mood of this novel. The other more immediate reason is that it is just a good means of illustrating the story’s general premise.

Perhaps the best way I can describe Who Killed Kennedy is as Doctor Who‘s answer to All the President’s Men. It’s the tale of one journalist’s quest for the truth about UNIT and the various alien incursions which take place over the Pertwee Era. Truth be told, it’s a rather bold and format-breaking concept that serves as an indicator of just how comfortable the Virgin books had finally become.

Though it uses the Missing Adventures logo on its front cover and is therefore often lumped in with that range, I don’t think it really fits into either of their main lines. This is a creative gamble, and a book that clearly only exists because its author was very passionate about writing it. And, by and large, I do think it’s a gamble that pays off.

While Who Killed Kennedy may be stylistically informed by the culture surrounding and immediately proceeding from the Watergate crisis, however, it is also a novel which is deeply tied to the zeitgeist of the period in which it was written. It’s a conspiracy thriller from the 1990s, a decade where conspiracy thrillers (and indeed conspiracy theories in general) were immensely popular.

This, of course, brings us to the next piece of media which the novel reflects, and you can probably guess what it is from the quote I’ve chosen to lead this review with. That’s right, we’re going back to the Dale’s Ramblings origin story and talking about The X-Files… but with way more depth than I ever would have afforded it as the dumb 14-year-old I was when I started this blog five years back.

Anyway. The X-Files was arguably one of the most quintessentially 1990s shows ever, captivating the entire country with its tale of a shadowy government conspiracy. It very much seemed to be a case of the right show at the right time, cementing the Fox network as a real heavy-hitter in the American television landscape. Not only that, but it perfectly reflected the national mood of the post-Cold War era, with a population who had turned their gaze inward and were expressing increasing paranoia about how much the government could be trusted.

Yet while that worldview was undoubtedly influenced by contemporary concerns over incidents like Ruby Ridge or the Waco siege, it also stretched back further. Chris Carter has been rather candid about how a lot of The X-Files‘ general philosophy toward government was influenced by his own experiences growing up as a teenager in the Watergate years, and this connection was quite often made explicit.

Mulder’s original government informant throughout the first season was named “Deep Throat” in reference to the real-life pseudonym afforded to the informant who assisted Woodward and Bernstein in their journalistic endeavours. It was established in the second-season premiere, Little Green Men, that Samantha Mulder’s abduction took place while she and her brother were staying up late and sitting through the Watergate hearings on television. The first proper meeting between Mulder and Scully in that episode was set in the car-park of the Watergate hotel complex.

There’s a deep-rooted cynicism to the worldview of The X-Files, but there’s also something of a romantic idealism to the way it presents Mulder’s quest for the all-encompassing ideal of “the truth.” It’s a search which is repeatedly and directly compared to a religious fervour, and it feels very appropriate to a peculiarly pre-9/11, “unipolar moment” understanding of faith that the show should often be so willing to vindicate that zeal.

For all that Stevens serves in part as a stand-in both for a Woodward and Bernstein-esque reporter and Bishop himself – the name “James Stevens” comes from Bishop’s own middle names, and details of his real-life journalistic career were incorporated into Stevens’ own backstory – he is also a Mulder-esque figure, and reflects the fascinations of a very particular moment.

Naturally, moments pass. It is very hard for a modern viewer to look at the types of conspiracy theories espoused by Mulder in quite the same way as one might have done back in 1996. Conspiracy theories seem less fun when they’re not all “Oh man there’s shapeshifting aliens and they’re putting alien oil in bees and they don’t have faces” and are more along the lines of QAnon, and I think the popular consciousness has generally shifted to reflect a greater awareness of the harm that these sorts of theories can do if left to spread unchecked.

Something that both The X-Files and Who Killed Kennedy share a mutual understanding of, however, is just why conspiracies can be so thrilling and affirming, especially in an age like the 1990s where a lot of the Cold War certainties that had come to define Western life were stripped away.

In a certain sense, it is fundamentally comforting to believe that every major event in American history was orchestrated by a bunch of evil shadowy cigarette-smoking government officials with hidden agendas, because the scary alternative is that these arbitrary and random happenings are precisely as arbitrary and random as they appear. That’s really the core reason behind the propagation and persistence of conspiracy theories, and it’s something that we’re even witnessing to this very day in the form of misinformation around COVID and vaccines.

It feels rather pointed, then, that Stevens’ big emotional reappraisal should be a realisation of the ways in which his desire for “the truth” has been perverted by disingenuous and malicious actors. The X-Files occasionally gestured at these kinds of notions by raising questions over how far Mulder could trust sources like Deep Throat or X, but because of the nature and premise of the show there was only so far that his basic bedrock assumptions could really be pulled out from under him. That’s not necessarily an inherently bad thing, but it does mean that Who Killed Kennedy does provide a subtly different reading experience twenty-five years on.

The novel is also canny enough to tap in to this need for a logical structure in a way that is very particular to Doctor Who and the fandom surrounding it, however: continuity. There are points at which Stevens’ researches into UNIT almost seem to serve as a reflection of Bishop’s own efforts to compile some kind of working history of British and international society as it might look in the wake of the constant world-threatening events that seemed to crop up every other week during the Third Doctor’s era.

The novel’s vision of politics even consciously blurs the line between fact and fiction, linking the events of Season 7 and 8 with the real-world defeat of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the 1970 election, in keeping with Virgin’s general policy of setting the UNIT stories in a time roughly contemporaneous to the date of broadcast.

Again, it’s worth pausing to note how much of a weird, format-breaking creative risk this is. On the face of it, the continuity overload sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. There’s an entire chapter that is simply a dossier drawing links between various appearances by the Doctor throughout the twentieth century in the television series, and the aforementioned Author’s Commentary even estimates that the chapter ‘probably has the highest level of fanwank per page in any Doctor Who novel.‘

Yet somehow it works, and I’d personally put a lot of that down to a question of presentation. I do think there’s an appreciable difference between the way Who Killed Kennedy paces out Stevens’ various revelations and something like, say, Craig Hinton just rattling off a list of pre-established aliens that all participated in some newly-invented big conflict in The Quantum Archangel.

Both are still rather unabashed instances of continuity overload or ‘fanwank,’ but Who Killed Kennedy at least makes the novel decision to supply its continuity analysis with a definable story structure. The exposition is only ever limited to what Stevens could feasibly know at any given moment, or what makes the most dramatic sense for that moment.

It works because it commits so thoroughly to allowing the audience to inhabit his viewpoint, turning what could be little more than a shallow exercise in continuity reverence and overanalysis into a thrilling paranoiac rollercoaster ride, even when you know the answers to his questions. Indeed, this commitment runs so deep that the entire novel is told in the first-person – a relative rarity in Doctor Who fiction to this point – and the fictional character of Stevens is rather prominently afforded co-author status on the front cover.

But it should be acknowledged that this commitment can sometimes work against the novel, which brings us at some length to the topic of Dodo Chaplet. This is probably the part of the novel which has been most singled out for criticism, including – as I will get to later – from the author himself.

Put simply, the picture of Dodo’s life in the aftermath of her hypnosis by WOTAN in The War Machines is not a very happy one at all. She finds herself passed between a series of psychiatric institutions which each carry out progressively more inhumane and cruel “treatments” on her, culminating in her being the victim of an attempted rape and inadvertently killing her attacker in self-defence. When she contacts Stevens, she’s wandering the streets of London without any real fixed abode beyond a hostel for the homeless.

These are all extremely heavy topics to throw into a character’s backstory, right off the bat. Coming just two months after Dodo was put through the emotional wringer in The Man in the Velvet Mask, it’s no surprise that some readers have felt as if there was some special focus on putting the character through hell and back.

As I said in my review of The Man in the Velvet Mask, I don’t necessarily think that the post-Doctor lives of companions need be supremely rosy and wonderful. I do think there is probably a story to be told about the long-term effects of Dodo’s experiences in The War Machines, even if it might not be the happiest of tales.

Even still, throwing in an attempted rape in an almost casual manner feels a bit like a manifestation of some of the (often a little overblown) criticisms of the Virgin books trying to be “adult” by offhandedly incorporating heavy topics, or even just the spectre of heavy topics, into their stories. This impression is only compounded by Dodo’s ultimate fate in the novel, killed by a brainwashed Private Francis Cleary as a part of the Master’s evil machinations. While Who Killed Kennedy was published three years before the creation of the website Women in Refrigerators made the term “fridging” a part of mainstream, colloquial media analysis, it feels like it would fit the bill nonetheless.

Dodo’s death serves to underline precisely why the novel cannot really work as that hypothetical exploration of her trauma that I floated earlier: on a fundamental level, this is a story about James Stevens and not Dodo Chaplet. Dodo’s character arc only really exists insofar as it can be understood in relation to that of Stevens – initially as a source of comfort and companionship after the breakdown of his marriage to Natasha, and later as a motivator through her death at the hands of Cleary.

That is textbook fridging, even if it may precede the writing of the actual textbook, and as I mentioned in my review of The Man in the Velvet Mask, it only becomes more noticeable when placed against the backdrop of her very perfunctory exit in The War Machines.

Now, in the awareness that I am perhaps skirting close to appearing rather harsh or mean-spirited, I do want to make it perfectly clear that I don’t really ascribe any malicious intent to Bishop in all of this. This is especially the case in light of the fact that, as I referenced earlier, he seems to have reflected on this criticism over the years.

And now I am placed in a rather unique and strange position, because we have to talk about the twentieth anniversary edition of the novel which Bishop released through the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club in 2016. Ordinarily, I try to confine my reviews to the books as they were originally published for simplicity’s sake, but Who Killed Kennedy presents something of a dilemma, as the updated edition adds substantial new material that significantly changes some key plot points, including Dodo’s death.

In brief, the new chapters have an older Stevens meeting with the Twelfth Doctor and travelling back in time to prevent Dodo’s murder. Though Stevens and Cleary both die in their combat, the timeline changes so that the 1970s counterparts of Dodo and Stevens go on to live together.

Because of my aforementioned habit of trying to read and review the books as close to their original published edition as I can (Lungbarrow will probably be an exception because I only have so many of my kidneys that I can sell for a copy of the original), I only read these new additions after completing the whole book. However, they do still fit rather well into the style of the original novel around them.

It’s an interesting and unique situation, but it is nice to see an author who’s actually willing to introspect about their past work and make changes where they deem it necessary, while also not going full-on George Lucas and completely annihilating the original from existence. In a world where certain other Virgin writers are severely lacking in a willingness to change their beliefs or consider alternate perspectives and just decide to dig their heels further into bigotry, it’s appreciated.

The last thing I want to touch on is, of course, the JFK stuff. And it does feel appropriate that I’ve thus far strayed away from the topic that originally provided the opening line of the review, as that is kind of what happens in the novel itself. Bishop even acknowledges this in his commentary to the NZDWFC’s eBook edition.

From a purely in-universe view, the Master’s plan to change the assassination of John F. Kennedy is a rather arbitrary and tacked-on one. There’s some gesturing at a justification behind it, with the Doctor speculating that the date might have been chosen because of how his adventures began in An Unearthly Child at around that same time, but it’s not a wholly watertight explanation.

(Then again, “The Master has a very arbitrary and hare-brained scheme” is hardly a break from the character as seen on TV. We are talking about a man who thought the best way to derail the signing of the Magna Carta was to replace King John with an android robot, all the while dressing up in an unconvincing ginger wig and assuming the ever-so-clever pseudonym of “Estram.” His logic centres may not be firing on all cylinders…)

But really, the in-universe explanations don’t get to the core of the issue. It’s a date chosen based on the metatextual logic and mythology of Doctor Who as a franchise, since the first episode of An Unearthly Child aired just under twenty-four hours after the assassination (if you correct for the time differences between Dallas and the United Kingdom).

Some might argue that this weakens Who Killed Kennedy as a story, but I do think that’s a bit of an uncharitable stance. If nothing else, it certainly fits within the scope of the Virgin books’ recurring preoccupation with examining the 1960s as a fundamentally important time in the history and identity of Doctor Who.

In a way, the series will always remain deeply linked with the ethos and spirit of that time, for better or for worse. That’s the bitter irony of the novel, and Stevens’ own character arc. Doctor Who, as a concept, depends in some sense on the fears of social decline and even collapse that were percolating through Western society and culture, and for many there is perhaps no better illustration of that fear than the assassination of JFK.

For all that Stevens attempts to serve as a valiant crusader in search of the truth, for all that he attempts to narrativise the random and seemingly senseless acts around him into a coherent theory, he cannot escape the pull of the myth of Camelot. In his efforts to interrogate and dismantle the secrecy surrounding UNIT, he ends up becoming a crucial cog in an entirely new legend.

It’s possible to read all this as a commentary on the way we, as fans, prop up certain aspects of the story of Doctor Who that we might find uncomfortable if we dug deep enough. If one ascribes to such a theory, there is perhaps something a little Love & Monsters-esque about all of this, and it’s aged rather well.

Or maybe it’s more akin to the revised ending, and things aren’t quite so set in stone. Maybe it is possible to pursue a model of fandom that allows us to celebrate what we enjoy and love about a show, while going back to redress our mistakes and ensure that there can be equal joy for everyone in that fandom.

Ultimately, I suppose that all I’m really trying to say is that maybe the real Kennedy assassination was the friends we made along the way.

I’m being more than slightly facetious there, but whatever the case may be, Who Killed Kennedy remains an intriguing oddity. It staunchly refuses to fit classification as an “ordinary” Doctor Who book, offering a unique take on the lives lived around events that we are so familiar with. Stevens’ arc is compelling, and even the odd misstep like the death of Dodo or the strangeness of the Master’s plan isn’t quite enough to ruin it for me. Read it if you have the chance, preferably with the added benefit of the author’s commentary. It’s definitely worth the time.

Miscellaneous Observations

Not to put too fine on a point on my waffling on about The X-Files, but you could perhaps mount a case that the death of Dodo serves as Who Killed Kennedy‘s own twist on that show’s repeated suggestion that the form of violence and control exerted by the Syndicate was very much a patriarchal one that disproportionately targeted women. Indeed, the senseless and seemingly random killing brought to my mind the death of Melissa Scully in The Blessing Way.

I’m not wholly convinced that this reading works especially well, as those themes are never really given enough room to breathe. Once again, it’s kind of a casualty of the focus on Stevens, as there’s no female figure comparable to Scully who can offer a lens through which to view this violence, so you’re just kind of left with a woman being killed off to advance the male lead’s story arc. As I’ve explained, that’s less than ideal. Again, though, credit where credit is due to Bishop for seeing fit to “un-fridge” Dodo, as it were.

As you can probably tell, I did get the inspiration to go back and rewatch all the “mythology” episodes of The X-Files that would have been aired at the time of the novel’s publication in April 1996. Completely separate from anything else, it was just great fun to do, especially since I got my start in (now-deleted) reviews of that show. I did also consider watching Oliver Stone’s JFK, but it’s like three hours long so I’ll probably leave that for another day.

Early on a part of me was concerned that, by doing all my talking about the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate scandal I was doing my usual thing of going on very lengthy and irrelevant tangents before getting to the book itself. Thankfully, I was reassured that there was some relevance to it all when I saw that Bishop explicitly acknowledged the influence of the Deep Throat informant on the creation of Stevens’ own informant, Cassandra. Moments like that are way more satisfying for me as a critic than they perhaps should be.

Final Thoughts

So yeah, that’s another book down. I had a lot of fun writing this one, even apart from the side course of X-Files viewing that I prescribed myself. I feel like it’s one of those books that is almost tailor-made for the way I like to talk about these stories, what with the whole 1990s conspiracy thriller angle. Hope you got as much enjoyment out of it as I did.

Next time, it’s May 1996. The Eighth Doctor is here, and we begin to witness the end of an era as Bernice makes a temporary departure from the New Adventures in Paul Cornell’s Happy Endings. Join me then as we celebrate the fiftieth of these novels that I, for one, have come to hold very dear to my heart. Until then, though…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper