John F. Kennedy lived

[carmine]

Don't Blame Me I Voted for Prez Rickard

[nightwing]

There was an All-Star Squadron Annual (#3?) that featured a slew of presidents; the JSA was assigned to save them from assassination to prevent the disruption of the timeline.  Since it was the 40s, this meant saving not only FDR and Truman but also JFK and Nixon as young Navy officers, Eisenhower when he was still Commander of Allied Forces and Ronald Reagan while he was making movies for the Army.  Not sure where Carter or Ford were, but they were in there.  (For the record, the heroes didn't know these were future presidents, just that they would be somehow crucial to history.)

Green Lantern suffers a major career failure when he's unable to save a kid from a falling tree (because...duh...it's made of wood!).  The kid is never identified, but it's implied he would've followed Reagan in the office (the story was written when Reagan was still serving).

Depending on your politics, this can be either a confirmation that America's been off the track since Reagan stepped down, or perhaps proof that Clinton, Bush I and/or II or Obama were never "meant" to get the job (take your pick based on your bias).  But from a DC comics perspective, it suggests that the comic book world did indeed get the same set of 20th century presidents we did, despite evidence to the contrary (eg: "The President of Steel": http://supermanfan.nu/main/?p=2463)

Of course, considering it's the JSA, maybe it just means that Earth-2 got all "our" presidents, even if Earth-1 didn't.

[Johnny Nevada]

Hmm...

"Superboy's Mission for President Kennedy" appeared in the early 80s "New Adventures of Superboy" run, in a storyline that also explored/explained how Superboy learned he'd turn invisible when time-traveling to a point in the past or future when he was alive. It also served to update the Superman's Mission for JFK story for the 80s (with Superboy's time-era having moved up to the 60s by that point, per DC's sliding timeline); in this version, JFK summons the Boy of Steel to help stop Russian spies from sabotaging a Project Mercury space flight (Superboy of the story's "present" had gone back in time a few years to watch said space flight for a school report, and found out about the turning-invisible bit)...

I'd assume that JFK of Earth-One also perished, especially in the Superboy setting above. Earth-One's Martin Luther King also was deceased (I always liked to think Superman or Superboy would've met the civil rights leader at least once), as was its Robert F. Kennedy (judging from a remark Superman made once when sent to Earth-Prime).

Post-JFK, presidents tended to be shadowed yes, but ones I recall seeing:

- Reagan (vaguely recall seeing him in a few 80s stories)
- Clinton appears alongside Hillary as the speaker at Superman's funeral.
- Lex Luthor got elected president in DC's 2000 election, presumably over Bush or Gore. He's eventually tossed from office and his veep Pete Ross takes over.
- No idea who president currently is (Obama? Still Pete Ross?).

[nightwing]

I'd assume that JFK of Earth-One also perished, especially in the Superboy setting above. Earth-One's Martin Luther King also was deceased (I always liked to think Superman or Superboy would've met the civil rights leader at least once), as was its Robert F. Kennedy (judging from a remark Superman made once when sent to Earth-Prime).

That sparks a memory.  Of course in that infamous scene at the end of the first O'Neill/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Ollie references the deaths of RFK and MLK.  The implication is they met their deaths in the same way and on the same schedule as they did on Earth-Prime. 

If so, then RFK met his death during his bid for the Democratic party nomination in 1968, which is hard to imagine happening in any way other than the one we saw; he didn't seem the type who'd have gone after the job if it hadn't been for the "unfinished" nature of his brother's term, and, if you ask me, he likely wouldn't have been seriously considered by voters without that back story, either.  Which means JFK was assassinated on Earth-One.

I grant you, that requires a couple leaps, and a willingness to accept evidence outside the super-titles.  And it does leave open the argument that Silver Age Superman and Bronze Age Superman are two different beasts altogether.

[India Ink]

Of course, all of these events were shown after the Weisinger Era and after Action Comics 387--in which the events began by the order of the Shadowy President resulted in Superman going to the very end of time, cycling back to the beginning of time with his soul ending up in the body of his recreated self and progressing through time to the very moment after his other self supposedly went forward in time in that defective time bubble.

[India Ink]

What was the status of the Vietnam War in Superman comics during the 1960s? It occurs to me that if JFK lived, then the escalation that occurred during the Johnson administration may not have happened. There may have been a war but not one that caused so much suffering and upset.

[DBN]

What was the status of the Vietnam War in Superman comics during the 1960s? It occurs to me that if JFK lived, then the escalation that occurred during the Johnson administration may not have happened. There may have been a war but not one that caused so much suffering and upset.

It happened. Superman went there.

http://supermanfan.nu/main/?p=343

[nightwing]

I'm not at all convinced Vietnam wouldn't have been just as messy and tragic with JFK in office.  After all, he put us there in the first place.  No president wanted to go down in history as the first to admit failure and defeat in a high-profile contest against Communism, and JFK already had the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs to live down.  I'm confident he'd have been as hamstrung by the "too deep in to give up now" mentality as anyone in the office.

I'm reminded of the old SNL skit from 1981 where a round table of political pundits discusses how different the world might have been if Ronald Reagan hadn't been killed by John Hinckley, making George H.W. Bush Commander-In-Chief.  One by one they list all the things that are going wrong in the country and the world and conclude, "Reagan would never have let this happen" or "Reagan would never have been crazy enough to..."  And of course, watching it in the real world where he *wasn't* killed, we know every one of those things happened just the same.  I thought it was one of the more intelligent skits SNL ever staged.  Without exactly being funny, you understand...that would be asking the impossible.

You'll note in the review DBN links to, the Vietnam conflict isn't treated any differently than any other war.  If not for the year in the indicia (1969), the story could have taken place in Korea or Japan just as easily.  That we're still in it in '69, and in apparently large numbers, shows there was an "escalation," but there's no suggestion of "suffering and upset" stateside.  Indeed, the war seems pretty much "out of sight, out of mind" for our cast of characters until Clark gets some letters from servicemen this one time, unlike WWII which drove all manner of comic-world references to spies, saboteurs, fifth columnists, quislings, shortages, paper drives, war bonds, etc.  In 40s comics, you never forgot there was a war on, but in 60s superhero comics, you could easily miss the fact that the US was in 'Nam at all.  But then there is this story, and the JLA tale spotlighting a returning Marine, and so on, so we know it did happen, just presumably in a tidier and less controversial fashion.  The Marvelverse got Oliver Stone's "Platoon" version of 'Nam, and DC got John Wayne's "Green Berets" version.