Kennedy assassination The Kennedy assassination referred to the murder of the American President John F . Kennedy at Dealey Plaza , in Dallas , Texas on 22 November 1963 . The assassination . mentally programmed UNIT Private Francis Cleary and sent him from 1971 to prevent the assassination . This would change history and possibly enable the Cuban Missile Crisis to proceed in a way that would lead to a nuclear war . James Stevens , a journalist obsessed with the assassination attempt , went to 1963 using a time ring to stop Cleary . Stevens discovered the actual gunman who had killed Kennedy and recognised him as an older version of Stevens himself , travelling back from the future a second time . In order to preserve the course of history , in 1996 , after writing a book revealing the truth , he used the time ring again to carry out the assassination . ( PROSE : " Who Killed Kennedy " ) One of Kennedy ' s last official acts before his assassination was to order Moonbase Eisenhower to shoot down the US Rocket Lincoln , which had been stolen by the Sixth Doctor and Larisa Petrov . Although Kennedy did not rescind the order before his death , the ' s commanding officer General Paterson countermanded it when Petrov contacted him and proved that she was an American spy working in the Soviet Union . ( AUDIO : " " ) The Zapruder footage depicted the assassination . ( AUDIO : " The Conspiracy " ) Following the assassination , FBI agent , Warren Skeet was employed to investigate the premises where the assassin had been spotted . Simultaneously , newspaper Dallas Morning News published a series of articles on the assassination , written by journalists Mae Callon and Jim . ( PROSE : " Shroud of Sorrow " ) Minor links . Peri Brown once commented that everyone remembered where they were when Kennedy was assassinated . She was in the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at the time . ( AUDIO : " " ) The Third Doctor mentioned to James Stevens in a telephone call that the prevention of the assassination would cause an historical embolism , which would result in the Doctor himself being erased from existence . ( PROSE : " Who Killed Kennedy " ) The Seventh Doctor implied to Ace that the proximity of Nemesis to Earth had caused or influenced the assassination . ( TV : " Silver Nemesis " ) The Eighth Doctor once claimed that he had been accused of the assassination . ( AUDIO : " Zagreus " ) A contemporary photo found by Clive Finch showed the Ninth Doctor as a spectator to the assassination . ( TV : " Rose " ) Darius Pike showed K9 , Starkey and Gryffen the 23 November 1963 issue of the " Daily Standard " , with the latest news on the Kennedy assassination as the headline . ( TV : " The Cambridge Spy " ) Ian Chesterton pondered the possibility of Russia n invasion during the turmoil after Kennedy ' s death . ( AUDIO : " 1963 " ) The crew of the " Teselecta " stated that the Kennedy assassination was an example of how time could be rewritten . ( TV : " Let ' s Kill Hitler " ) Conspiracy theorist George Wilson suggested the assassination was carried out by aliens . He joked to Jack Harkness that he could say something as ridiculous as that , but if he referenced the wrong frame of the Zapruder footage , he would never hear the end of it . ( AUDIO : " The Conspiracy " ) Behind the scenes . The première of " Doctor Who " on 23 November 1963 happened just one day after the Kennedy assassination , a fact frequently mentioned in media overviews and non - fiction literature on " Doctor Who " . The Kennedy assassination happened during the recording of an episode of " The Daleks " , interrupting shooting as the cast and crews learned of the news . A common rumour states that news coverage of the killing caused the interruption of the normal television schedule , too , so that on 23rd November , 1963 , one day after the assassination , the first episode of the first " Doctor Who " story , " An Unearthly Child " , aired five minutes late ; however it actually went out only ninety seconds later than scheduled . As the episode was not seen in parts of the country due to a power outage , it was rebroadcast the following week ; it is often stated that it was replayed due to the assassination coverage , but this too has been debunked .