Round Two of the Smackdown. Sub-Genre: Alternate History. 

There's a glitch in the time-stream. At various moments throughout our history, alternate timelines are emerging, taking humanity into wildly different courses of development. Using your assigned historical person, write an alternate history story and tweak the past.

Assigned historical person: John F Kennedy. 

November 22,  1963

The sky is an autumn azure. So is Jackie's dress. The rich fabric slinks down her navel, and ripples past her knees and down to the floor of the car. Like a glistening waterfall, it flows around her calves and heels. Her dress rustles as the car moves through the cheering crowds and confetti. The motorcade snakes lazily through the heat and packed streets. Police motorcycles and men in dark suits and sunglasses patrol alongside them. She waves to the crowd with regal white gloves.

John F Kennedy sits alongside her. He has a Presidential smile held fast to his face. In front of them, the Texan Governor and his wife are also going through the motions. Kennedy catches the gaze of his wife. Her eyes are blue, sparkling, like the dress she is wearing. Unable to help himself, a Genuine smile spreads across his face. It will be the last Genuine smile he makes in his life, but he does not know that, so don't tell him. It's not your job.

The motorcade turns into Main St.

The procession of regal, open-aired black cars parades down it. The Dallas air is full of cheers, confetti, and car engines. There is probably a baby crying, and children fighting for a good view. Perhaps an older brother has his sibling in a headlock, when three loud shots sound from a high vantage point.

Take a moment to observe the bullets as they, well, bullet through the air toward the car, and Kennedy's last Genuine smile.

Now, consider a different situation: if Jackie were wearing a pink coat and dress, with a matching circular hat, the bullets would find their intended marks inside Kennedy and Texan Governor, Connally, and history would simply stagger along until it ends with Trump, and plastic pollution, and you probably can fill in the rest (the rest being a slip of the toupee, a Russian invasion, and a scientific study linking fake tan to both Parkinson's, Dementia, and a marked drop in IQ. In case you were wondering, yes, the study was dismissed as Fake News).

However, Jackie is not wearing pink. She's clothed in blue. A delightful, shimmering, freeing blue that probably isn't meant for Presidential motorcades. But her daughter Caroline will be watching on television. She wanted to see her mother in blue. Such requests, Jackie cannot refuse her daughter, whose birthday is in six days. The dress moves in the chilly breeze.

In this situation, the marksman is slightly inconvenienced. He has had Kennedy in his crosshairs for over a minute now. Watching the car draw slowly closer to his position. He breathes slowly out. The azure fabric blinks in his eyes, like a mirror directing sunlight. The marksman recoils in pain (only briefly, as he is a professional, after all). The bullets leave his rifle almost identically. Ex-Marine Harvey Oswald takes his job seriously. Even though he fires an infinitesimal millisecond early, the barrel doesn't even wobble.

Three loud rifle shots shock the older brother into releasing his sibling. They have missed the act.

Jackie Kennedy's dress floods with crimson. Connally's skull splatters the President with skull and brain. A third bullet clips the car, and history doesn't so much stagger towards the End, so much as glance at the edge of a cliff, and start sprinting.

Kennedy paces the lino floor outside Trauma Room One. Disinfectant cloys his nostrils and settles on the back of his neck. Servicemen stake out the corridors. For all the power he has in America, they will not let him enter. Jackie's dress, so dreadfully red, was cut off with shears as they wheeled her off the ambulance. A door slams in the distance. He flinches. He has seen men dying in the Navy, and they look much, much too similar to Jackie in his memory. His own shirt is white again. There is always a change of clothes for the President.

A man in a long white jacket explains that his wife has passed away. The exact words used are: "your wife has passed away. I'm terribly sorry."

What Kennedy hears is different. He hears: "your wife has been murdered. Respond in kind."

The Governor's wife wails, as she receives similar news from Trauma Room Two. The news is not surprising.

Caroline's birthday is on Wednesday, he thinks, dazed. Kennedy lets his legs collapse underneath him, landing on an anonymous waiting room chair. Anchors of guilt lash him to the chair, and pull him swiftly under. The bullet meant for him is sitting on a surgeon's operating table.

He is reminded of a speech he once gave: "A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on." The idea he has currently is retribution.

The marksman, Oswald, is caught within two hours of Jackie drawing her last clotted breath. It was not pleasant. Kennedy heard her drowning in the motorcade. Cowering, forced to lie beside her on the ground as she coughed the life from her lungs. Useless, as her hand grew slack clasped in his own. Streams of private tears are covered with concealer before he meets the press. He puts his Presidential face on.

Two days pass. Grey. It sleets.

The day is November 24th. The courtroom is full. Kennedy wears black. Secret servicemen were unable to dissuade him from appearing at the trial (Note that justice moved swiftly in 1963). He watches on a monitor at the courthouse.

Jack Ruby is going bald, and using hair gel to darken and coerce the remaining hairs to stay attached to his scalp. Cigar smoke clings to him. He owns nightclubs, several not-quite-legal-institutions, and a significant proportion of the Dallas police force. There is a .38 Colt Cobra revolver snug in his pocket. He watches the trial from the journalist's seats. Front row seats to Oswald's trial.

Consider again pink dress situation. Here, Ruby, enraged Kennedy's untimely passing, steps out from a crowd of reporters and empties the bullets into Oswald at-point blank range.

Now however, there are several secret servicemen evenly spaced in the journalist's stands. One of them, reliably, wears a dark suit and sunglasses (no one ever suspects a man in a dark suit and sunglasses). Anyway, one of them is seated next to Jack Ruby. The policemen who have recognized Ruby cast their eyes quickly downward, upward, or in any direction that doesn't acknowledge him. Ruby pays well, even if he stinks of cologne and rank hair gel. Secret Service #1 notices the shape in Ruby's pocket early into the trial. Ruby plans a sprint, but the demure man wearing sunglasses - with no notepad or portable recording device, odd for journalist when you think about it - seems to anticipate his actions, and tackles him to the ground with a bellow. Ruby briefly thinks: " Фсыое заеебахнух" before a much larger pistol knocks his cranium into unconsciousness.

More details emerge in the coming weeks. Without his untimely courthouse murder, even an ex-marine like Oswald can only hold his secrets for so long before they spill. To his credit, he does attempt to bite his own tongue off during the third day. Ruby's tongue is likewise made pliable. A hammer and sickle is found framed in a secret room of Ruby's nightclub. Both men name the same names. Make the same promises. Ruby cries in Russian. Days bleed together as the interrogations continue. White House physician's are concerned at Kennedy's insistence he watch all of the footage. Every second.

Kennedy misses his daughter's birthday: it is quiet, glum affair with a clown. The au pair keeps leaving the room to blot tears from her face. She is dismissed the next morning.

Mass donations are made to public libraries and education in Jackie's name. A legacy. Her name will be printed en masse inside book covers, above commemorative arches, and in cursive font on plaques and scholarship trophies. Unfortunately, no one will survive to read them.

Deep circles have cultivated under Kennedy's eyes. Unable to rest, yet, until justice is had. He stops making public appearances. His physician's query his dosage of  LSD being unsafe with his medication. They are breaking their oaths, sure it must be harming something, organ or otherwise, by this. But they cannot say no to a President. They are just doing their jobs.

A large number of men in dark suits and sunglasses cross the Russian border. No one suspects them. They verify the accuracy of Oswald's anguished shriekings. Coordinates are gathered and re-confirmed. Three locations. For three bullets. They are only following orders, after all. They are professionals: and nothing, if not excellent at their jobs.

Beneath the White House, in its warren of unmarked tunnels, a file is delivered to Kennedy. As is a briefcase. Kennedy reads the file once, and again. Four times within the week. Whiskey sinks in his tumbler. It rises and falls in his glass like the tides (if the tides repeated every two hours instead of every twelve). The world shimmers around him, in waves. Physicians have been dismissed like dominos as they voice concerns to their President, who should consider not combining such quantities of narcotics and medication. Eventually he finds one that does not say "No." He is from Dallas.

Now, the night is December 22nd. Snow blankets the White House. The Washington DC winds turn it to sleet. One month has never passed as fast or as slow to him. Kennedy draws a slow breath. He stands, and (after several tries) accomplishes his goal: he draws the curtains (blue) and sits with the flag at his back (the blue and red too close for comfort, still). The house is desolate without her. On his desk, the delivered briefcase is open, and there is a trail of empty glasses. Jackie's photograph sits on his desk. He carries it with him throughout the house, in case she talks to him. Sometimes he sees Jackie, oh so faintly, in a pink coat, crying on their bed.

Kennedy teases a finger over the button inside the briefcase. He still wears his ring. If he had a press release for this moment, he would reuse another speech: "Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man." But there is no one to say this too. The room is dark and empty. He says it aloud anyway.

When the scarlet Hammer and Sickle stepped out of Peru, he'd thought it a success. But the scarlet had only splattered over Dallas instead.

Kennedy loads the coordinates carefully. Selfishly - and aware of the selfishness involved - he breathes out.  What he does next has been signed off on by the highest authority in America.

He is only doing his job.

Consider again the pink dress. In this situation, the suitcase will not be opened until it is aboard the Air Force One in 2020.

Three missiles erupt out of the Texan countryside. Their proximity creates a disk shaped smoke cloud, which eight separate farmers will call in as a UFO. One will claim to have been probed.

The ground will be razed by Russian missiles before dawn.