Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy, FRSL (3 November 1919 – 18 October 2009) was a Scottish journalist, broadcaster, humanist and author. As well as his wartime service in the Royal Navy, he is known for presenting many current affairs programmes and for reexamining cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the murder convictions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley. He also campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom.

Kennedy was born in 1919 in Edinburgh, the son of a career Royal Navy officer, Edward Kennedy, and his wife, Rosalind Grant, daughter of Sir Ludovic Grant, 11th Baronet. His mother Rosalind was a cousin of the Conservative politician Robert Boothby, later Lord Boothby. He had two younger sisters, Morar and Katherine. Morar married the playwright Royce Ryton in 1954. Katherine married Major Ion Calvocoressi in 1947. Kennedy was schooled at Eton College (where he played in a jazz band with Humphrey Lyttelton) and studied for a year at Christ Church, Oxford, until the outbreak of war. While at Oxford he was a member of the Bullingdon Club.

Kennedy's father, by then a retired captain, returned to the navy and was given command of HMS Rawalpindi, a hastily militarised P&O ocean liner, known as an armed merchant cruiser, that was used on the Northern Patrol. On 23 November 1939, while on patrol southeast of Iceland, Rawalpindi encountered two of the most powerful German warships, the small battleships (or battlecruisers) Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, trying to break out between Iceland and Britain into the Atlantic. Rawalpindi was able to signal the German ships' location back to base. Despite being hopelessly outgunned, Kennedy decided to fight, rather than surrender as demanded by the Germans. Scharnhorst sank Rawalpindi; of her 312 crew, 275 (including her captain) were killed. Kennedy was posthumously mentioned in dispatches and his decision to fight against overwhelming odds entered the folklore of the Royal Navy.

Ludovic Kennedy followed his father into the Royal Navy; he served as an officer on destroyers, mostly in the same northern seas. His ship, HMS Tartar, was one of those that pursued the battleship Bismarck following the Battle of the Denmark Strait. He witnessed the final battle, until Bismarck was ablaze and its crew began to abandon ship, but shortage of fuel forced Tartar to depart for home before Bismarck sank. Kennedy later wrote about this in his 1974 book Pursuit, his chronicle of the chase and sinking of Bismarck.

Kennedy returned to Christ Church, Oxford, at the end of the war to complete his English degree. He also edited the student newspaper The Isis Magazine. At Oxford he co-founded the Writers' Club and wrote a book on Nelson's captains. After leaving Oxford he began a career as an investigative journalist.

Kennedy wrote for a number of publications, including Newsweek. From 1953, he edited and introduced the First Reading radio series on the BBC Third Programme, presenting young writers such as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Later he became a television journalist and a newsreader on ITV's Independent Television News alongside Robin Day and Chris Chataway. He presented the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama for several years. Kennedy was interested in miscarriages of justice, and he wrote and broadcast on numerous cases. In 1957 Kennedy made a guest appearance as a newsreader in the Scotland Yard supporting feature series episode The Lonely House.

Kennedy was interested in naval warfare. He wrote and presented a substantial number of television documentaries for the BBC on maritime history in the Second World War, beginning with Scapa Flow, followed by the dramatic narrative of the sinking of the Bismarck in which he was involved. Other subjects included the U-boat war, the story of HMS Belfast, and the Dieppe Raid and St Nazaire Raid. The Life and Death of the Scharnhorst (1971) brought him into contact with survivors of the battlecruiser that had sunk his father's ship Rawalpindi. The series included Target Tirpitz (1973), a history of the extraordinary attempts to sink the feared German battleship Tirpitz; two of the films led to books.

In 1980 he presented an episode of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys of the World, in which he crossed the United States.