Questioning how the less than exemplary life of JFK related to the actions and decisions of his public career, Thomas Reeves probes the bewildering vagaries of Kennedy's character. He shows in particular the effects of his father's ruthless political tutelage and follows JFK through a career marked by an ever widening gap between the public image of a courageous and caring intellectual leader and the private reality of indifference to those values of fidelity, compassion, and concern he extolled. Drawing extensively on both published and archival materials, Reeves shows how "the best and the brightest" whom Kennedy attracted in life glorified him in death and transformed a man personally and politically ambivalent about such issues as civil rights into the fallen champion of the subsequent reforms of the Great Society.