A Question of Character: John F. Kennedy in Image and Reality - Hardcover

Reeves, Thomas C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0029259657 ISBN 13: 9780029259658

Publisher: The Free Press, 1991

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas C. Reeves is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. He is also the author of The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy and The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity. He lives in Franksville, Wisconsin.

From the Inside Flap

more hotly debated than how, or even if, a politician's private life affects his public competence. In A Question of Character John F. Kennedy's two lives—public and private—are examined to answer this timely question. Respected historian and biographer Thomas C. Reeves reveals discrepancies between JFK's public persona, which has reached mythic proportions, and his scandalous private behavior. Most illuminating is the constant theme or Joe Kennedy's almost total control of JFK's behavior and politics throughout most of his son's career.

"The John Kennedy who emerges from these pages was not a man of good moral character. He was reared not to be good but to win." — Los Angeles Times

Reeves has provided the most truthful and balanced assessment of John F. Kennedy to date. Written more in sorrow than in anger, A Question of Character explores the sensitive and difficult question of how people, and

Edition details

• Publisher: The Free Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0029259657
• ISBN 13: 9780029259658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 500