This is a counter-revisionist examination of John F. Kennedy and his administration, which presents a policy history of major US legislative efforts between 1961 and 1963. Irving Bernstein focuses on administrative and congressional progress under Kennedy in civil rights, education, taxes, unemployment, Medicare and the Peace Corps. He contends that many of Kennedy's campaign promises were well on their way to being enacted by the third year of his first term. The author also declares that many of Kennedy's objectives, later achieved by Lyndon Johnson, would have been brought to fruition by Kennedy himself had he not been assassinated. He supports this argument by tracing Kennedy's selection of advisers and directors on each issue, piecing together his overall decision-making process through original written sources and previously published works, and calculating the probability that the policy would have been successfully implemented.