Includes index.

Includes index.

"Bob Hawke has been in the forefront of Australian life for the best part of a generation and has, during that time, become perhaps the most famous and certainly the most enduring political figure, with a power second only to that of the Prime Minister.
By the time he joined the ACTU in 1958 he had been a professional student for eleven years and his only experience of industry was a brief six months with an oil company between his degrees. At a time when graduates were rare in the trade union movement, his arrival created a good deal of apprehension within the movement itself and elsewhere.
Since then, as President of the ACTU, he has become famous as the healer of industrial conflicts, the originator of ACTU business enterprises such as ACTU Solo and Jetset, and the balance between the separate wings of the trade union movement.
So much has not only been visible, but commented on and described in minute detail by the media throughout Bob Hawke's public life. What have not been so obvious are the changes in his political attitudes and the private agonies over the changing role of the labour movement.
In this book, Robert Pullman examines Hawke as a man as well as a leader - a product of his background, education and experience. He examines the paradox that Hawke represents: a leader whose drinking and weeping is part of national folklore; a man who can rip into opponents with obvious relish, yet remain gentle and vulnerable; a man admired as the voice of calm, yet hated as a traitor by those who have a different view of the role of the labour movement.
It is a fascinating portrait of a man who has already made his mark at fifty, and whose entry into federal politics may well have a profound significance for all Australians." -- Inside cover