A Tale of Two Childhoods

Each summer of his childhood, George Bush went with his family to a sprawling shingle-and-stone cottage in Kennebunkport, Me., joined by assorted cousins and friends who could always find a spare bedroom, an extra tennis racquet. Days were crammed with sailing and tennis at the River Club, fierce games of backgammon and Scrabble at night. After Prescott Bush Sr., the imposing (6 ft. 4 in.) patriarch, arrived by sleeper car from Manhattan on the weekends, he would recruit a vocal quartet from the assembled company for after-dinner harmonizing. Family Friend Bill Truesdale describes those summers: "It's hard to imagine anything better."

One vacation that the Dukakis family embarked on when Michael was growing up lasted less than a day. Euterpe Dukakis had persuaded her husband, a doctor, to rent a house on the Massachusetts shore for a week. The day the family arrived, Panos Dukakis got word that one of his patients had gone into labor. The family immediately headed back to Boston. They never planned another long vacation.

The contest between Dukakis and Bush will be less about ideas and ideologies than about clashing temperaments and styles. Assessing such traits is always tricky, and never more so than in a campaign that provides little more than snippets of carefully programmed candidates. But the puzzle can sometimes be pieced together by examining the contenders' backgrounds, including the values and formative experiences of childhood.

From their earliest days, Bush and Dukakis were very different. Bush was the outgoing, eager-to-please son to whom athletics and grades came easily; Dukakis was a serious, hardworking achiever. Bush always wanted to be liked, and would do just about anything toward that end; Dukakis was willing to settle for respect, and may have even preferred it. Bush joined every social club that would have him (and most would); Dukakis spurned them.

Bush has an easygoing disposition and a raft of friends he swamps with notes and phone calls. Generous to a fault, he once opened his cramped apartment at Yale to a former Andover teacher beset by alcoholism. Dukakis is frugal to the point of cheapness. He has never made many friends; two school chums he did have were sacrificed to his career. In high school, Dukakis cared so little for peer approval that he went around scolding fellow students for not putting milk cartons into the trash bin. His yearbook calls him "Chief Big Brain-in- Face." He did not have his first date until the second half of his senior year. Sandy Cohen, the girl he wanted to take to his senior prom, went with one of his rivals, so he checked coats instead.

The paradox of this campaign is that Bush, for all his youthful grace and charm, is now displaying neither. The effortless way he assumed leadership at Andover and Yale has vanished. By contrast, Dukakis, who lacked Bush's early ease, is having some success using the determination from his early days to master the political art of appearing warm.

Both Bush and Dukakis were blessed with families that could afford to give them every advantage. But among the blessed, Bush occupied a more exalted perch; he was a prime specimen of the Wasp Wall Street elite that once dominated the Eastern establishment. The second of five children, he grew up in a nine-bedroom house in Greenwich, Conn., an enclave of wealth and power an hour from New York City. A chauffeur took him to Greenwich Country Day School; he played tennis and golf at the Flossy Field Club. Recalls his mother Dorothy Walker Bush: "Life was very easy in those days. We had a lot of help. All the children had a lot of friends who were always swarming around the house."

Christmases were spent in South Carolina at the plantation owned by Dorothy's family; summers at the Kennebunkport house, where college friends remember being met after a late-afternoon swim by servants bearing warm towels and cold drinks. Both families were well heeled. Prescott Bush, the son of a Midwestern industrialist, went to Yale in 1913 (where he was tapped for Skull and Bones, the most exclusive of the secret societies) and eventually to Wall Street, where he became managing director of Brown Brothers Harriman. After his children were in college, he ran for the Senate and served ten years, % distinguishing himself for his incorruptibility and his early opposition to Joseph McCarthy. He died in 1972.

Dorothy Bush, now 86, was the daughter of a St. Louis dry-goods wholesaler, George Herbert Walker, who founded his own investment firm. She was the disciplinarian in the family, determined that her children would not grow up spoiled. Lights were turned off in unoccupied rooms, long-distance telephone calls were circled on the family bill, Cokes at the tennis club were prohibited; they could be had more cheaply at home. Possessions were downplayed; Bush offspring remember never boasting about a new car.

A onetime national women's tennis finalist, Mrs. Bush used sports to teach her brood the value of team play above any individual achievement. When George would run home to tell about his stand-up double in a baseball game, his mother would quickly interrupt, "Weren't there other boys on the team?" She recalls, "We would just jump on them if we ever saw any poor sportsmanship. If they resented a decision made for another brother or sister during a game, they would be ordered to their room." Young George's first nickname, "Have- Half," came from his unfailing willingness to share.

But Dorothy Bush was also a blithe spirit, always happy to hit a bucket of tennis balls with a child or swim two miles off Kennebunkport in water that rarely got above 70 degrees. Prescott Bush played a smaller part in family life, as fathers catching the early train from Greenwich did in those days. Most weekends found him swinging a 9-iron at the Round Hill links. When he was around, he brooked no nonsense in his children, although he would lead the singing at family get-togethers.

George was always the star of the family, a natural athlete, no intellectual but a good student, liked by everyone, especially the adults. Somehow the other kids did not want to short-sheet his bed for this. "They accepted from the start that George was going to be the best in whatever activity," his mother says. "Someone asked me, 'Wasn't it hard for Pres that his younger brother was able to do everything so well?' But George never boasted, so it was all part of the family performance." The category that Bush's parents monitored most closely at Greenwich Country Day School was "claims no more than his fair share of time and attention." George excelled.

Dukakis' upbringing was not as privileged. But despite his current emphasis on being the son of immigrants, he had all the advantages an upper-middle- class life could provide. Within twelve years of arriving in America at 16 with $25 in his pocket, Panos Dukakis, the candidate's father, had learned English and graduated from high school, Bates College and Harvard Medical School, the first Greek immigrant to do so. Michael's mother Euterpe Boukis, a Phi Beta Kappa, was graduated from Bates twelve years after her arrival from Greece. Although the two had crossed paths briefly a decade earlier, it was not until Panos finished his residency that he asked Euterpe for a date. It was a no-nonsense courtship. Their second time out, Panos proposed.

By 1933, when Michael Stanley* Dukakis was born, Panos had a thriving medical practice and could afford a frame house in Brookline, a well-to-do Boston suburb. Euterpe gave up teaching to raise her two boys, the first of whom, Stelian, was born in 1930. Although he worked twelve-hour days, Panos came home at 6 p.m. to listen to CBS radio news and have dinner. He sat at the head of the table, a formidable presence in a three-piece suit, speaking little and leaving early enough to return to his office for several hours. The Dukakises prospered, but they are remembered by friends as close but not joyful, never relishing success as much as building on it. Panos had few distractions; he never swung a baseball bat or shot a basketball with his kids. Says Michael: "My dad was not an intellectual. His two passions in life were medicine and his family, in reverse order." The warmest memories Dukakis has of his father are the evenings he would make it home in time to tuck him into bed. Alexandra Dukakis, Panos' sister-in-law, recalls that Dr. Dukakis would drop out of any discussion about politics, preferring to sit back and watch. "Leave me alone," he would say when asked his opinion.

Michael (he was never called Mike) was a model and diligent son. He recalls, "My father was an Old World father in many ways. You had a series of things to do and you just did them." For Michael, they included bringing home A's, doing chores without being asked, earning his own spending money from his paper route, becoming an Eagle Scout and working hard enough to make first- string point guard on the basketball team. His mother pushed as hard as his father did. Dukakis remembers his father telling his mother when he was about 16, "If this boy doesn't slow down, he's going to get sick."

Assimilating was extremely important to Euterpe Dukakis. She remembered the humiliation of being turned down for a teaching job because she was Greek. The children were to be as American as possible. Michael would stand before a mirror practicing his pronunciation. His mother has no memory of the Greek dancing her son now recalls taking place at family gatherings. "We were leading an American life," she says.

Adolescence, if Bush and Dukakis had any, has been blacked out by both families. No teenage escapades, no bad skin, no sullen rebellions. Says Mrs. Bush: "I used to wonder why people had problems with their children. I just never did." Mrs. Dukakis has to go back to toddler days to recall any acting up, a refusal by young Michael to change mismatched socks. Dukakis remarks, "I was never a particularly rebellious kid."

Michael adored his brother Stelian, who was three years older -- shooting basketball in the driveway, happily wearing his hand-me-downs -- but the relationship became troubled and competitive. If Stelian made the honor society, Michael was president. If Stelian was picked for the tennis team, Michael would be named captain. Euterpe describes them as close but intense siblings. During Michael's senior year in high school, Stelian suffered a nervous breakdown and came home from Bates College. While at home, he attempted suicide. Eventually, with medication and counseling, Stelian was able to finish college. But for the next 20 years, he was chronically unstable, aggressively hostile toward his younger brother, going so far as to distribute leaflets urging people to vote against his re-election as a state representative. In 1973, at the age of 42, Stelian was hit by a car while riding his bike; he slipped into a coma and died four months later.

Whatever sorrow this caused, Dukakis has kept it to himself. In his senior year he told Sandy Cohen that his older brother was too depressed to continue college, but never brought up the subject again. Boston Psychoanalyst Don Lipsitt, who has known Dukakis for 25 years, says Dukakis talked about his brother's illness mostly in terms of the medication he was taking. To this day, Dukakis will not acknowledge Stelian's suicide attempt, although his mother confirms it.

George Bush followed lockstep in his father's path: prep school, Yale, stalwart of the baseball team, Skull and Bones. Dukakis, on the other hand, broke with the expected pattern, deciding against Harvard in favor of Swarthmore, a small Quaker college near Philadelphia. A D in physics dissuaded him from studying medicine. Instead, he threw himself into politics, working for the 1951 election of Philadelphia reformist Mayor Joe Clark, his first taste of squeaky-clean government. Dukakis still did not have much of a social life -- no one remembers a steady girlfriend -- and he did not join any fraternities because they blackballed people. He became a minor legend in college, setting up a dormitory barbershop to serve Nigerian students whose hair the local barbers refused to cut. It was a perfect Dukakis enterprise: high-minded and lucrative at the same time.

Both Bush and Dukakis were Big Men on Campus. But Dukakis, by nature less popular, had to campaign and occasionally lose. Bush did not seek election so much as accept it. Despite a miserable batting average, he was elected captain of the Yale baseball team. He was tapped last for Skull and Bones, the society's ritual signal that he would be leader of his class. When it came time for his pledge class at his eating club to elect its president, Bush was quickly nominated, and he just as quickly demurred. "I don't think I'm the right guy. I don't have time for all this folderol." He was elected unanimously. "Leadership," says Yale Classmate Stu Northrup, "always came to him."

Bush and Dukakis both joined the military, Bush on his 18th birthday in 1942, just after finishing Andover; Dukakis after finishing college in 1955. Although Dukakis talks about being in the "rice paddies in Korea," the war was over by the time he joined up. He served guard duty and used his free time to study Korean. During his 2 1/2 years in the Pacific during World War II, Bush was shot down and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. He formed lifelong attachments, even with enlisted men, whom the other officers avoided. At a campaign stop in San Diego last month, Leo Nadeau, Bush's turret gunner, came out to see him. When reporters asked what kind of pilot the Vice President was, Nadeau said, "The best. I'd go back up with him right now if he wanted to go."

Strong wives have replaced strong mothers in both the candidates' lives. Neither man wasted much time looking around. George met Barbara Bush, a student at Smith College and the debutante daughter of the president of McCall's publishing house, when they were 17. Two weeks after George came home from the war, they wed.

Dukakis' marriage, on the other hand, was a pairing of opposites. Katherine Ellis Dickson (nicknamed after Kitty Carlisle), daughter of the first $ violinist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is emotional where he is repressed, profligate where he is cheap, high-strung where he is calm. Kitty, divorced with a three-year-old son, was not the Dukakis family's ideal choice for Michael. But they relented, and the two were married in 1963, when Dukakis was 29.

Bush is still decent to his core, like the child who could not sit by and watch a fat classmate teased or endure dissension for very long. His self- effacement and gentility, however, may conflict with the immodesty and downright crassness often required in the real world of 1988 politics. Dukakis has no such problem. He remains aloof and utterly in control, wedded to the work ethic and the conviction that he is destined to achieve. He can cut down friends when they get in his way, suffering no pangs of loss in the process. Each man has parlayed his own distinctive personality into a particular political style. This election voters may have to choose between a candidate with too soft a heart and another with one that is, perhaps, too cool.

FOOTNOTE: *In honor of Stanley Gray, Euterpe's mentor in elementary school.