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Mike Dukakis thrived under this demanding regimen. At Brookline High he was president of the student council and lettered in three sports: cross country, tennis and -- believe it or not -- basketball. As a senior in 1951, he ran the Boston Marathon and finished 57th. But his brother Stelian had a nervous breakdown while a student at Bates College. "He recovered but never completely. There was always a certain amount of instability there," Dukakis says. "Nevertheless, he was my brother and we were very close, even though at times it was a difficult situation to deal with." Stelian was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1973.
In this era of generational politics, Dukakis is very much a product of the 1950s. He followed a predictable careerist path: Swarthmore College, peacetime service as an Army private in Korea (he studied Korean to break the tedium of barracks life) and Harvard Law School. Even at Swarthmore, recalls Dr. Richard Burtis, a classmate, Dukakis talked about his ambition to be Governor of Massachusetts. Small wonder that as a young lawyer he plunged into Brookline politics with a vengeance, engineering a good-government takeover of the town Democratic committee and then building an organization to expand the fight statewide. There was a strong element of social class to the struggle: well- educated reformers rebelling against old-line Irish ethnic politics. Elected to the state legislature in 1962, Dukakis radiated disdain for backslapping and favor trading while zealously championing causes like no- fault auto insurance.
When Sandy Bakalar arranged a date for Dukakis with her friend Katharine Dickson, she felt compelled to explain, "She's Jewish, divorced and has a son by her first marriage." The two clicked immediately. "I found him very sexually attractive," Kitty Dukakis laughs. "People don't think of Michael that way. That's why it's fun to talk about it." Friends say Dukakis' parents were initially resistant to the match, and suggest that his marriage to Kitty in 1963 may have marked his true break with his Greek immigrant roots.
Michael and Kitty Dukakis are almost a comically exaggerated study in contrasts: he is reserved, analytical and parsimonious, while she is warm, emotional and a bit extravagant. They raised three children: John Dukakis, 29, Kitty's son from her first marriage; Andrea, 21, who just graduated from Princeton; and Kara. John, now running the Dukakis campaign in the South, sees a gradual softening in his father's demeanor: "My mother has really helped him to express that it's not an invasion of privacy to show people that he cares for them."