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After a failed race for Lieutenant Governor and a stint as moderator of the PBS television show The Advocates, Dukakis achieved his boyhood ambition in 1974 by mobilizing a statewide army of volunteers. Massachusetts had never seen a Governor like the "Duke": riding the trolley to work, insisting on dinner at home with his family and bursting with plans and programs. The honeymoon lasted just six months, until a $500 million state deficit forced him to rescind his "ironclad" pledge not to raise taxes. Dukakis, who viewed governing as a clash of abstract ideas, quickly developed a reputation for arrogance. "We were a bunch of bright young technocrats," recalls a veteran of that troubled first term. "We were brighter than anyone else and not embarrassed about showing it." The political damage was fatal: Dukakis was upended in the 1978 Democratic primary by a conservative named Ed King, just the type of Irish politician he had always scorned.
That defeat was Dukakis' personal Bay of Pigs. John Dukakis remembers visiting his father in the statehouse the day after the primary and watching him sit in a rocking chair and stare sadly out the window. "I don't think he slept for the next four or five days," John recalls. Even now, Dukakis describes that political setback as the "most painful thing that ever happened to me in my life." Disdaining the practice of law and a probable six-digit income, Dukakis joined the faculty of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. It was an ideal place to reflect, a colleague recalls, "a place where he had to face the hard reality of what he had done and failed to do."
Re-elected in 1982 and then by a landslide in 1986, Dukakis was a politician transformed. The new watchword was consensus. "Now he doesn't jump until he's sure he's touched all the bases," says Frank Keefe, who served in all three administrations. "But the differences are mostly style. The elemental Mike Dukakis stays the same." Some in the legislature wonder if Dukakis and his aides really listen, even today. "They're very sure of their policies," says a Democratic critic in the legislature. "And they now listen politely until you demonstrate your own lack of understanding."
The second-chance Governor can point to laudable accomplishments: an education and training program that has provided jobs for more than 30,000 welfare mothers, a tax-enforcement and amnesty program that raised $900 million in three years, and innovative public-private partnerships to spur balanced economic development around the state. Yet Dukakis' strongest suit may simply be his record as an administrator who inspires creativity, closely monitors performance and eventually learns from his mistakes.
But a presidential campaign should illuminate character and vision as well as provide an account-book ledger of a candidate's record in public office. Michael Dukakis has always resisted baring his soul in public. As Zervas says, "The guy has a very tight control on his feelings. Nobody knows what's going on underneath." Reaching within himself to unravel that mystery may be Dukakis' toughest challenge as he runs the longest race of his career.