If John Kennedy's death stunned the nation, it almost crazed some people in Massachusetts. Those who had been close to Kennedy, in fact or by association, felt as if the bullet had struck them -- people in Brookline, where Kennedy was born; in Boston, his political base; in state politics, still charged with the energies of his election. Michael Dukakis, born and raised in Brookline, was serving his first term in the legislature; he was among those exposed to the sharpest sense of loss. He had pointed to Kennedy's career as a model for his own -- written college advice to his Senate office, attended as a 26-year- old spectator the convention that nominated him in Los Angeles, invoked his name on the stump. Yet when people all around him were losing their heads at the disaster, Dukakis typically kept his.
The President was shot on a Friday and Lee Harvey Oswald on that Sunday. Two days later, Dukakis turned in his monthly column to the Brookline Citizen. There was nothing heightened about this particular column, no private memory of the man or personal emotion expressed. Dukakis deals in consequences, and he did not want emotions let loose by the assassination to be spent unproductively:
Many in the last few days have spoken about the need to recognize and rid the nation of the cancer of hate which has been gnawing at its vitals and which undoubtedly contributed to the President's death. No one can deny the truth of such assertions. But simply to work to rid the nation of fanaticism and hate is, it seems to me, an essentially negative task.
Dukakis thought all the energies of grief should be channeled into his own current project, the reform of the Massachusetts legislature. He quoted a Kennedy speech on the subject and concluded his column:
Will we pay him heed and will we act on his message until Massachusetts has at last wiped out the stains of incompetence and dishonesty and once again become "the city on the hill" about which John Kennedy spoke almost three years ago today?
That is the essential Dukakis, unswerving from his task, putting everything to use, disdaining waste, even the emotional waste of grieving. Do not grieve; get the job done. Nothing personal.
As the years passed, he would speak more warmly about Kennedy, and remember even more ties than there were. He now answers "Kennedy" when asked who most drew him toward politics -- an answer that intrigues Martin Linsky, a Brookliner who went on, like Dukakis, to the state legislature and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government: "Considering how unlike Kennedy Dukakis is, and how little he knew him, and how different their politics are, it is a typically Dukakis answer -- one that reveals absolutely nothing about Michael Dukakis, which is the most revealing thing about it." If anything drove Dukakis into government, it was contempt for the kind of affectionate tales Tip O'Neill tells of the Kennedys in his autobiography -- how, for instance, bribes were paid to potential supporters of Jack. But if he could use the death of Kennedy for a noble purpose, he could, clearly, use the man's life in a similar way. He tries to make everything instrumental, even inferior instruments.