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His Greek identity would be clear to a person of Dukakis' intelligence growing up in a house where his grandmother spoke only Greek. Stelian and Michael had a second language they could use when they did not want their schoolmates to understand them (as Dukakis even now uses Greek with his aide Nick Mitropoulos when he does not want reporters to know what they are saying). His mother told Michael the Greek myths when he was a child. He thought there was something special about being a Greek, and there is. Precisely because he lacked the rub of real Greeks around him in the playground, being Greek was internalized as a concept more prescriptive than descriptive. When he first visited Greece, he was put off for a while by the gritty reality, the undisciplined actual citizens of Athens. That was not what being Greek meant to him. His was an older and more demanding ideal.
His mother and father met because of their Greek ties. Euterpe Boukis' brother told her there was a handsome Greek in a visiting company of college players who had acted Euripides' Hippolytus. She met, briefly, the man who played the lead role and who was on his way back to college. He marked in his mind this schoolgirl for his bride, a typically Greek way of deciding, and came back for her after he finished his studies. Panos Dukakis was an Anatolian Greek (from the region of Troy), and his parents were from Lesbos.
When Jules Dassin adapted Euripides' Hippolytus for the screen in 1962, with Anthony Perkins as the Hippolytus character, Panos and Euterpe went to see again the play that had brought them together. It had special meaning for them. Hippolytus is the tale of a man too good for his own good. Intent on his pursuits, impervious to the demonic, he will not notice the gods' dreadful pother being made above his head. The play deals with a recurrent flaw in the Greek ideal. Martha Nussbaum, in her profound study of ancient Greek ethical standards, The Fragility of Goodness, argues that self-sufficiency was a standard for the city that individuals tried to appropriate for themselves, with tragic results. Even Plato came to realize that he had sealed his Socrates off from human feeling by making him so independent of others. Later, he tried to rescue his Socrates from the fault of perfection, allowing him a bit of (measured) love for others and dependence on them. Desire, he conceded, must drive the soul, but with a reined-in "craziness."
Dukakis, obviously, is no Hippolytus. He has given his hostage to the gods of love in Kitty. He can be moved by the plight of others; he can faint at the bloody reality of pain, be disarmed at the sight of real Athenians, waver when his friend misleads him about a campaign trick. But he does radiate to voters his own sense of being chosen. Sam Beer, Harvard's famous professor of government, who taught Dukakis at Swarthmore, says, "He was born to rule." He was always the Inevitable Michael. Things fall into place for him as by plan; he does not have to make any frantic effort to pass marker after marker on his privately charted marathon. Whether his actual first words were, as his mother likes to remember, monos mou, "all by myself," they have become the memory that gives her son his identity.
DEALING WITH DISORDER