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Dukakis' revulsion at political corruption descended to details from the outset. He boasted to his constituents, in the year Kennedy died, that "I haven't fixed a ticket." But others in the state were constantly fixing things -- a truth dreadfully confirmed for him in 1970, the year he lost his race for the lieutenant governorship. A boozy young driver with Irish political connections hit a campaign car accompanying Dukakis' own from a TV station. When Dukakis rushed to the hospital and saw one aide's head all bloodied, the normally controlled candidate fainted. That aide recovered, but another one in the same car died. Judge Jerome P. Troy, who was later disbarred, assigned the drunken-driving case to a special judge, who let the driver off.
By the time Dukakis took office as Governor four years later, he had been through all the blarney and jokes about corrupt politics, and he meant to give it a truly last hurrah. His integrity was seen as righteousness, which helped defeat him in his 1978 re-election bid; but he got the job done. Said an omnidirectional fixer named Billy Masiello: "If any one man destroyed me, it was Governor Dukakis. When he came in there were no open hands. And the game was over."
A SUBURB THAT GREW ETHNIC STRIVERS
Where did Dukakis acquire his driven attitude toward clean government? He was in college as part of the '50s "silent generation" charged with conformity and apathy. But Dukakis was never silent. Through student $ governments and publications, he was always "sounding off" -- just as, after launching his political career, he would launch a column, run a regular radio show and become the host of a TV series, The Advocates. For all his contained air, he was put into this world to bustle.
He grew up in a voluble and protected community of strivers, where competition was prized and turned into social contribution. Brookline, embedded in Boston, has always considered itself better than Boston. A Revolutionary village, it had become so affluent in the 19th century that it was the first suburb in America to resist the cumbrous embraces of a major metropolis. The defiant localness and privacy remain, along with a communal apartness and vigilant self-government. The Brookline Citizen is aptly named. The '50s sense of asocial privacy never reached the inmost core of Brookline.
Dukakis ended his campaign in this year's California primary, simultaneously defeating and flattering Jesse Jackson, boasting that only in America -- and only in the Democratic Party -- could the party's two finalists for President be the son of poor Greek immigrants and the son of a poor black family in South Carolina. Jackson's aide, Bob Borosage, said wryly when he heard this: "Yeah, only in America can the son of a Brookline doctor from Harvard's medical school, who left his family million-dollar trusts, end up with the illegitimate son of a black woman in South Carolina." Dukakis grew up with the children of middle-class professionals who knew they must keep striving, but who were certain they could affect the world around them. Children grew up early in Brookline -- which may be why Dukakis, now 54, has always seemed older than he is (as opposed to Bush, 64, who has always seemed younger than his years).