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Thus Thomas Schelling, a game theorist, opposed Dukakis' appointment. To this day he says, "He could not have made his career in the academy; the scholarly writing was not there." And he notes with satisfaction that the people Dukakis took from the school when he want back into government were his fellow "practitioners" on temporary duty by the Charles, including (Schelling adds, with a grimace) "our building manager." But others think Dukakis gave to the Kennedy School more than he took from it. Mary Jo Bane, who is responsible for the school's poverty studies, is partly mocking but serious too when she says, "We used to be technocrats, but we're born again." Albert Carnesale, the academic dean, agrees that Dukakis refocused the school from lofty federal projects to more nitty-gritty state and local issues. He began the summer program for state and local officials that continues with great success. Mark Moore, the specialist in criminal justice, says, "Other politicians who come in have three problems with the place. First, there is status shock. They are reduced from having their own staff to sitting in a cubbyhole." That never bothered Dukakis, who showed up on his bicycle every day. "Second is the ((graduate school)) student body, skeptical and older than the politician was expecting, often with more academic training than he has." Dukakis loves to be challenged and found no problem there. "Then there are the classes themselves. Other politicians come in, spend the first sessions on the political lessons they have learned in a lifetime, and then wake up to the horrible realization that there are another 30 hours to fill. Michael prepared his syllabus ahead of time, knew his cases, had done all the readings." Pacing a course offered little challenge to the man who never stayed up at night to cram. He opened up to discussion, becoming a very popular teacher.
While Dukakis was attracting talent to himself at Harvard, Ed King was proving an irresistible lure for incompetents and their predators in the statehouse. Leftovers from Dukakis' time, realizing how good things had been in the "bad old days," leaked embarrassing material on their clown-king, channeling it through Dukakis' government-in-exil e to the Boston Globe. The bad people were undoing Dukakis' reforms, and he went after them with his first ferocity, encouraging the leaks, playing up the grudge match he would win with King in 1982.
He took great satisfaction in that victory, but it did not look like smugness this time. He had found a political operative, John Sasso, for whom, as in Kitty's case, he cleared a certain area of relaxation within his more rigid general framework. He pursued the same goals in his second term as in his first, but with more accommodating methods. A few deals and favors could be done, if he was not directly involved. There are some things about Kitty that her husband does not want to measure with a calibrated knowledge -- how much she smokes, what pills she took, what her dresses cost. In the same way, as was shown during the Biden-tape episode last year, there were some things about Sasso that Dukakis did not want to know too much about.