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The better Massachusetts voters have come to know Dukakis in recent elections, the more they have liked him, though there is some uncertainty about how well the populace knows him at all. For many, he is as simple as a declarative sentence written in an unknown language. He is enigmatic precisely because he seems to contain no mysteries. In rapidly changing times, he has changed remarkably little. As one of his teachers, Paul Ylvisaker, says, "Michael is the most consistent person I know. He is the same as when I taught him at Swarthmore."
WHAT MOTIVATES A GREEK EVERYETHNIC
Brookline clearly helped to shape him. But the great influences or agitations of his times did little to disturb his course -- the silent '50s, the Kennedy years, the civil rights movement, the antiwar protests, Watergate, or Reagan's greedhead '80s. Through it all, Dukakis has been busy about his own business. He goes serenely toward his chosen target, like a humming bullet; and how is one to handle or take apart such a smoothly moving pellet?
The best way to find a bullet's intent is to look at the firing apparatus that sent it on its way. What was Michael Dukakis' impelling force? He answers that it is as simple, and as grand, as the American dream of immigrant success, a sound if obvious answer. His parents are textbook cases of the hard workers who turn opportunity into achievement. If any cost was paid, it was by the one member of the family, Michael's older brother Stelian, who could not keep up his parents' rapid pace in America. While Dukakis' father was learning English and going to Harvard, his mother was learning English and graduating as a Phi Beta Kappa from college (a rare achievement for any woman in the '20s). His mother, especially, saw the advantages of mobility in American life. She not only learned English but perfected an accentless (almost Massachusetts-less) diction, to go with her schoolteacher's insistence on precise terms and correct behavior.
But these immigrants did not just land on the shore from anywhere or nowhere. They came from Greece. The significance of that fact can be lost because Dukakis did not grow up with a Greek community around him or with any deep involvement in the Orthodox Church (the center of community life for most Greek immigrants). The customary way of putting this -- the endlessly repeated comment that Dukakis is "no Zorba" -- illustrates the poverty of our image of Greeks in general, as well as the unobtrusive way that Greeks have fit into American life, quietly working their way to independent property.