Brountas’ Task Is to Find Right Person for No. 2 Spot : Dukakis Confidant Searches for the Best Choice

In the intense, sometimes driven, world of highly paid Boston lawyers, the story has become a legend: Paul P. Brountas in pinstripes and wing tips, a bulging briefcase in each hand, carrying a week’s worth of work as he hurries down the street to check himself into Massachusetts General Hospital for treatment of bleeding ulcers.

Some people say ulcers are nature’s way of telling a person to take it easy. Brountas dismisses the idea.

“I figured I might be in the hospital a few days and I was not prepared for the visit,” Brountas said recently. “I figured I’d better get everything into the briefcase.”

That was several years ago. Today, with the youngest of his three children grown and junior partners groomed to handle much of his law practice, “this was going to be the year I was going to relax,” Brountas said with a laugh. It comes as little surprise to those who know him that his life did not work out that way.

Intensely Loyal

It may not be possible for a man to be more intense, more driven, more self-disciplined than Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, but Brountas, Dukakis’ friend and adviser of 31 years, comes close. He is, say those who have worked with him over the years, meticulous, painstaking, cautious and, above all, intensely loyal to the man who has now turned to him to handle the most sensitive assignment in current American politics, finding the right person to fill the No. 2 slot on the Democratic ticket.

On the trail, the two men are seldom far apart. Brountas sits across the aisle from Dukakis on the campaign plane, on call for quick advice or to think over the events of the day and the challenges of the day to come. He is witty, personable, dapper.

Aided Gubernatorial Bid

Brountas was a top adviser in Dukakis’ gubernatorial campaigns. He chaired the transition team when Dukakis took office. And, when the Dukakis presidential campaign hit its lowest point last year--the firing of campaign manager John Sasso after he leaked a videotape showing that Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) had cribbed speeches from British politician Neil Kinnock--it was to Brountas that Dukakis turned to find a new chief strategist.

Not Seeking a Favor

In all those endeavors, Brountas has won praise for his intelligence and diligence. Dukakis publicly praises him with rare warmth, calling Brountas the wisest and most thoughtful person he knows. But, like any successful politician, Dukakis can hire brainpower. What Brountas really offers is something else. He is that indispensable support for a politician, the friend who has been successful enough on his own that he is not looking for a favor.

“In his relationship with Michael, Paul has no agenda of his own,” said Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.), a longtime mutual friend who introduced Dukakis and Brountas when all three attended Harvard Law School in the late 1950s.

Brountas, says Dukakis’ wife, Kitty, “is someone who can be totally honest with Michael.”

For more than 30 years, the two men have lived closely intertwined lives. When Dukakis, after graduating from law school, took a cross-country trip in the summer of 1960, traveling to Los Angeles to watch John F. Kennedy win the Democratic presidential nomination, it was Brountas who went with him.

On the way home, Brountas persuaded Dukakis to stop in Las Vegas to try the slot machines. Brountas lost $5 in quarters, Dukakis--who rigidly refuses to bet--tried one quarter and hit a $30 jackpot.

Double-Dated

And when Michael Dukakis and Kitty Dickson went on their second date, it was Paul Brountas and his future wife, Lynn, with whom they doubled.

Both men are sons of Greek immigrants. They are close in age--Dukakis 54, Brountas 56. Dukakis attended Swarthmore, a small elite college in Pennsylvania. Brountas attended Bowdoin, a similarly elite school in his native Maine. Both went on from Harvard to join prestigious Boston law firms. Both considered a career in politics.

But while Dukakis plunged almost immediately into politics, Brountas held back, a contrast which may stem from the crucial difference in their backgrounds.

Dukakis’ parents--his father who became the first Greek-American graduate of Harvard Medical School, his mother who became a teacher--by themselves made the transition from penniless immigrant to prosperous suburbanite. He grew up in pleasant Brookline, and launched his political career in that safe haven, where he still lives.

Brountas, by contrast, grew up poor in Bangor, Me., running a paper route in the dawn light and then joining five siblings to serve breakfast at his father’s restaurant before heading to school. From Bangor to Bowdoin, then on to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and thence to Harvard, he moved steadily into the upper ranks of the New England elite.

When he used to talk of returning to Maine, he recalls, Lynn would ask: “What would you do in Bangor if you lose?”

Chief High-Tech Lawyer

But if he ever harbored regrets, they are now gone, he insists. “Much to my surprise, I found I liked practicing law,” he says, and the law, it seems, liked him too. As an adviser to entrepreneurs starting up new companies, Brountas during the late 1960s and 1970s became one of the chief high- technology lawyers in Boston, the godfather to dozens of the new companies that crowd around Boston’s Route 128 and formed the backbone of Dukakis’ “Massachusetts Miracle.” As a senior partner in Hale & Dorr, Boston’s largest law firm, he is one of the most influential men in the city.

And as the man in charge of finding Michael Dukakis a running mate, he wields a degree of influence few mere elected politicians ever attain. Traveling the country, talking to party leaders from the Rev. Jesse Jackson to Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, it is his job to make sure all voices are heard, all opinions weighed and, above all, no details are left unchecked.