But Inner Resolve Serves Him Well : Dukakis’ Determination: Both Strength, Weakness

When Michael S. Dukakis announced he was running for the Democratic nomination for President on a snowy, blustery day in April, 1987, he admitted to his supporters on Boston Common that he was a “very, very long” shot indeed.

Tonight, as the 54-year-old, three-term Massachusetts governor is nominated as his party’s standard-bearer, his early prognosis has proved one of the few mistakes of a remarkable political campaign.

“People have always underestimated Michael,” said Ira Jackson, a longtime friend and adviser. “That’s a tremendous asset in politics.”

Few underestimate Dukakis today. Initially dismissed as just the bushy-browed member of the “seven dwarfs,” Dukakis effectively locked up the nomination by the night of the New York primary last April 26. He raised more money, faster and more efficiently than any Democratic candidate, and promises to break more records this fall.

In a raucous political season, the colorless candidate showed and evoked little excitement or emotion. He made few promises, offered few specifics, and rarely presented more “vision” than a numbing mantra of “good jobs at good wages.” His acceptance speech Thursday night may not be much better: frustrated aides say he has rejected four drafts so far, penciling out the rhetorical flourishes they hope will rouse the nation.

Dukakis has avoided the “special interest” ties and intra-party squabbles that crippled the 1980 and 1984 nominees. After a week of tense negotiations, he has finally patched up his rift with Jesse Jackson. And he continues to beat rival George Bush, the presumed Republican nominee, in most national polls.

Dukakis says the secret of his success is easy: “Be yourself. Don’t try to be something you’re not.”

His 18-month campaign for the nomination has shown the best and worst of Michael Dukakis. He remains disciplined, determined and supremely self-confident. He also remains so closely guarded in his behavior that even his 30-year-old stepson, John, says he cannot remember a family photo of Dukakis wearing glasses instead of his customary contact lenses.

Refusal to Compromise

His determination--some say stubbornness--has proved both a strength and a weakness. During his first term as governor, Massachusetts legislators resented his refusal to compromise on many issues, and they rejoiced when he was defeated. Dukakis now says he sees the error of his ways. But his inner resolve withstood pleas from aides this year to shed his reserved style, to remake himself, after a surprising loss to Jackson in the Michigan caucuses.

Dukakis stayed cool, even dull, but he beat Jackson in every major contest thereafter. He touts his family’s Greek-immigrant heritage, and deride’s Bush’s patrician past. But Dukakis is the son of a wealthy Harvard-trained doctor and has lived all but six years of his life in one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs.

Dukakis is a dedicated public servant, and once was voted the most effective of the nation’s governors by his peers. But he showed no moral leadership during Boston’s bitter school busing battles in the 1970s, just as he did not stand up to complain during the racial attacks against Jackson in the bitter New York primary.

He disavows negative campaigning. But when pushed, he is an expert practitioner. Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, who beat him in the Iowa caucuses and finished second in the New Hampshire primary, was wiped out during the Super Tuesday contests in a wave of Dukakis commercials accusing him of flip-flopping on a series of issues.

Dukakis has trouble with the common touch. As governor, he began statewide adult literacy programs only after an embarrassed janitor took him aside to ask for help; Dukakis responded by asking the illiterate man to write down his name and address. As presidential candidate, he emphasizes that the United States “has only 5% of the world’s population but consumes 60% of the world’s cocaine,” a statistic that dryly makes the point but doesn’t convey the despair and drama of drug use in the streets.

Discards Key Supporters

He has been a ruthless politician at home, discarding friends and key supporters on his path to success. As presidential candidate, Dukakis has been unwilling to publicly acknowledge the pain many of Jackson’s supporters felt for what they saw as graceless, insensitive treatment of the civil rights leader.

He campaigns as a competent manager, but critics say he used creative accounting, rather than the “tough choices” he touts, to balance a $446-million deficit in the 1988 state budget and a $225-million deficit in the 1989 budget. As presidential candidate, he has hyped his role in the so-called “Massachusetts miracle” and is as vague today as when he began about how his call for stepped-up tax collection would ease the federal deficit.

Campaigning across the country, he boasted of cutting Massachusetts taxes five times. He shrugged off the fact that he raised most of the taxes in the first place, and initially at least, opposed most of the cuts. Or that state spending is up 60% in the last five years.

He remains vulnerable on charges that he is naive on foreign policy. A man who has never visited the Soviet Union, China or, indeed, any of the major countries of Western Europe, he said enthusiastically for several days that the “one thing” he knew about himself and Mikhail S. Gorbachev was that their first names were pronounced similarly in Greek and Russian.

Despite the maelstrom of the presidential campaign, friends say they see few dramatic changes in Dukakis. He still launders his wash-and-wear shirts in his basement Maytag, and hauls his battered garbage cans to the curb on Tuesday nights. Few were surprised when Dukakis said Sunday that he was “re-energized” by an intensely pressured week in which he chose his running mate, tried to heal relations with Jackson, prepared for the convention, and worked until midnight to finish the budget before leaving for Atlanta.

‘This Is What I Love’

“This is the stuff of politics,” he told reporters. “This is what I love to do. This is my life.”

It has been a life in which hard work, self-control and focused ambition were the ingredients of success.

His father, Panos, arrived from Asia Minor in 1912 with little English and less money. Eight years later, he was the first Greek immigrant to attend Harvard Medical School.

His mother, Euterpe, arrived at Ellis Island with her family. She too broke barriers, apparently becoming the first Greek girl to attend college from working-class Haverhill outside Boston.

They married just before the Great Depression in 1929. They moved quickly to Brookline, a heavily Jewish suburb on Boston’s outskirts, paying cash for their Dutch Colonial home and nearly everything else. Dr. Dukakis, an obstetrician, would use a spare bottle of ouzo to sterilize his instruments. Euterpe, now 84, would serve leftovers of leftovers.

Michael, born on Nov. 3, 1933, and his brother Stelian, who was two years older, grew up on a winding tree-shaded street less than a mile from the country club that hosted the U.S. Open golf tournament this year. Ironically, it is less than eight miles from the Milton birthplace of Vice President Bush.

Father Was ‘Severe’

Panos, who died in 1979, was a somber Old World patriarch. “Panos was very severe, honest, upright but unbending,” said Dukakis’ father-in-law, Harry Ellis Dickson. “There was a discipline about him. He’d never utter an obscene word or smoke a cigarette.”

Close friends say the description applies to the expected Democratic nominee as well. “You often wonder about Michael,” said Stratton (Tiky) Sterghos, a cousin. “Even as a child, I never saw him real high or real low. I don’t remember him ever getting mad and crying. He was always in control.”

“Michael was what your mother always wanted you to be, but you never were,” recalled teen-age friend Haskel A. Kassler, now a Boston lawyer. “Nearly all A’s. Trumpet player in the band. Captain of the tennis team. President of the Student Council. And dating one of the prettiest girls in school.”

Dukakis attended Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia. His academic career had similar honors. But after getting a D in freshman physics and serving a stint as a poll-watcher in Philadelphia’s rough-and-tumble river wards for a reform mayoral candidate, Joe Clark, Dukakis began to talk about running for governor someday.

“He knew even then that’s where he could make a difference,” said his roommate, Frank Sieverts, who went on to become a Rhodes scholar and spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Attended Law School

After a 16-month stint in postwar Korea, Dukakis returned to his parents’ home to attend Harvard Law School. But he wasn’t interested in practicing law. Soon after graduation with honors, he led a reform slate in his hometown and was elected a state representative from Brookline in 1962.

He married the following June. Earlier, Katherine Dukakis, tall and willowy, had quit Pennsylvania State University to get married. She soon returned to Boston with an infant son, John. Panos Dukakis did not approve at first when his son began to date a divorced woman. “Not because she was Jewish,” said Euterpe. “Never. That she had been married, yes. It made you wonder.”

Aides say Kitty Dukakis, now 51, is her husband’s closest adviser. How close was clear last week when she was one of the four advisers around his round maple kitchen table when he chose Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate.

Dukakis and his wife are a study in contrasts. He is cool and aloof, she is fiery and intense. He rarely drinks, and says he can’t understand how anyone could smoke. She enjoys Margaritas and sneaks cigarettes on the campaign plane. He is uncomfortable with small talk; she enjoys bantering with reporters, demanding to see baby pictures and sharing the lastest tales of her husband’s cheapness.

“He hates air conditioning,” she confided on the plane to Washington last week. “So when we drive, we have a deal. I turn on the air full blast, and he opens a window.”

Stood in Tears by His Wife’s Side

In Tears at Announcement

Dukakis revealed last July that she had been addicted to diet pills, which are mild amphetamines, for 26 years. Her husband, who stood in tears at her side, said he did not know of her habit until she underwent treatment in 1982. Given their intimacy and his attention to detail, even her sister was surprised at his professed ignorance.

“I sort of knew,” said her sister, Janet Peters. “Everything she did, she gave credit to the pills.”

His wife’s drug addiction was not Dukakis’ first family crisis. His brother, Stelian, had suffered a nervous breakdown in college, and then tried to commit suicide. Although he eventually finished college, held a full-time job and unsuccessfully ran for the state Legislature, his family says he never fully recovered.

In a no-failure family, Stelian resented his successful younger brother. Michael eclipsed him in school, athletics and, later, politics. “The sibling rivalry was something awful,” said their mother. Another friend recalls Stelian growing “aggressively hostile” to his brother as the years passed.

The most bizarre episode occurred in 1964, when Michael ran for reelection to the Legislature. Stelian wrote and distributed hundreds of leaflets urging a vote against his brother. Campaign aides spent all night pulling them out of mailboxes. “He was a sick boy,” recalled Dickson, Kitty’s father.

Brother’s Problems

Stelian was killed by a hit-and-run driver while riding his bicycle in 1973. Dukakis says little about his brother’s problems, and about his death. Whatever the lingering effects, it is clear that Dukakis stood by his brother through his illness. “You try to be understanding, not get angry, and be as supportive as you can,” he said.

Dukakis served eight years in the Legislature in the 1960s, when Boston and the nation were bitterly riven by civil rights issues and the Vietnam War. Other state legislators marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he came to Boston, or demonstrated against the war. Not Dukakis.

His cause was reforming government, not social change. His battles were bloodless: rent control, condo conversion and, most notably, the nation’s first no-fault auto insurance law. And in 1974, he launched his first gubernatorial campaign with a slogan some found arrogant: “Dukakis Should Be Governor,” the bumper stickers read.

Duke I, as his first term was called, was a public relations disaster. Facing a growing deficit and raging recession, he infuriated liberals by slashing services and angered businessmen by raising taxes. In a state built on ethnic politics, he tried to eliminate patronage. Even his friends were baffled.

“He saw all of us as working for the common good, not working for Mike Dukakis,” said Francis X. Meaney, who met Dukakis at Harvard and chaired his political campaigns for the next 15 years. The two have barely spoken since 1976, when the governor accused his longtime friend of a conflict of interest because his law firm had won a state contract to handle state bond issues.

Lost to Ex-Football Player

By 1978, even though the state economy had turned around, Dukakis lost his party’s primary to former pro-football player Ed King. Dukakis was stunned, unable to comprehend the loss. “Michael was grieving,” said Dr. Don Lipsett, a psychiatrist and friend for 25 years. Dukakis called it “the most painful thing that ever happened to me.”

Dukakis cites the loss frequently now, saying he learned “how to listen.” Although some question his stubborn insistance that he learned to be humble, it is clear that Dukakis became a more skillful politician. His goals and values did not change, but his tactics did.

In 1982, Dukakis won reelection in a hard-fought, gutter-level campaign. And Duke II, as his subsequent administrations were known, was markedly different from Duke I.

In his first term, he wore a gray suit when the invitation said black tie. In his second, he bought a tuxedo. In his first, he lectured legislators and refused to meet lobbyists. In his second, he invited groups to his home or office to put programs together. Consensus was the goal, not confrontation.

As the Democratic presidential nominee, Dukakis will need all the consensus he can get. He certainly has all the confidence. At his press conference Sunday, Dukakis brushed aside questions of controversy.

“I’m on my way to the convention, and if all goes well, I’m going to be the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States,” he said. Then he paused, and added with a voice filled with wonder, “That’s something that’s never happened to me before!”