The Duke of Economic Uplift

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Claiming credit for his state's New Age affluence, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis has been fast gaining ground in the Democratic presidential race. This is one of a series of occasional profiles of major 1988 contenders.

It was one of the most grueling, yet exhilarating days of Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign. For 18 hours the Massachusetts Governor barnstormed across eastern Texas, drawing attentive crowds and displaying his fluency in Spanish and Greek. Now, after midnight, Dukakis stood with his exhausted 18- year-old daughter Kara on the airport tarmac in Dallas. For the first time all day, the candidate noticed that Kara was teetering on high heels. "Why do you wear those foolish shoes?" he asked, baffled that his child would choose fashion over function. "Why don't you wear running shoes or something sensible like that?"

Sensible is what Michael Stanley Dukakis, 53, is all about. If he were a magazine, it would be Consumer Reports. Dukakis is a man who cannot recall the last novel he read; he once took on a family vacation a book entitled Swedish Land-Use Planning. In his high school yearbook he is facetiously depicted as "Big Chief Brain in Face." He can wax ecstatic over finding a pair of $47 shoes in a discount outlet, and has owned just four cars in the past quarter- century: a Rambler, two Plymouths and the current 1981 Dodge. "My wife says I'm the most uncomplicated man in the world," Dukakis admits. "I guess I am." Even his 83-year-old mother says of him, "What you see is what you get."

What you see is a compact-model candidate, 5 ft. 8 in. tall, with a mop of dark brown hair just beginning to gray at the temples, caterpillar-thick eyebrows and an aggressive Grecian nose tempered by a soft, almost shy smile. But in the Democratic presidential race Dukakis is as hot as a Friday-night traffic jam heading for Cape Cod. Ever since he unveiled his long-shot candidacy in March, Dukakis has been running like a modern-day Hermes in wing- tip shoes. He inherited most of Gary Hart's Iowa organization, raised a record $4.2 million in three months, and was judged by the keepers of the conventional wisdom as the winner of the Houston debate.

In his bargain-basement suits and button-down, short-sleeve shirts, Dukakis offers the Democrats neither charisma nor quixotic causes. Instead, he is running as the Lee Iacocca of state government: the Governor who brought the Massachusetts economy back from the dead. True, a Harvard study concluded that, at most, state government "may have helped sustain the growth once it began." And even Frank Keefe, Dukakis' secretary of administration and finance, claims only that the Governor's policies are responsible for 20% of the drop in state unemployment.

But as a candidate Dukakis radiates a far more simplistic version of cause and effect. "I speak to you as the Governor of a state which twelve years ago was bouncing around at the bottom of the barrel," he said in Tipton, Iowa. "Twelve years later we have a 3.5% unemployment rate, and we're now an economic showcase. How did it happen? Because we worked at it. We invested public resources; we got the private sector in; we involved citizens, mayors, business people."

Dukakis believes he has found an answer to the Democratic Party's desperate search for a post-New Deal ideology: liberalism on the cheap. He offers the traditional vision of "economic opportunity" and "full employment." The difference is that Dukakis insists that these goals can be achieved largely by rechanneling existing federal resources. As a candidate, he resists putting price tags on programs: "I don't think you have to prepare a budget, for God's sake." But even Dukakis' showcase proposal -- a regional-development fund that he mentions in almost every speech -- would cost just $500 million a year, about what the U.S. spends on aid to Pakistan. As he talks eagerly about harnessing the "enormous capacity at the state and local level," Dukakis at times sounds like a man whose fondest ambition is to be Governor of the United States.

There is another element in the Dukakis campaign, one that is politically more problematic. With Mario Cuomo on the sidelines, Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants, is the only claimant to give-me-your-tired-your-poor ethnicity. But this first-generation heritage can also make Dukakis seem like a political outsider, especially in the South. Introducing him at a speech in Corpus Christi, Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro said, "Governor, when I saw the two k's in your name, I can tell you we've never had a Dukakis run for anything in Texas."

Five years ago, in his comeback race for Governor, Dukakis had to be coaxed into talking at all about his father Panos, who died in 1979, and his mother Euterpe. Now he revels in it. "Each of my parents is an American success story," Dukakis boasts in his standard stump speech. "My father, eight years after he came to this country as a 15-year-old Greek immigrant, was entering medical school . . . My mother was the first Greek girl ever to go beyond high school in Haverhill, Mass."

Buried within this autobiography is the portrait of a family that belies easy ethnic stereotypes. By the time Dukakis was born, in 1933 (three years after his brother Stelian), the family was living comfortably in the prosperous Boston suburb of Brookline. The Dukakises were, by all accounts, demanding parents. Sandy Bakalar, Mike Dukakis' high school girlfriend, remembers Panos as "scary." She recalls, "He had high standards for the boys, strict high standards. They had a very structured life at home. They had specific responsibilities."

This stern upbringing owed as much to New England Puritanism as it did to Greek ethnicity. Dr. Nicholas Zervas, a close friend of Dukakis', describes Euterpe as a "really patrician woman. She would have made a wonderful Brahmin." Unlike many immigrant families, the Dukakises were not religious, supporting the Greek Orthodox Church primarily for cultural reasons. If anything, the family was governed by what Bakalar calls the "quintessential Protestant ethic. Whatever gifts you received, you had to give back. They really believed that money corrupted."

Mike Dukakis thrived under this demanding regimen. At Brookline High he was president of the student council and lettered in three sports: cross country, tennis and -- believe it or not -- basketball. As a senior in 1951, he ran the Boston Marathon and finished 57th. But his brother Stelian had a nervous breakdown while a student at Bates College. "He recovered but never completely. There was always a certain amount of instability there," Dukakis says. "Nevertheless, he was my brother and we were very close, even though at times it was a difficult situation to deal with." Stelian was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1973.

In this era of generational politics, Dukakis is very much a product of the 1950s. He followed a predictable careerist path: Swarthmore College, peacetime service as an Army private in Korea (he studied Korean to break the tedium of barracks life) and Harvard Law School. Even at Swarthmore, recalls Dr. Richard Burtis, a classmate, Dukakis talked about his ambition to be Governor of Massachusetts. Small wonder that as a young lawyer he plunged into Brookline politics with a vengeance, engineering a good-government takeover of the town Democratic committee and then building an organization to expand the fight statewide. There was a strong element of social class to the struggle: well- educated reformers rebelling against old-line Irish ethnic politics. Elected to the state legislature in 1962, Dukakis radiated disdain for backslapping and favor trading while zealously championing causes like no- fault auto insurance.

When Sandy Bakalar arranged a date for Dukakis with her friend Katharine Dickson, she felt compelled to explain, "She's Jewish, divorced and has a son by her first marriage." The two clicked immediately. "I found him very sexually attractive," Kitty Dukakis laughs. "People don't think of Michael that way. That's why it's fun to talk about it." Friends say Dukakis' parents were initially resistant to the match, and suggest that his marriage to Kitty in 1963 may have marked his true break with his Greek immigrant roots.

Michael and Kitty Dukakis are almost a comically exaggerated study in contrasts: he is reserved, analytical and parsimonious, while she is warm, emotional and a bit extravagant. They raised three children: John Dukakis, 29, Kitty's son from her first marriage; Andrea, 21, who just graduated from Princeton; and Kara. John, now running the Dukakis campaign in the South, sees a gradual softening in his father's demeanor: "My mother has really helped him to express that it's not an invasion of privacy to show people that he cares for them."

After a failed race for Lieutenant Governor and a stint as moderator of the PBS television show The Advocates, Dukakis achieved his boyhood ambition in 1974 by mobilizing a statewide army of volunteers. Massachusetts had never seen a Governor like the "Duke": riding the trolley to work, insisting on dinner at home with his family and bursting with plans and programs. The honeymoon lasted just six months, until a $500 million state deficit forced him to rescind his "ironclad" pledge not to raise taxes. Dukakis, who viewed governing as a clash of abstract ideas, quickly developed a reputation for arrogance. "We were a bunch of bright young technocrats," recalls a veteran of that troubled first term. "We were brighter than anyone else and not embarrassed about showing it." The political damage was fatal: Dukakis was upended in the 1978 Democratic primary by a conservative named Ed King, just the type of Irish politician he had always scorned.

That defeat was Dukakis' personal Bay of Pigs. John Dukakis remembers visiting his father in the statehouse the day after the primary and watching him sit in a rocking chair and stare sadly out the window. "I don't think he slept for the next four or five days," John recalls. Even now, Dukakis describes that political setback as the "most painful thing that ever happened to me in my life." Disdaining the practice of law and a probable six-digit income, Dukakis joined the faculty of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. It was an ideal place to reflect, a colleague recalls, "a place where he had to face the hard reality of what he had done and failed to do."

Re-elected in 1982 and then by a landslide in 1986, Dukakis was a politician transformed. The new watchword was consensus. "Now he doesn't jump until he's sure he's touched all the bases," says Frank Keefe, who served in all three administrations. "But the differences are mostly style. The elemental Mike Dukakis stays the same." Some in the legislature wonder if Dukakis and his aides really listen, even today. "They're very sure of their policies," says a Democratic critic in the legislature. "And they now listen politely until you demonstrate your own lack of understanding."

The second-chance Governor can point to laudable accomplishments: an education and training program that has provided jobs for more than 30,000 welfare mothers, a tax-enforcement and amnesty program that raised $900 million in three years, and innovative public-private partnerships to spur balanced economic development around the state. Yet Dukakis' strongest suit may simply be his record as an administrator who inspires creativity, closely monitors performance and eventually learns from his mistakes.

But a presidential campaign should illuminate character and vision as well as provide an account-book ledger of a candidate's record in public office. Michael Dukakis has always resisted baring his soul in public. As Zervas says, "The guy has a very tight control on his feelings. Nobody knows what's going on underneath." Reaching within himself to unravel that mystery may be Dukakis' toughest challenge as he runs the longest race of his career.