The Democrats: Born to Bustle
By Garry Wills Garry Wills, Henry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University, is the author of The Kennedy Imprisonment, Nixon Agonistes, and Reagan''s America.
If John Kennedy's death stunned the nation, it almost crazed some people in Massachusetts. Those who had been close to Kennedy, in fact or by association, felt as if the bullet had struck them -- people in Brookline, where Kennedy was born; in Boston, his political base; in state politics, still charged with the energies of his election. Michael Dukakis, born and raised in Brookline, was serving his first term in the legislature; he was among those exposed to the sharpest sense of loss. He had pointed to Kennedy's career as a model for his own -- written college advice to his Senate office, attended as a 26-year- old spectator the convention that nominated him in Los Angeles, invoked his name on the stump. Yet when people all around him were losing their heads at the disaster, Dukakis typically kept his.
The President was shot on a Friday and Lee Harvey Oswald on that Sunday. Two days later, Dukakis turned in his monthly column to the Brookline Citizen. There was nothing heightened about this particular column, no private memory of the man or personal emotion expressed. Dukakis deals in consequences, and he did not want emotions let loose by the assassination to be spent unproductively:
Many in the last few days have spoken about the need to recognize and rid the nation of the cancer of hate which has been gnawing at its vitals and which undoubtedly contributed to the President's death. No one can deny the truth of such assertions. But simply to work to rid the nation of fanaticism and hate is, it seems to me, an essentially negative task.
Dukakis thought all the energies of grief should be channeled into his own current project, the reform of the Massachusetts legislature. He quoted a Kennedy speech on the subject and concluded his column:
Will we pay him heed and will we act on his message until Massachusetts has at last wiped out the stains of incompetence and dishonesty and once again become "the city on the hill" about which John Kennedy spoke almost three years ago today?
That is the essential Dukakis, unswerving from his task, putting everything to use, disdaining waste, even the emotional waste of grieving. Do not grieve; get the job done. Nothing personal.
As the years passed, he would speak more warmly about Kennedy, and remember even more ties than there were. He now answers "Kennedy" when asked who most drew him toward politics -- an answer that intrigues Martin Linsky, a Brookliner who went on, like Dukakis, to the state legislature and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government: "Considering how unlike Kennedy Dukakis is, and how little he knew him, and how different their politics are, it is a typically Dukakis answer -- one that reveals absolutely nothing about Michael Dukakis, which is the most revealing thing about it." If anything drove Dukakis into government, it was contempt for the kind of affectionate tales Tip O'Neill tells of the Kennedys in his autobiography -- how, for instance, bribes were paid to potential supporters of Jack. But if he could use the death of Kennedy for a noble purpose, he could, clearly, use the man's life in a similar way. He tries to make everything instrumental, even inferior instruments.
Dukakis' revulsion at political corruption descended to details from the outset. He boasted to his constituents, in the year Kennedy died, that "I haven't fixed a ticket." But others in the state were constantly fixing things -- a truth dreadfully confirmed for him in 1970, the year he lost his race for the lieutenant governorship. A boozy young driver with Irish political connections hit a campaign car accompanying Dukakis' own from a TV station. When Dukakis rushed to the hospital and saw one aide's head all bloodied, the normally controlled candidate fainted. That aide recovered, but another one in the same car died. Judge Jerome P. Troy, who was later disbarred, assigned the drunken-driving case to a special judge, who let the driver off.
By the time Dukakis took office as Governor four years later, he had been through all the blarney and jokes about corrupt politics, and he meant to give it a truly last hurrah. His integrity was seen as righteousness, which helped defeat him in his 1978 re-election bid; but he got the job done. Said an omnidirectional fixer named Billy Masiello: "If any one man destroyed me, it was Governor Dukakis. When he came in there were no open hands. And the game was over."
A SUBURB THAT GREW ETHNIC STRIVERS
Where did Dukakis acquire his driven attitude toward clean government? He was in college as part of the '50s "silent generation" charged with conformity and apathy. But Dukakis was never silent. Through student $ governments and publications, he was always "sounding off" -- just as, after launching his political career, he would launch a column, run a regular radio show and become the host of a TV series, The Advocates. For all his contained air, he was put into this world to bustle.
He grew up in a voluble and protected community of strivers, where competition was prized and turned into social contribution. Brookline, embedded in Boston, has always considered itself better than Boston. A Revolutionary village, it had become so affluent in the 19th century that it was the first suburb in America to resist the cumbrous embraces of a major metropolis. The defiant localness and privacy remain, along with a communal apartness and vigilant self-government. The Brookline Citizen is aptly named. The '50s sense of asocial privacy never reached the inmost core of Brookline.
Dukakis ended his campaign in this year's California primary, simultaneously defeating and flattering Jesse Jackson, boasting that only in America -- and only in the Democratic Party -- could the party's two finalists for President be the son of poor Greek immigrants and the son of a poor black family in South Carolina. Jackson's aide, Bob Borosage, said wryly when he heard this: "Yeah, only in America can the son of a Brookline doctor from Harvard's medical school, who left his family million-dollar trusts, end up with the illegitimate son of a black woman in South Carolina." Dukakis grew up with the children of middle-class professionals who knew they must keep striving, but who were certain they could affect the world around them. Children grew up early in Brookline -- which may be why Dukakis, now 54, has always seemed older than he is (as opposed to Bush, 64, who has always seemed younger than his years).
As happens around people who succeed, there are prophecies "remembered" from Michael's school days about his future prowess. But a classmate, Mikki Ansin, says great things were predicted of many students at that forced-pace high school. "We all got the message -- we were headed somewhere." Brookline has been hospitable to strivers -- about a third of the population Dukakis grew up with was Jewish. Today about 20% of the community is made up of industrious South Asians.
Classmate Ansin says of Brookline: "A lot of stars came out of that town." But in 1951 the predominating star was a senior people already thought of as the Inevitable Michael. He was president of the honor society, good at sports, a trumpeter in the band. "Whatever it was, he ran for it," according to his mother. When he was rated only as the equal of his girlfriend, Sandy Cohen (Bakalar), in French, Michael found out this was because of her superior accent, and he practiced his pronunciation. He did not like losing, even to friends. He signed her yearbook, with a parting flourish, in French. The accent had been conquered.
For many at Brookline High, Harvard was the next rung on the striver's cursus honorum. Joe Kennedy, the President's father, who had moved to Brookline to launch his banking career, went to Harvard for its social benefits, and sent his sons there for the same reason. Academic matters were secondary. The social benefits of Harvard were a reason for Michael Dukakis not to go there. He believes deeply in meritocratic distinctions, which are blurred (if not reversed) by social influence. He went, instead, to the Quaker school Swarthmore, where his love for discipline would be rewarded. The school also gave him a smaller pool in which to establish (as he did) his dominance.
The most interesting thing about Dukakis in his student days is not that he excelled, but that he did so at a predetermined pace. His is not the brilliance that disdains looking at books until the final exam, and then crams. He does not move in spurts, or take things at a gulp. He learned his lessons every day, and left time for other things. He boasts that he never stayed up all night to study -- in fact that he never stayed up all night for anything. He early established the arc of his own effort, and maintains that trajectory despite diversions and passing impulses. That is the story of his current campaign for the presidency, and of his first and only Boston marathon, run when he was underage, with such awareness of his resources and the rate of their expenditure that he came in among the top third.
A similar calculation made Dukakis, against the advice of his family and friends, get his Army duty over before going on to law school. Having spent one summer in Peru and one semester in Washington, he had to break off his developing interest in politics for a task he accurately foresaw as one of almost complete boredom. But he must have sensed that Harvard Law -- where he was already accepted -- would give him opportunities to participate in a larger world of politics, creating a momentum that would be even harder to break. Going to Korea was like going to bed early before a big exam. He already knew enough; he just had to save his energy.
George Bush claims that he had time for deep reflection on the submarine that picked him up in the Pacific (it concentrates the mind to be shot out of the air and lose two crewmates); but Dukakis is not given to meditation, to reading books for their own sake, to what he dismisses as "introspection." His wife says, "I have never seen him read a novel, unless you count Nick Gage's Eleni as a novel." The Army was something to be done, once, like the marathon, in order for Michael to return to his real business.
THE RISE AND FALL OF A MORAL MANAGER
Moving back into his parents' home in Brookline in 1957, he took up law school and town politics with equal, because measured, intensity. While still a freshman in law school, he ran for the newly established Brookline Redevelopment Authority, a body reflecting the old suburb's continuing resistance to rapid urbanization. He was defeated, despite the skilled campaign work of a fellow law student, F.X. (Fran) Meaney.
The next year, as a sophomore, Dukakis won a more important race, becoming a town-meeting representative. He ran with the help of a bright group of young Brookliners, many of them Jewish, who were consciously taking control of the town meeting on their way to bigger battles. Forming an organization called the C.O.D. (Commonwealth Organization of Democrats), they were not crusaders devoted to a single ideology. Reform for them meant putting better people into government, enforcing laws, ending graft.
In the early days of the C.O.D., the Brookliners and their allies ran each other's campaigns, coordinated their movements, agreed on slates to bring their joint efforts to bear for everyone's benefit. Sometimes one would defer to another, as Sumner Kaplan did to Dukakis by opening up his own seat on the legislature for his protege to succeed him in 1963, or when Fran Meaney left another candidate's campaign to help Dukakis. The first break in this code came in 1969 after Dukakis had agreed to run for attorney general against Elliot Richardson while Beryl Cohen, an ally from his high school days, would run for Lieutenant Governor. When Nixon took Richardson to Washington, the legislature filled the attorney general's post with a Democrat, and Dukakis had no clear shot at the office. So he switched, and took aim at Cohen's slot, the lieutenant governorship. Dukakis felt or feigned surprise that Cohen would take this departure from the game plan as enough to end their friendship. It was just a matter of who could do the job better. Nothing personal.
The '60s were torn with passion, from the death of Kennedy through the civil rights and antiwar demonstrations, culminating for Boston in the great antibusing struggle in the early 1970s. Michael Dukakis' great cause in this decade was no-fault automobile insurance. He waged a sustained campaign for this reform, which took endless litigation out of the tainted Massachusetts courts. It was a solid, valuable reform, imitated in other states, hard to dramatize, but for that reason amenable to sustained argument of the sort Dukakis is good at. On the other, emotional issues of the time, Dukakis voted "correctly" for a liberal. After all, in Massachusetts even Republican Governor Sargent signed a law challenging the constitutionality of the Viet Nam War. But Dukakis did not march or protest. He agreed with most of the goals, but did not think "demonstrating" an effective tool. Emotional binges are like staying up all night -- they throw one's schedule off. Vote, if that will do it; argue, if you have to; and if votes and arguments will not (yet) avail, then do not waste time lamenting. On the busing issue, he refused to join either camp, suggesting there must be a third position that would serve to end discussion, not continue it.
WHAT OIKONOMIA REALLY MEANS
On money matters, Dukakis likes to remember the way his father always urged on him "Oikonomia! Oikonomia!" That applies to more than the price of a non- Filene's suit. The Greek ideal of oikonomia (literally, house management) is the optimum disposal of one's resources. Bush's claim that Dukakis has fetched his politics from some liberal boutique in Harvard could not be further from the truth. He was never susceptible to fads. He does not shop boutiques, but bargain basements, wanting the same old things at a better price.
Given his record, his friends should not have been surprised at his dramatic rectitude when he took office as Governor in 1974. He had schemed with them when they were fighting the entrenched powers -- who were bad men, after all, and had to be treated with some of their own weapons. Now, however, when good men were in office, the old practices would be abolished. The Dukakis people were ready for that. What they failed to anticipate was that Dukakis would not be sure that even they were as good as he needed. Even legitimate dealings with state agencies were suspect if engaged in by his friends -- Sumner Kaplan was denied a judgeship for which he was clearly qualified. Fran Meaney would have been denied an equally justifiable contract if he had not accepted it at the price of Dukakis' friendship. Michael expected his friends to be above mixing public service and any private gain. Even minor political favors -- summer jobs, special license plates -- were ostentatiously abolished; a lottery was set up to distribute summer jobs. Not only was Dukakis unyielding on his promise not to raise taxes (it was his word), but he also showed no compunction when human services were cut back.
The people who had brought him into office began to feel like Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. After a night of trying to seduce Socrates, Alcibiades concludes that he was holding an "eerie inhuman thing" in his arms. Alcibiades voices his bafflement in words that mingle admiration with disgust, which catch the feelings widely shared in Dukakis' circle: "How was I supposed to take that, what with my realization that he had rejected me, yet my awe at his character and control and hardiness, my actual experience of a creature who, for shrewdness and strength, I never dreamed existed, so that I could not quite get angry at not receiving his favors, nor, when it came to winning those favors, was I anything but stumped."
When the legislature forced on Dukakis the inevitable tax increase, after all the damage his resistance had caused to programs for the poor, the first term became a success. He did clean up Massachusetts politics. He brought rational organization to the agencies and the courts. He was so involved in these procedural improvements that he did not notice the failure of his loyalists to return to him. Now it was his turn to be baffled and rejected. He had not seen the loss coming, which made it fall on him more thunderously. It shook his self-confidence, which is his central virtue.
THE MYTH OF THE REDEMPTIVE LOSS
It hurt. But he would take an odd glee, in years to come, publicly describing how much it hurt. The defeat, carefully reconsidered, became his Redemptive Loss, the thing that would absolve Dukakis of former insensitivities. Hurt became a passport to the world of vulnerability. Because of the stress on this humanizing defeat, an impression has spread that Dukakis never suffered political loss before. That helped explain his first term as an aberration -- Dukakis was just stunned, for a while, by his sense of the sacredness of public trust.
But he had, in fact, lost political races before -- his first one, for the Brookline Redevelopment Authority, in 1958; his try at the attorney general's post in 1966; and at the Lieutenant Governor's in 1970. He had departed from public office -- from the legislature to make his 1970 race, whose loss left him in private practice for a while. Besides, he had known personal loss in the brutal deaths of his brother and his aide in car fatalities.
Nor did he need the Redemptive Loss to learn that he had to loosen up at times. His marriage to Kitty -- by his buttoned-up standards a wastrel, undisciplined in her smoking and language, electric with impulses he lacked or leashed in (he did not know then that amphetamines were helping her) -- had been an early recognition that there must be some allowed compartment of the random in his life. Through her he enjoys a vicarious spontaneity. They have a totaliter aliter marriage, reversing each other's tastes and temperaments. Others cannot live up to his standards. She is allowed to have a different set of standards altogether.
Admittedly his earlier losses had been expected or deemed possible by Dukakis -- just as his losing votes in the legislature had been when he first went there. But those losses he meant to use on the way to larger victories. In retrospect, he brought the Redemptive Loss within that same scheme. It would make him a better Governor the next time -- just you wait and see. His mother would take up the theme: All had happened for the best. Dukakis even came to take a kind of perverse credit for the loss, emphasizing that "I should never have lost," and "It was mine to lose," and "I blew it." Ed King was not a big enough figure to do in Michael Dukakis. Only Dukakis could do that.
Dukakis formulated to himself the optimistic concept of the Redemptive Loss while he was at the Kennedy School of Government. But he did not go there like other defeated politicians, to trade campaign anecdotes for some academic polish. That would have been too much like going to Harvard for the social benefits. He went there as he had gone to Swarthmore, to compete and contribute.
There was resistance to his coming, even as a full-time teacher and program organizer (rather than a visiting celebrity). The Kennedy School was from its founding in 1936 rather defensive about its academic legitimacy. Renamed in the '60s, during a time of heady confidence in the application of economic methods to social problems, it stressed the "hard sciences" as a basis for formulating public policy. The students' course evaluations bear the memory of that time, listing the mathematical and statistical skills needed for taking each course. That was a period when game theory was hot, and such games can all be played in the mind. "Field experience" does not make one a theoretician.
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.
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.
His Greek identity would be clear to a person of Dukakis' intelligence growing up in a house where his grandmother spoke only Greek. Stelian and Michael had a second language they could use when they did not want their schoolmates to understand them (as Dukakis even now uses Greek with his aide Nick Mitropoulos when he does not want reporters to know what they are saying). His mother told Michael the Greek myths when he was a child. He thought there was something special about being a Greek, and there is. Precisely because he lacked the rub of real Greeks around him in the playground, being Greek was internalized as a concept more prescriptive than descriptive. When he first visited Greece, he was put off for a while by the gritty reality, the undisciplined actual citizens of Athens. That was not what being Greek meant to him. His was an older and more demanding ideal.
His mother and father met because of their Greek ties. Euterpe Boukis' brother told her there was a handsome Greek in a visiting company of college players who had acted Euripides' Hippolytus. She met, briefly, the man who played the lead role and who was on his way back to college. He marked in his mind this schoolgirl for his bride, a typically Greek way of deciding, and came back for her after he finished his studies. Panos Dukakis was an Anatolian Greek (from the region of Troy), and his parents were from Lesbos.
When Jules Dassin adapted Euripides' Hippolytus for the screen in 1962, with Anthony Perkins as the Hippolytus character, Panos and Euterpe went to see again the play that had brought them together. It had special meaning for them. Hippolytus is the tale of a man too good for his own good. Intent on his pursuits, impervious to the demonic, he will not notice the gods' dreadful pother being made above his head. The play deals with a recurrent flaw in the Greek ideal. Martha Nussbaum, in her profound study of ancient Greek ethical standards, The Fragility of Goodness, argues that self-sufficiency was a standard for the city that individuals tried to appropriate for themselves, with tragic results. Even Plato came to realize that he had sealed his Socrates off from human feeling by making him so independent of others. Later, he tried to rescue his Socrates from the fault of perfection, allowing him a bit of (measured) love for others and dependence on them. Desire, he conceded, must drive the soul, but with a reined-in "craziness."
Dukakis, obviously, is no Hippolytus. He has given his hostage to the gods of love in Kitty. He can be moved by the plight of others; he can faint at the bloody reality of pain, be disarmed at the sight of real Athenians, waver when his friend misleads him about a campaign trick. But he does radiate to voters his own sense of being chosen. Sam Beer, Harvard's famous professor of government, who taught Dukakis at Swarthmore, says, "He was born to rule." He was always the Inevitable Michael. Things fall into place for him as by plan; he does not have to make any frantic effort to pass marker after marker on his privately charted marathon. Whether his actual first words were, as his mother likes to remember, monos mou, "all by myself," they have become the memory that gives her son his identity.
DEALING WITH DISORDER
He moves nimbly on his mental map because all parts of it are equally clear. It does not fuzz off at the edges or border on larger mysteries. You do not fade from this map; you are either there, firmly placed, or you fall off. Stelian fell off. Stelian was the older brother, who did first all the things that Michael rapidly did better. But Stelian was soft, gentle and more social, vulnerable. He was partly a boyhood role model for Michael and partly a competitor to be surpassed (as friends have been since Sandy Cohen's day). Their mother admits that the boys, though close and loving, were intense in their rivalry, and Michael, the younger, was the eventual winner in every arena.
Then, in 1951, the year Michael graduated from high school, his brother, already in college, suffered some fatal wound to that self-confidence the Dukakis-Boukis marriage was meant to instill. Stelian attempted suicide, and was committed to mental care. He lived on, erratically, for 22 more years, haunting the outskirts of his brother's career, organizing with him in the heady days of the C.O.D., winning his own term on the town-meeting committee, then changing party, competing for the votes of his parents (who had to change their registration to Republican when Stelian was on that ticket), trying to sabotage a campaign by his brother. In 1973 his bike was hit by a runaway driver; he lingered in the hospital for four months before dying, a partly shameful mystery to his family.
Especially a mystery, one would think, to Michael. Stelian was the only other Greek boy who had grown up in the same circumstances. Michael had no Greek kids in the neighborhood, peers or rivals, to compare himself with -- as Mario Cuomo, for instance, had a swarm of Italian friends to gauge himself against. In Michael's formative early years, there was not only monos mou but also oi thyo mas ("we two"). When Stelian, the soft one, went under, Michael, the quicker one, must have made something of that. But we cannot know what -- he is quietly respectful of his brother's memory, and incurious. He has forgotten many of his brother's bizarre actions, including -- most significantly -- his suicide attempt. Stelian is off the map. His brother was not Greek after all, as Michael understands Greek self-reliance and achievement.
Even Kitty is sometimes off the map, when Michael does not want to know what she is doing. She tells the famous story of hiding her dresses for years in her father's house so Michael would not see how many she had bought -- which means he did not keep track of the ones she wore. She walks on the border of his clear mental map, usually there but sometimes not. So did Sasso, proving that Dukakis can combine intimacy with a person and a carefully determined distance from some aspects of them, a distance so great as to defeat his vision.
Whatever Dukakis may lack in comprehensiveness of knowledge, he makes up for in concentration, in the ability to focus on a problem and sort out practical solutions to it. Furthermore, by emphasizing his family's general success story, he makes himself the common denominator of immigrant aspiration, a kind of Everyethnic, ecumenical and assimilated. His individualism appeals to an American (as well as ancient Greek) ideal of self-sufficiency. The outsider riding in to handle a problem is part of our myth. Dukakis' unwavering optimism is an advantage when dealing with an electorate that likes that quality, whether displayed by a Franklin Roosevelt or a Ronald Reagan. Attempts to hedge Dukakis into compromising company -- as a Kennedy spender, or Harvard liberal, or game-theory technocrat, or Carter-Mondale moper -- run up against the serenely enclosed quality of his individualism.
His record in Massachusetts is impressive despite the inevitable imperfections. He deserves credit for the orderly management of a prosperity of which he was more the beneficiary than the cause. He is a meritocrat to his bones, with great respect for equity (if not quite a passion for equality). His claims are more moral than technocratic. He first wanted integrity. Efficiency followed on that. Though he was excessively rigid in his first term, and comparatively lax in his second, the practical result is that he cleaned up Massachusetts, an Augean task, enough to make anyone who did it a Greek hero.
Washington, these days, may well remind Dukakis of the Massachusetts he grew up in. In Ed Meese's town, fending off indictments could follow swift upon the oath of office. Simply to lever the White House out of its sleaze may prove a major feat of moral engineering. There is a more immediate need for management than for ideology in the demoralized departments and scandal-ridden White House. Dukakis, now cagey as well as righteous, may be fitted for a task that will require some rectitude. He has become like Plato's later Socrates, carefully programmed to look less programmed, admitting desire but reining it in, measuredly "crazy" like a fox. Sam Beer says that he finds in Dukakis a leadership like that of Franklin Roosevelt, the man often called a combination of the lion and the fox. So far, Dukakis has half of that act perfected. The rest of the campaign may find us looking for some signs of the other half, the lion.