American lawyer and politician, Governor of Massachusetts and the Democratic Presidential Candidate in 1988. Formerly an attorney and a professor of government at Harvard, he began his political career as an elected member of a Brookline, Massachusetts town meeting, a legislative forum in 1959. He won the chairmanship of the local Democratic committee in 1960 and a Massachusetts legislative seat in 1962. He made an aborted run for attorney general in 1966, finishing second at the state Democratic convention. A losing bid for lieutenant governor followed in 1980. Taking a sabbatical from politics, he became a partner in his law firm and moderator of “The Advocates,” a public affairs show produced in Boston. He ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 1974, and won. In 1978, he lost the Democratic primary after problems during his first term. He then went to teach graduate students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In 1982, he won the governorship again, and was re-elected in 1986.
He is the son of Greek immigrant parents, a physician father and teacher mother and he won honors in sports and academics in school, where he was viewed as brainy, punctual, and a serious and methodical thinker. Descriptions of the 5’8″ tall, slightly built governor by others hone in on his serious, cautious personality. He has been called “a colorless drone,” an “earnest nerd,” “poetic as a slide rule” and a “word processor of a politician.” Someone observed that if he were a car, he would be a Honda Civic–economical, reliable, completely unexciting. From the time he was a kid, Dukakis has been seen as intense, reserved, and notably stubborn. Always a favorite of his teachers, he was beautifully behaved, and respected rather than popular as a teenager. He won honors in sports and academic while in school, and with the hobby of running, finished 57th in a 1951 Boston marathon.
Dukakis’ strait-laced and frugal ways carried into adulthood with the observance of a modest, unassuming lifestyle, and he is a strong family man. He married the former Kitty Dickson on 6/20/1963, adopting Kitty’s son from a first marriage, and they have two daughters, Andrea and Kara. He has faced a wide range of family problems: his oldest brother Stelian suffered a nervous breakdown in 1970, and three years later was struck by a hit-and-run driver, dying after four months in a coma. His wife’s battle with prescription drug addiction has been well publicized.
Dukakis is a runner and his life may be likened to a marathon: with a strong and steady effort, he reaches his goals.
His mother, Euterpe Dukakis, died at age 99 on April 2, 2003 at a retirement facility in Jamaica Plain, MA. Earlier that week, his father-in-law died in the same city.
Link to Wikipedia biography