Michael S. Doukakis
Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Northeastern University
Governor of Massachusetts (1975-1979, 1983-1991)
1988 Democratic Nominee for President of the United States
Michael Stanley Dukakis was born in Brooklyn, Massachusetts on November 3, 1933. His parents, Panos and Euterpi (Boukis) Dukakis, both immigrated from Greece to the cities of Lowell and Haverhill, Massachusetts before they married and settled in the city of Brooklyn, just . outside Boston. Dukakis graduated from Brooklyn High School (1951), Swarthmore College (1955) and Harvard Law School (1960). He served two years in the United States Army, sixteen months of which were spent with the support team at the United Nations Mission of the Military Armistice Commission in Munsan, Korea.
Dukakis began his political career as an elected Town Meeting member in the City of Brooklyn. He was elected chairman of his city's Democratic organization in 1960 and won a seat in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1962. He served four terms as a legislator, winning reelection by increasing margins each time he ran. In 1970 he was the Massachusetts Democratic Party candidate for Lieutenant Governor and Boston Mayor Kevin White's running mate in that year's gubernatorial race, losing to Republicans Frank Sargent and Donald Dwight.
Dukakis won his party's nomination for Governor in 1974 and decisively defeated Sargent in November of that year. He inherited a record deficit and high unemployment and is generally credited with pulling Massachusetts out of one of the worst financial and economic crises in history. But the effort backfired and Dukakis was defeated in the 1978 Democratic primary by Edward King. Dukakis returned to defeat King in 1982 and was re-elected to an unprecedented third four-year term in 1986 by one of the largest margins in history. In 1986, his colleagues at the National Governors Association voted him the most effective governor in the nation.
Dukakis won the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 1988, but was defeated by George W. Bush. Soon after, he announced that he would not run for re-election as governor. After leaving office in January 1991, Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, spent three months at the University of Hawaii where Dukakis was a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Health. While at the University of Hawaii, he taught courses in political leadership and health policy and led a series of public forums on reforming the nation's health care system. Public interest in Hawaii's first-in-the-nation universal health insurance system and the lessons that can be learned from it has grown as the nation debates the future of health care in America.
Since June 1991, Dukakis has been Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at UCLA. His research has focused on national health care policy reform and the lessons that national policymakers can learn from state reform efforts. Recently, he and former US Senator Paul Simon co-authored a book titled How to Get Into Politics—and Why, which is designed to encourage young people to seriously consider politics and public service as a career.
Dukakis was nominated by President Clinton for a five-year term as a member of the Board of Directors of Amtrak, The National Railroad Passenger Corporation on May 21, 1998 and confirmed by the Senate on June 25, 1998. He served a total of five-year terms on the Amtrak Board of Directors as Vice Chairman .
Mike and Kitty Dukakis have three children: John, Andrea and Kara, and are the proud grandparents of seven grandchildren.
Katharine (Kitty) D. Doukakis
First Lady of Massachusetts (1975-1979, 1983-1991)
Kitty Dukakis' concerns for women's rights, human rights, the arts, the environment, community, and her family are reflected in the numerous activities and organizations that have characterized both her public and private life.
Appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust, he later became a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He now serves as a member of the Conscience Committee.
Ms. Dukaki has worked extensively on issues related to the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and contemporary human rights issues. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Refugee Policy Group and Refugees International. In 1985, he participated in a fact-finding tour of refugee camps in Thailand and founded the International Refugee/Cambodian Crisis Fund to bring about humanitarian changes in the treatment of Southeast Asians with families in the United States. He also organized a Task Force for the Children of Cambodia. In 1981 Ms. Dukaki organized a mission to Thailand where she worked to free 250 unaccompanied orphaned minors from Cambodia, most of whom settled in Massachusetts.
From 1985 to 1989 she was Director of the Program on Public Sector Partnerships, a joint program between the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Graduate School of Planning. The program developed demonstration projects and research models for the design, management and financing of public spaces. Mrs. Dukaki was greatly influenced by her parents' appreciation of the arts. Her late father, Harry Ellis Dixon, was the first violinist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 49 years, associate conductor of the Boston Pops, director of the Youth Concerts at Symphony Hall, and conductor emeritus of the Boston Classical Orchestra. Ms. Dukaki taught modern dance for many years at the Dittmer School of Dance in Pennsylvania State College, Lesley College, and the Brookline Arts Center.
Ms. Dukaki now serves on the advisory board of Mapendo International, a humanitarian organization that rescues and protects at-risk and forgotten refugees in Africa. She also serves on the board of the New England Center for Children, a school for autistic children in Southborough, MA and is the namesake of the Kitty Dukakis Treatment Center for Women, which is part of Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. She is also the author of two books: Now You Know, the story of her battle with addiction and depression, and Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy, co-authored with Larry Tye, which describes how ECT proved to be the only treatment that effectively dealt with recurring cycles of depression.
Ms. Dukakis attended Pennsylvania State University and received a BA in Education from Lesley College. She also received a Masters in Broadcasting and Film from Boston University School of Communications and a Masters in Social Work from Boston University School of Social Work. She and her husband, Michael S. Dukakis, former Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and currently Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University, live in Brooklyn, Massachusetts. They have three children, Giannis, Andrea and Kara, and seven grandchildren.
