The Iceman Cometh
Lydon, Christopher
The Iceman Cometh by Christopher Lydon No one can remember a funny moment with Michael Dukakis. Michael Dukakis came of age at a moment in the 1950s when young Jewish professionals...
...As abundantly gifted as Michael, Stelian had more of his father's gentleness, as Michael had more of his mother's driving intellect...
...Charles Kenney, Robert liirner...
...and he was marked early on as a Reformer, more than a Liberal...
...Michael S. Dukakis, Rosabeth Moss Kanter...
...The strangest part was that Dukakis loved the job he was doing...
...But how much did any or all of this account for the spectacular drop in Massachusetts unemployment—from 12.3 percent at the start of Dukakis's first term to 3.2 percent at the start of his third in 1987...
...For almost 30 years now the rule of Brookline politics has been that you go along with Mike Dukakis or you get out...
...And no presidential candidate in memory has been more happily and exclusively wedded to a provincial community as Dukakis is to his...
...In statewide politics, Dukakis's subliminal slogan could have been, "He's smart, he's clean, and he's not Irish ." Dukakis has enjoyed contentious if not contemptuous relations with the oldschool, Irish names of note in Massachusetts, from Tip O'Neill to Boston's longtime mayor, Kevin White...
...ad absurdum...
...In the third volume at hand* Dukakis recounts his discovery of entrepreneurship and business economics, which happened in phase five of his career...
...The Iceman Cometh by Christopher Lydon No one can remember a funny moment with Michael Dukakis...
...and the rescue of rotting mill cities like Lowell and Pittsfield...
...But never does the reader, or Dukakis watcher, fancy he is cooking up a miracle...
...Dukakis and the Reform Impulse...
...I was reminded of all the tense, loving, often destructive brotherly contests that have shaped politicians—from Jacob and Esau to Jimmy and Billy Carter...
...Expert at party rules, Dukakis was positively passionate about the procedural stuff of good government— things like congressional redistricting and highway land-taking reforms...
...At least partly, it appears, under the pressure of Michael's fierce cornpetition, Stelian collapsed in suicidal depression during college and never fully recovered...
...In politics, after law school, the mission was not just to get himself elected (he was only the third Democrat Brookline had ever sent to the state legislature...
...the emotional and political makeover at Harvard's Kennedy School...
...And till the day when Edward J. King clobbered him from the right (and Irish) side in the Democratic primary of 1978, Dukakis thought everybody loved the job he was doing...
...He grew up a doctor's son, tennis star, trumpet soloist, and student body president in a community of achievers that spoiled him, in a sense, but kept challenging him...
...He is co-anchor of "The Ten O'Clock News" on WGBH-TV, public television in Boston...
...Dukakis: An American Odyssey...
...His was not the gadfly style of reform...
...Quinlin Press, $17.95...
...A product of Brookline schools, a pillar of Brookline town meetings, and a boss of the Democratic town committee, Dukakis is more "Brookline' than Lyndon Johnson was "Texas" or Jimmy Carter was "Plains...
...they diversified their sources and have kept a gritty documentary quality in their narrative...
...What credit goes to the tax cuts that Dukakis at first opposed, like Prop 21/2 ? What credit belongs to businessbooster Ed King, who stripped the Taxachusetts label off the state...
...There was his hands-on interest in the struggles of particular companies and his advocacy of run-down regions like New Bedford and Fall River in southeastern Massachusetts...
...A lot of them wonder how different things might have been if Barney Frank had *Creating the Future: The Massachusetts Comeback and Its Promise for America...
...major transit investments around Boston...
...In short, Dukakis's long list of economic remedies is impressive in its way and expressive of his tenacious mind...
...Dukakis had stood in the well of the House all day, fighting the bar associations and the House speaker, answering hundreds of inquiries and objections...
...Eventually he won major structural reforms that clarified executive authority in state government—liberating governors from held-over and frozen-in administrators, for example, and cutting the House membership by a third from 240 seats to 160...
...2. Legislature Dukakis arrived at the State House in 1963 with a thick sheaf of his own bills already written, and he spent the rest of the decade pounding away in the manner of ocean waves on the indifferent boulders of legislative leadership...
...The New Dukakis lent his name to Buckle-Up-for-Safety promotions, and such things, and was prepared to distribute summer jobs in state parks through the Legislature...
...3. Duke One His first reign as governor, elected in 1974, was a fiscal and political bloodbath...
...In the pit of the worst recession since the 1930s, Dukakis found himself slashing hospital care for welfare families and, at the same time, breaking his no-new-taxes promise to save the state from insolvency...
...What he is cooking is alphabet soupMIFA, JTPA, MAP, MTDC, CARD, BSSC, ET, etc...
...The real reason Massachusetts has been a one-party state in modern times is precisely that Mike Dukakis reembodied the stern Brahmin tradition of moral advantage and politics as "service...
...and the comeback as governor in the booming Massachusetts of the 1980s...
...The day the first no-fault bill passed the Massachusetts House is remembered with feeling— something like the moment when "Havlicek stole the ball" for the Celtics...
...He was a buff on condo-conversion and rent-control rules, an absentee in the popular politics of Vietnam...
...Dukakis became both student and teacher of the "case method" of public policy management...
...Of the two biographies it may be worth noting that Turner and Kenney (of The Boston Globe) are the smoother writers, and they interviewed Dukakis at length...
...The mitigating details of that first term included some exemplary judicial appointments and an overhaul of court administration...
...state sponsorship of photovoltaics, polymer plastics, and other emerging technologies...
...And how do we explain the even faster growth and still lower unemployment today in New Hampshire, so differently governed...
...They are all listed here: state pools of venture capital and development bonds...
...The hardest and best victory came in 1970 for no-fault auto insurance, restricting tort litigation over minor injuries...
...the support systems, including job training, day care, and transportation for welfare mothers in Dukakis's Employment and Training Choices (ET...
...They still talk a better game than he, but Dukakis's suburbanites and middle-class reformers had the last laugh in Democratic primaries, and they destroyed the Republicans while they were at it...
...Irish Democrats in droves said farewell to the puffy pink faces and sticky fingers of all the Knockos and Jockos, Dittos and Up Up Kellys of The Last Hurrah...
...Political scientist Richard Neustadt has compared Dukakis's exile to FDR's polio, for character building...
...Post knock-out Dukakis was not demonstrably humbler, or a better listener...
...In 1973, at age 42, he was knocked off his bicycle and into a coma...
...and the business recovery, which actually got started in Duke One, was well underway...
...Herewith, from observation as well as from reading, a synopsis of the stages of Dukakis's development: 1. Brookline There is probably no old suburb in America with better schools, more public tennis courts, fewer billboards, more Chinese restaurants, and as many Nobel prize winners...
...The Dukakis-Kanter claim is that every little bit of Dukakis's industrial policy helped...
...Dukakis's long rule in Massachusetts was founded on those twin splits and transitions: first, the Jewish heart-transplant inside his privileged old town and, second, the statewide breakup of the natural Irish hegemony into High Irish and Old Rascal factions, representing divisions of class and district and selves...
...His instinctive interest was in process as much as in end results...
...Dukakis and Kanter are not eager to resolve some obvious questions: How has Dukakis's hand in the economy compared with the lift of the 59 percent increase in the Pentagon's investment in Massachusetts during the first half of the Reagan decade...
...5. Redivivus By the time the New Dukakis turned the tables on Ed King in 1982 and took back the governor's office, the Prop 21/2 tax revolt was a fait accompli by referendum...
...four months later his family, including Michael, took him off life supports...
...And his own moves have had the spontaneity and the deep personal resonance of, say, the New Coke campaign...
...Richard Gaines, Michael Segal...
...More important was systematizing the reform of the Democratic ward and town organizations in Brookline and elsewhere around Boston...
...The Old Dukakis had insisted on a summer-jobs lottery...
...What remained to fight about was the public credit for the Massachusetts Miracle, which is where Creating the Future comes in...
...Dukakis's latest identity as "the son of Greek immigrants" may have been buried somewhere in his heart, but it didn't count much in Massachusetts where (despite the evidence of Paul Tsongas's term in the Senate and Nick Mavroules in the House) there is no base of Greek votes to stand on...
...And I am haunted by the question put to Timer and Kenney by Mike Dukakis's high school sweetheart Sandy Cohen Bakalar, who is still among his closest friends...
...Dukakis's wilderness was the place where the two best brandnames in Massachusetts meet: the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard...
...Dukakis offended everyone, listened to no one, lost contact with his legislature, and drew challenges against his own renomination from both the right and left fringes of his party...
...But he did come back with his first professional handler in John Sasso—and with a new deference to convention...
...Houghton Mifflin, $16.95...
...Old legislators, however, can't remember a funny moment in all their years with Mike Dukakis...
...The most impressive scoop in either book is the Turner and Kenney digging into the tragedy of Dukakis's older brother Stelian...
...He has been recruiting ever since from that business school of analytical, war-gamed, test-marketed politics...
...Summit, $17.95...
...Would you want to have Michael Dukakis for a brother...
...At the end, every member stood and cheered Dukakis's mastery...
...If he'd had to compete against Barney Frank's passion and wit, would Dukakis's earnest brains have seemed quite so impressive...
...It was also the very moment when John F. Kennedy (another Brookline Native) was introducing a different class of politics in Massachusetts and opening a Tong rivalry with House Speaker John McCormack and his nephew Edward...
...Christopher Lydon started covering politics for The Boston Globe in 1964 during Michael Dukakis's first term in the Massachusetts legislature...
...the good-faith flop in his first term as governor in the 1970s...
...They were very close friends, but the sibling rivalry was something awful," said their mother, the remarkable Euterpe Dukakis...
...Who needed Republicans...
...He has been a League of Women Voters' dream come true, a walking, talking Boston Globe editorial...
...he was bent on ruling as surely as Richard Daley ever ruled Chicago...
...Dukakis was the last to learn of what his wife Kitty called his "public death !' 4. Exile Dukakis's co-author Rosabeth Kanter goes so far as to compare his interregnum as a growth period to Gandhi's maturation between South Africa and India...
...Dukakis's real base was his success in coopting the alliterative styles of Brookline— progressive, prudent, process-minded, prosperous but parsimonious, and relentlessly participatory...
...Michael Dukakis came of age at a moment in the 1950s when young Jewish professionals were converting the Brahmin Republican politics of his hometown Brookline, Massachusetts—when Elliot Richardson's town, so to speak, was being taken over by Dick Goodwin's brother Herb and their law-school generation...
...Gaines and Segal (of the weekly Boston Phoenix) had no private access to Dukakis for this book...
...As long as anyone can remember he has used the line, "I hear you, I hear you" to wave people off...
...That first term looks now like a warm-up for a Democrat succeeding Ronald Reagan in 1989...
...As these two thorough and useful biographies* document, the public history of Michael Dukakis has five thematic phases: the incredibly deep-root setting in Brookline...
...the emergence as a reform legislator in the 1960s...
...entered the Massachusetts House alongside Mike Dukakis, instead of a decade later...
...The performance and the ovation have never been outdone...
...hello to the suburbs, Ivy League suits, and Reform...
...But the details did not mitigate much: Lowell and Pittsfield both voted for Ed King...
...I think it must have been tough for Stelian," she said...
...In 1975 Dukakis fell heir to the runaway deficits and cooked books of the affable Republican Frank Sargent...
Vol. 20 • May 1988 • No. 4
