Interview with Michael Dukakis

He got up and said, Look, I’m not going to make a speech. You have me for an hour; ask me any question you want. I remember him saying, Joe Clark and I are the only two Democrats in the Harvard Corporation, and we stand in a corner and talk to each other at these meetings. [laughing] Clark was the former mayor of Philadelphia and United States Senator from Pennsylvania. I remember that it was an absolutely brilliant performance. Even then I’d seen a fair number of politicians in action, and I hadn’t seen anybody quite as sharp, as interesting, as funny. He was a little bit nervous; he kept putting his hands in his pockets, taking them out of his pockets, but I was impressed.

In 1960, after I graduated from law school and my buddy Paul Brountas and I took the bar exam, we got into Brountas’s Volkswagen and headed across the country to go to Los Angeles, to be at the national convention. I had just been elected chairman of my Democratic organization in the town of Brookline—We had run a kind of reform slate and won, and since I was the guy who was behind all of it, and was still in my last year of law school, I had become chairman of the Democratic organization, but I wasn’t a delegate or anything. We just wanted to go out there and watch Kennedy be nominated, and we did. When he came over, the night right after his nomination, to say thank you to the delegates, before his speech the next day, we were in the hall. I’ve never forgotten that. But that was about as close as I got to Jack Kennedy.

Frankly, at the Democratic Convention, where I was a delegate, I voted for [Edward J.] McCormack [Jr.].

I remember him inviting the Democratic legislators to his place on Beacon Hill. I remember seeing him and Joan [Bennett Kennedy] walking around Beacon Hill from time to time. I’m sure I was in touch with the Kennedy district office on immigration issues, and I’m sure we connected from time to time, but remember, I was just one of, at that time, 240 members of the House of Representatives, and he was the United States Senator. Of course we both were running for statewide office, but it wasn’t until I became Governor that I began to work closely with him.

Was it an instinct? Where did it come from? I don’t know.

The other thing was his sense of humor. He was a funny guy. He just loved life and he lived it. He had his ups and his downs, big ones, but he practiced the politics of joy in many, many ways. And he had great staff.

You know, there have been all kinds of articles—Maybe you guys are going to do it anyway. How is it that all of these kids, and the grandkids, have somehow inherited that same set of values?

There’s a guy over here, Rich Katula, who has taught communications for years and was involved with some of our study abroad over in Greece; we worked together. He worked in the communications operation in the Pentagon in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He said Kennedy’s staff was just far superior to any other Congressional staff he ever worked with. He said they were in a class by themselves in terms of what they did and how they did it, and in particular, in dealing with these individual problems.

Where did he get that? It wasn’t an exercise. Like all of us, you learn from your constituents. You find out the things that are happening out there because they come to you. There was never any Hey, I’m up here in the Senate; go see your Congressman. He considered that service every bit as important about his job as anything else that he did, and he did it well.

On the other hand, he’s the guy—and I remember him saying this—who said the biggest political mistake he ever made was not to sit down with [Richard M.] Nixon right away, when Nixon proposed his universal health plan in 1971; that it was a mistake to go for a pure public plan. This wasn’t a public option. The Kennedy bill would have been universal Medicare. When he finally decided, in ’73, that they’d better sit down and work something out—They had begun discussions on it and then Watergate hit—he said it was the worst mistake he ever made in the Senate.

Ted said, I’ll take it either way, just as long as every American has decent and affordable healthcare. You’ve never heard that story?

In fact, the bill I signed here, the state version, was the Nixon bill, basically. It was what Hawaii did in ’75. We did it, only more so, in ’88, and he was tickled to death. He worked with us. At one point we had a problem with the hospitals. There had been cuts in Medicare. Medicare is a federal program; we have nothing to do with that at the state level. They said, If you don’t put $50 million into it, to make up for the federal cuts, we will oppose the bill. We were that close to success. I was furious with them. They had 5,000 hospital employees coming to the State House, arguing that we were going to kill the hospitals. By the way, it was $50 million on an overall hospital budget, at the time, of $4 billion. This was a deal breaker.

If you want a contrast between Profiles in Courage and the alternative, just look at Kennedy and Romney. I was a big fan of Romney’s father. I thought George Romney was one of the best. In fact I courted my wife in a little yellow Rambler convertible.

I’d generally meet with them, just me and these folks, not with the press around. I’d ask them to tell me about themselves, where they were working, what was good about the welfare-to-work program, what were the things they thought we could do better, and so forth. Then we’d go out and do a press event. It always got front-page coverage. Here were women who had been on public assistance who were working, earning, and we had their employers there, usually saying, These are some of the best people ever to work with me. I’d come home all hopped up about this and Kitty would say, What is it? Geez, I just had another—You have no idea. Let me tell you about these women, and what they’re doing.

Then a whole bunch of them came to me—By that time there were hundreds, thousands—and they said, We want to create a support group. These were people who had been on welfare in some cases for more than ten years. They came to me, now employed, supporting themselves and their kids, and they said, We want to create a support group, as volunteers, because we think we could be helpful with some of the folks coming along. Do you know how inspiring this is, and energizing? That’s why you’re in public life, to have that kind of an opportunity.

It’s like with the schools. All these critics of the schools—Jonathan Alter at Newsweek is a good guy, but he’s decided that the litmus test for political courage is whether or not you’re for charter schools.

I signed the first broad education reform bill in ’85; another one came along in ’93 that instituted the whole MCAS thing. I’m not sure I’m for testing every year. My bill was fourth, seventh, and tenth grades, which is probably enough. How much testing do you do and how much teaching to the test do you do? But No Child Left Behind did not have an impact on this state the way it did on many other states, just because we already were out in front of most states.

By the way, Ted was very supportive of it, and included it as part of his reauthorization. He was a big fan. You didn’t have to spend three months persuading him. We have a group up here called Mass 20/20, with an advisory board I sit on. We went down to explain it to him and the next day—bang—we had a new section of the No Child reauthorization. You didn’t have to walk him through this.

I thought Kerry was going to win, but again, you have to be down there at the grassroots, as Obama demonstrated very clearly, and you have to have a central idea. Look, this is not taking anything away from Bill Clinton, but ’92 was a better year for a Democrat than ’88. Why? Because we were in another recession again. Sometimes it’s where you are, and at what time. I don’t think any of our campaigns were really up to what they should have been as campaigns.