What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  He could still govern, and campaign—he could do it all!—as long as the campaigning didn’t change the kinda guy he was. ... So he worked on his health bill, he got it through the House ... and then he went to New York—where, after all, it was apparent ... he was on a roll!

  He had a rally in Astoria, Queens ... his Greeks. They came out by thousands. There were so many people on the street—the Crystal Palace could not hold them!—they were hammering his car, rocking it crazily. ... Inside, people rushed the stage for pictures with him, for his autograph. The New York cops had to shove them back. They were waving flags, Greek and American. Men were yelling his name:

  “BRA-VO DU-KA-KIS ... BRAVO ... BRA-VO DU-KA-KIS.”

  And for them, Michael departed from his speech, to tell them about his father, Panos, who was so proud of his heritage ... so in love with this great new land. ... Michael only wished that Panos could be there, at this moment, at the Crystal Palace, to see what the times had wrought, for his son ...

  And for all Greeks in America ... for this was the same hall, where Michael had stood, the summer before, when his mother, Euterpe, speaking in Greek, told another cheering, keening crowd that Michael Dukakis was not just her son ... but from that point, he was a son to them all.

  And so Michael talked to this crowd about their sons and daughters, who were like children of his own now ... and his hope for them, that they would see him, see this, feel this great moment, in this hall ... and think about a life of public service—the highest calling, the finest honor, in this great land!

  And he could see some of those children staring up at him. He saw mothers weeping, next to them. And with the image of Panos alive behind his eyes, and before them, the future of his people ... and not just his people, but all the children of all the peoples who came to this nation ... he knew, at that moment, what he was called to do: he was their bridge, their hope ... he would not disappoint them.

  Michael told them, correctly, in Greek ... the words with which the Athenian commander, Miltiades, rallied his outnumbered forces against the Persians, in 490 B.C.:

  “Tha nikisoume! ...”

  “We shall win! ...” And the place exploded in a roar of righteous pride.

  “BRA-VO ... BRA-VO ... BRAVO DU-KA-KIS ...”

  How could he live through that and fail to marvel? How could he not be borne almost off the ground by that hot rush of ... well, it was love, what he felt from that crowd. How could he conclude anything but ... he was their hope, their elect? Him! ... And he was on his way—from triumph to triumph, ahead in New York! He was on his way to another win, his biggest, the win of his life ... and beyond—to the nomination for President of the United States. Dukakis ... President. On his way to the White House! It was happening ... to him.

  124

  1982

  HE KNEW THAT FEELING of blessed elation—even the same sense of wonder, that it should happen to him, a miracle in politics. He knew what that was—from ’82. It’s said that most politicians rerun forever their first successful campaigns. But Michael’s model was his comeback—the campaign that said the most about him.

  It was all about him—from the start, when Ed King took his job away. Michael never blamed anybody but himself. Even when he thought his career was over, even in the first months of sad disorientation, he never allowed himself the luxury of alibi. The problem was him. Something was wrong with him.

  That’s what made it so devastating. It was not about policy, or competence, or performance. He knew he’d run the state well. Massachusetts was booming. He left the state with a surplus. He’d cleaned up, straightened up, speeded up, every bit of government he touched. People had to see that!

  But they did not see that ... or they didn’t care. Or they weren’t willing to see him ... or maybe they did see him.

  What was it about him? ... For the first time in his life, Michael had to take inventory of himself—the one thing he’d never spent a minute worrying about. He was the steady one, the smart one, the strong one. He’d spent from a bottomless reserve of ability and will on everything outside—Kitty, the kids, the town, the state, his citizens. ... He had no way of working on himself, even seeing himself. He had not the habit of mind, the language, the history ... no ground from which to start.

  He asked friends: “Was I really that bad? That lousy?”

  Of course, they told him no.

  Well, then, what happened?

  Son John would find him in the afternoon, just staring, sitting in the kitchen, dark, sad eyes fixed on nothing. No one had ever seen Michael Dukakis without something to do. No one had ever seen him at a loss. It was like the power went off, and the house on Perry Street was at a standstill. Then he saw how people tiptoed around him, and he felt worse. He was a drag on them! He was a dead weight. He was finished! ... That was the cinch of the circle: Michael was depressed. But Michael was a man who was never depressed—not for one day in his forty-five years. He never took more than one aspirin! ... Now he didn’t understand what had happened to him, what was wrong with him ... he felt awful. He felt bad for feeling bad. He’d let them all down. He’d let himself down. And he could not understand, now, why he couldn’t pick himself up.

  He had that one-room office, but he wasn’t going to sit there. What would he do? He couldn’t go back to practicing law. His life was about the public weal. So he took a job at Harvard’s Kennedy School—he would teach the managers of state and local governments ... and meanwhile search for his answers.

  There was opposition to his appointment—professors didn’t want the school to look like a dumping ground for failed politicians. But Michael soon showed his seriousness. He went at teaching as he went at everything—full speed, with dogged attention to the unglamorous mechanical chores: faculty meetings, curriculum, committees ... he pulled his weight. He’d ride his bike to his crowded cubbyhole office ... a far cry from his elegant corner suite in the State House—but Michael never mentioned that. He’d roll up his sleeves, he had students to serve! And these weren’t kids, fresh out of college. Most had finished law school, some were working officials. The method of instruction was case studies—problems confronted by governments in states and localities around the U.S. Michael would work through the problems, along with his class. That part was easy—too easy.

  Michael was so ferociously smart, so sure his answers were correct, that he barely paid lip service to the notion of class discussion. Students who presented a different solution would see Michael’s head start shaking—nope, nope ... even when he tried to say something nice: “Well, you’ve almost got it. You’re close ...” At the end of his first summer session, his faculty ranking from students was third from the bottom (the two who ranked lower were not asked back).

  But Michael was learning. By his second year, the tone in his classes had changed. There was no single right answer, and Michael didn’t have to prove he knew what he was doing. In fact, he’d decided what he had to prove was ... he knew how to listen.

  He started asking questions—even when he thought he knew. He started questioning his own assumptions—everything he thought he knew. For a while, he was like a kid with a new word: you couldn’t stop him asking everyone’s opinion. In his classes, he started to preach the value of “broadening participation,” asking legislators, community leaders, labor leaders, businessmen, to help hammer out policy, which would then have the force of “consensus.”

  In fact, he was already building consensus, off hours, on Perry Street. He’d host roundtable discussions on topics of personal fascination: welfare reform, economic development, affordable housing ... this was Michael’s idea of fun. He wanted to bring himself up to speed on ideas from other states. He wanted to know what was happening in the King administration, the Carter administration. He’d sit down three or four experts, in his kitchen, and he’d quiz them:

  “Where’s the youth employment policy going? ...”

  “What are you finding out about what we need to do? ...”
>
  “Do you know what we did in Lowell, with the Labor Department?”

  He didn’t want soliloquies, didn’t want to know what they thought. He wanted to know what they knew—data, facts, statistics, studies. They didn’t have to break it down into bites for him. They could talk high-policy government-speak, and in a minute he’d start nodding. “Yeah ... yeah.” He got that. He’d move on. The excitement was his urgency, and the speed of his comprehension. But he also wanted these experts, gurus of the policy groups, to see him listening.

  He was rebuilding his base from the ground up. He wanted the liberals and good-government groups, the ones who abandoned him in ’78, to know he was different. They had to see him—and see, he had learned.

  What had he learned? Well, that it wasn’t enough to be right ... unless he got the politics right. Without the politics—that grooming and stroking he’d always disdained—he might be absolutely right ... and have no office from which to govern. What’s more, politics would not make him less correct—only more effective.

  He had learned to value effect. When he won the Governor’s chair in ’74, he thought it was a new age in the State House, and the Commonwealth. But now Ed King was taking apart his reforms, piece by piece. (They were bad for business, Eddie said. King was a business booster!) And Michael saw that by a failure of politics, of his own persona, the Age of Dukakis was without effect.

  He saw that he had failed. That was the defining fact in his new awareness. He had tried as hard as he could, worked so hard—and nevertheless. ... If Michael got back to that big corner office, he would not show the same impatience toward people who ended up, somehow, with the short end of life’s stick. He wouldn’t assume a want of will, or discipline ... not anymore.

  Two years after his loss, Michael dusted off his file cards and sent a Christmas mailing—first notice to the Commonwealth that Dukakis was on his way back. It was an odd document, Christmas greetings coupled with Dukakis’s first public broadside against the man who’d taken his job.

  “We worked hard to bring integrity and competence to state government,” Michael wrote. “But during the past two years, you and I have seen that progress slowed, stymied and reversed by the present state administration. ...” To restore confidence, competence, and integrity, “and with your continued support and encouragement, I intend to be a candidate for Governor in 1982.”

  In addition, there were messages from the Dukakis children—this from twenty-two-year-old John:

  “... My father made some unpopular decisions, and there was a lot of anger directed at him—and sometimes at us. If I felt it, I know he and Mother must have felt it a hundred times more. So I’ve thought about that—the price you pay.

  “But we’ve all grown through those experiences, and learning to understand them and deal with them brought us all very close together. I’m really proud of my father. I’m proud of both my parents. And I’m glad the campaign is on.”

  The mailing sparked an extraordinary reaction—not just political support, not just money (though it drew an amazing number of checks) ... but the personal appeal for expiation was met with an equally personal response. It was remorse for what the voters of the Commonwealth had done to Michael Dukakis.

  After the mailing, he moved fast: he had to get the politics right.

  This time, there would be no campaign-on-the-cheap. Dukakis wanted money and plenty of it. So he signed on a strange new friend—a fellow who actually loved to raise money—Bob Farmer.

  This time, Michael wouldn’t manage his own campaign. He signed on a pro—a young man who’d formed that splendid consensus around the fair-tax amendment to the state constitution—John Sasso.

  This time, he would not ignore the liberal interest groups, the neighborhood associations, big labor—even business groups. ... He went to their meetings, and told them, he had to have their help. Dukakis had made errors in his first term—he admitted that, night after night. But he wanted them to know, he had learned, he had changed, he meant to listen ... and with their help, he would start the march of progress anew.

  It was like statewide group therapy, wherein Michael presented himself to be yelled at, lectured, reminded of his failings. But he took it, and every room he left held a core of supporters—some new ... but many who had turned away from him before. There were so many people who told him, they really never meant for him to lose ... it was just ... well, by ’78, they were so pissed off, they couldn’t even bring themselves to vote!

  “I know,” Michael told them. They needn’t feel bad: “That was my fault. I blew it. I made a lotta mistakes.”

  The state’s newspapers worked out their own guilt: King had slipped by them, King had put one over. So they hammered him at every turn, never failing to mention his bodyguards, his limousines, his lobster salad ... his bumbles in the State House, his shady appointments, his rich business pals. ... Sure, Michael helped out with that. But not as much as King helped: everything he touched turned to dust.

  King had promised to cut taxes—“Taxachusetts is dead!”—but he couldn’t convince the legislature. His tax cut was stillborn.

  King had promised to cut violent crime, but crime had risen by thirty percent. The Boston papers were a daily freak show.

  In December ’80, King turned a labor tiff on the T into a full-blown crisis that ended with a strike and shutdown of all transit—at the peak of the Christmas shopping season.

  Then, in July 1981, King’s Secretary of Transportation, Barry Locke, was arrested and indicted on bribery charges ... he’d become the highest-ranking state official ever to land in jail.

  You couldn’t write a better play for Michael Dukakis ... it had a story line, surprise, suspense, a moral ... and then a clever friend of Sasso’s, Dan Payne, gave it a name:

  The Rematch.

  In the spring, before the primary, there was one televised debate. And this was Michael’s chance to exorcise the greatest failure of 1978.

  This time, in the microphone checks, it was Michael who departed from the standard “Testing, one, two, three ...” Dukakis growled into his mike:

  “Under Ed King, violent crime has increased thirty percent in Massachusetts ...”

  And that was mild compared to Michael’s tone once the show began. Here’s one of his “questions” to King:

  “Your Secretary of Transportation, Barry Locke, was convicted and jailed for stealing public funds. Your Commissioner of Insurance was a front man for the industry and had to resign after one week. Three other officials in your administration were forced to resign because they lied or were unfit for public office. The Ward Commission documented that corruption is costing each taxpayer in Massachusetts three thousand dollars, per capita, that goes directly into the pockets of corrupt public officials, and never gets spent on public services. That adds up to six billion dollars—and you say that ‘Taxachusetts is dead’? With your record of bad judgment and bad appointments, what can you say to us tonight to convince us you’ve changed, and that we can expect anything better over the next four years?”

  By the end of the question. King was white under his makeup, with his head shaking denial, confusion, and rage. All he could mumble, by way of answer, was: “I’d urge everyone listening to disregard your totally absurd, without foundation, statements ...”

  Who could disregard the spectacle of Dukakis ripping the man to shreds, under spotlights, in front of the whole state? Michael never stopped—never gave King a chance to breathe. He attacked without rest, without remorse. He had to beat Ed King—take him down ... and he did. After that debate, statewide polls showed Dukakis ahead of King by more than forty percent.

  Then John Sasso got in trouble with a tape ... this was an audiotape, a parody of a King radio ad. The ad had King’s wife telling how Ed took care of her through her battle with polio. The parody (made by a supporter of Dukakis at a radio station in the town of Ware) changed Mrs. King’s words to an anatomy of Big Ed’s sex life. It was just a joke, a private j
oke ... or so Sasso thought, when he shared it with a friend from the Globe.

  But word of the joke spread, and the King campaign (with the Herald’s help) played it for all it was worth, SEX TAPE SCANDAL, the front page screamed. King’s minions described in loving detail how Big Ed jumped out of his chair when he heard. He was gonna punch Dukakis’s lights out ... they hadda restrain him! (Actually, King and his campaign had known about the tape for weeks before the story blew.) For days, there was hardly anything else in the papers. Radio call-in shows were nonstop outrage about that slimy Dukakis ... makin’ fun of a polio victim!

  Michael called from Western Massachusetts when the story hit. “What the hell is going on back there?”

  Sasso offered to resign—for the good of the campaign—but Michael wouldn’t hear of it. “Are you crazy? ... C’mon! We’ve got a lotta work to do!” Michael had to beat Ed King—he wasn’t going to get distracted by some nonsense with tapes.

  And he was right about the work. King was climbing. With Tape-gate, Michael was losing the moral high ground—which was his entire platform. On the issues, voters mostly agreed with King—at least in spirit (who’s for taxes, crime, welfare?). Michael lost votes every time the race strayed from competence, management, cleanliness. By midsummer, King’s pollster, Ed Reilly, put the gap at only eight percent. Michael knew he could lose ... unless he took King down.

  That summer, a man named Stanley Barczak, a minor official of the Revenue Department, got arrested for taking a bribe. Barczak tried to save himself—he sang. A grand jury started looking into charges that any tax delinquency could be “settled” by payment of cash to the right parties at the Revenue Department. One of those under suspicion was a schoolfriend of King’s, John J. Coady, the Governor’s Deputy Commissioner of Revenue. In late July, King learned that his old pal was a target of the investigation. Nine days later, Coady was found dead, hanging by the neck in the attic of his home.

  The papers ran stories revealing that Barczak had been hired by Coady.