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Dukakis began his political career as an elected Town Meeting Member in
the town of Brookline. He was elected chairman of his town’s Democratic
organization in 1960 and won a seat in the Massachusetts legislature in
1962. He served four terms as a legislator, winning re-election by an
increasing margin each time he ran.
In 1970 he was the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s nominee for
Lieutenant-Governor and the running mate of Boston Mayor Kevin White
in that year’s gubernatorial race which they lost to Republicans Frank
Sargeant and Donald Dwight. Dukakis won his party’s nomination for
governor in 1974 and beat Sargeant decisively in November of that year.
Dukakis inherited a record deficit and record high unemployment and is
generally credited with digging Massachusetts out of one of its worst
financial and economic crises in history. But the effort took its toll, and he
was defeated in the Democratic Primary in 1978 by Edward King.
Dukakis came back 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 in the National Governors Association
voted him the most effective governor in the Nation.
In 1988 Dukakis became the first Greek-American to be nominated for the
presidency. He emerged from a strong Democratic field that included
Senators Al Gore, Gary Hart and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Dukakis won the
Democratic nomination but was defeated by George H.W. Bush. Soon
thereafter, he announced that he would not be a candidate for re-election as
governor and served his final two years as governor at a time of increasing
financial and economic distress in Massachusetts and the Northeast.
 After leaving office in January 1991, Dukakis was a visiting professor
at the University of Hawaii in the political science department and at
the 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 the reform of the nation’s health care system.
Since then, there has been increasing public interest in Hawaii’s
first-in-the nation universal health insurance system and the lessons
that can be learned from it as the nation debates the future of health
care in America.
Dukakis has taught in the senior executive program for State and Local
managers at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University. He has also taught at Florida Atlantic University.
His research has focused on national health care policy reform and the
lessons that national policy makers can learn from state reform efforts.
He has authored articles on the subject for the Journal of American
Health Policy, the Yale Law and Policy Review, the New England
Journal of Medicine, and Compensation and Benefits Management.
In addition, he co-taught with Professor Rochefort a graduate seminar in
national health policy reform that included a series of public forums
and an all-day conference that culminated in the publication of
Insuring American Health for the Year 2000, a Northeastern
University publication that has been distributed widely to health policy
makers, legislators and others.
Today, Dukakis spends his time teaching, spending one semester a
year at Northeastern University in Massachusetts and the other at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
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