The Michael Dukakis Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan | Friday, April 1st 2005
Both of your parents immigrated to the United States
from Greece. Boston Celtics legends Red Auerbach and
Bob Cousy have similar stories to tell. Cousy, for
example, was born to French immigrants who settled in
the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York. He spoke
French before English. What was it like for your
parents upon arriving in this great land of opportunity?
MICHAEL DUKAKIS
My parent’s names were Panos and Euterpe – my father was
fifteen when his family immigrated from Greece and my
mother was nine, so they were among that first wave of
Greek immigrants to make their way to the United
States. Both of them immigrated to mill towns – my
father to Lowell and my mother to Haverhill. Lowell was
a textile town and Haverhill was famous for being a shoe
town. My father came to the United States in 1912
without speaking a word of English, but eight years
later he was the first Greek to enter the Harvard
Medical School. My mother went to Bates College and
became a teacher. She campaigned tirelessly with me
when I ran for president in 1988, which is remarkable
because she was in her eighties at the time. She was a
truly incredible woman.
We lived in a middleclass neighborhood in Brookline,
where we had a basketball hoop at the end of our
driveway. During the winter months we’d shovel the snow
and shoot baskets – I wasn’t a tremendous athlete and
don’t want to suggest that, but I enjoyed playing a
number of sports, basketball included. Red Auerbach and
Bob Cousy are such a rich part of the sports landscape
in Boston – what they’ve done for the city is just
tremendous, and I admire both of them very much. I
didn’t realize all of that about Cousy. He was a legend
at Holy Cross and then went on to become an even bigger
legend with the Celtics. Just a beautiful person.
Brookline High School has turned out a number of famous
personalities, including talk-show host Conan O’Brien,
Boston Red Sox GM Theo Epstein, and New England Patriots
owner Robert Kraft. Former Celtic Rick Weitzman is also
a graduate of Brookline, as is a certain former
presidential candidate. Please take me back to your
time at Brookline.
MICHAEL DUKAKIS
What can I say? The 50s in this country were terrible
in so many ways – we were a segregated nation with
tremendous problems in the areas of racism, bigotry and
anti-Semitism. You go further back to when my dad
finished high school and you see a fiercely racist
society, and I’m not just talking about the southern
states. It was right here in Brookline. It was not an
easy time.
I was very interested in politics by the time I started
high school, and had been from a very early age. I’ve
often been asked about the first political office that I
ever held, and I like to say that it was as president of
my third grade class [laughs]. But my interest was
always there from as far back as I could remember, and I
got more involved as I moved through high school at
Brookline and then on into college at Swarthmore. John
F. Kennedy had a huge influence on me – he was a very
prominent figure when I returned from serving in the US
Army, and what was there not to like? He was
intelligent and attractive, and he had this incredible
charisma that all great leaders possess. In 1960, I ran
for my first political office, which was a minor
position as a Brookline Town Meeting Member. That began
the process of daring to reach higher in my political
career, so it’s safe to say that the foundation for
every office I held was really laid in Brookline.
You mentioned that Conan O’Brien went to school at
Brookline, and I’ll take you back even further than
that. David Suskind went to school there – I don’t know
if you remember him, but Suskind was one of the early
talk-show hosts who pioneered the open-ended
conversation shows that you see on cable television
today. Weitzman played for the Celtics in the late
sixties, at the end of the Russell Dynasty, but I recall
him only playing part of one season. He graduated from
college right here at Northeastern.
You were a highly regarded basketball player at
Brookline. Did you follow those great Holy Cross teams
of that era, especially the ones that featured Bob
Cousy?
MICHAEL DUKAKIS
Me – highly regarded? You can certainly say that I
played freshman basketball, but I’m not going to take
credit for much more than that [laughs]. Sports were
very important to me – basketball, cross country running, tennis – and
it’s a component that I still feel is critical for our
youth today. I’m a firm believer in both a sound mind
and a sound body, and I think we need our youth spending
more time on the playing fields and less time in front
of the television. Get out and get active – that’s the
message that needs to be sent to our young people.
Of course I followed those great teams from Holy Cross –
they won both the NIT and NCAA championships, and back
then the NIT was the premiere basketball tournament in
the country. The Crusaders had a Greek named George
Kaftan on that 1946-47 national champion, and that was
huge for me in terms of having a prominent Greek athlete
as a role model. Kaftan would go on to play a couple of
seasons with the Celtics, by the way, right before Cousy
joined the team.
Cousy didn’t play a prominent role at Holy Cross early
on, but he was one of the greatest college players in
the game by the time he graduated. He was an
All-America player as a senior, and then went on to
become the legendary playmaker for the Celtics. He
revolutionized the game. Basketball before Cousy was
almost a plodding sport, with the two-handed set shot as
the main scoring weapon and with a lot of standing
around on offense. Cousy changed that. The game had
never seen a player like him. He pushed the ball up the
court and threw incredible passes to his teammates, and
early on he earned the reputation of being a hotdog –
that’s how much different his game was from everybody
else’s at the time. Even today he remains one of the
greatest players of all time.
Walter Brown founded the Boston Celtics in 1946. His
father, George V. Brown, was the originator of the
Boston Marathon. As a senior at Brookline, you finished
57th in the Boston Marathon, an incredible feat for
someone that age. What was your training regimen like
in preparing for this race, and what was it like to
finish so high in the rankings?
MICHAEL DUKAKIS
I was a cross-country runner in high school, and during
my senior year I decided to run the Boston Marathon. My
friend and fellow cross-country teammate Reid Wiseman
ran it with me. We had a record field of three-hundred
for that race in 1951. Three hundred! It has grown
considerably since then, both in terms of the numbers of
runners and the exposure that it generates, but I’m sure
it hasn’t gotten any easier on the feet [laughs].
There were nine weeks between the end of basketball
season and Patriot’s Day – race day – so that’s when we
really did our training. Here is another sign of the
times: Since there were no shoes made for running on
asphalt at the time, I ran the race in a new pair of
Keds sneakers. The twenty-mile mark was when the pain
and the doubt really set in. I had the usual problems
runners face on the Newton hills. Fortunately,
virtually the entire town of Brookline was out waiting
for both me and Reid as we ran through Brookline. That
was a big moment for us.
I finished the race in three hours, thirty-one minutes,
and in fifty-seventh place! That was the good news:
The bad news was that, as captain of the Brookline High
tennis team, I had to be ready to play a match the very
next day. I remember waking up the next morning at 7AM,
knowing that there was a match scheduled for two hours
later, and being unable to do anything but limp to the
bathroom. My thighs were killing me. It was so hard to
move. I remember my mother calling from me from
downstairs, and I just limped to the top of the stairs
and stood there for the longest time. I couldn’t go
down, that’s how bad my thighs were hurting. So I sat
on the top step and went down by the seat of my pants
[laughs].
Somehow I was able to make to the match by 9AM, but I
could barely serve and come to the net. It was
torture! Brookline won 8-1 that day, and you can
probably figure out who was responsible for the lone
blemish on an otherwise spotless match record.
I’m sure both Walter Brown and his father would be
surprised by how big the Boston Marathon has become.
Walter Brown was a great human being who really cared
about people, and I think every player who ever played
for him will tell you the same thing. The Boston
Celtics really struggled financially in the beginning,
and Walter lost money trying to keep the franchise
afloat. He would loan money to his players, help them
find jobs in the off-season…in short, he’d do just about
anything to realize his dream of a sound, successful
professional basketball league. Cousy was the true
turning point. His arrival guaranteed that the team
would pack the Boston Garden, and that’s exactly what
happened. It was a key moment for the team, and for
Walter Brown.
At Swarthmore College in the 1950s, you led a fight
against a local barber who refused to cut the hair of
black students. Celtic great Bill Russell was no
stranger to racial prejudice and stereotypes. He once
said: “What's more important than who's going to be the
first black sports manager is who's going to be the
first black sports editor of the New York Times.”
Please tell me about the barber shop you set up while at
Swarthmore, and about the civil rights landscape that
Russell faced as a Boston rookie in 1957.
MICHAEL DUKAKIS
It’s hard to describe this country in the middle of the
Cold War. Blacks were forced to sit in the back of the
bus and couldn't eat at restaurants in many parts of the
country. It
was just brutal. Even the nation's capital was
legally segregated.
There were three barbershops in Swarthmore at the time
and all of them refused to cut the black students’
hair. There were only a handful of African Americans
attending Swarthmore in the late forties and early
fifties; most of the blacks on campus were Nigerians who
needed a haircut like anybody else. So I decided to
take a stand, although I didn’t actually open a barber
shop. I had a chair and some scissors on the third
floor of Wharton D, and it wasn’t long before my
personal protest against segregation was turning a
profit. My victims were paying me sixty-five cents a
cut, which kept me in lunch money. I didn’t have a
license, though, so don’t mention this to the state
barber commission [laughs].
That’s a very good quote by Russell, by the way. He is
a very complicated man, and I think a lot of that
complexity comes from the discrimination that he faced
as an African-American. He has a reputation for being
difficult, but I think you should walk in his shoes
before you judge him so quickly. Remember, Bill Russell
played professional basketball in Boston, at a time when
the city was not known as the most racially tolerant
place to be. He carried himself with a lot of pride,
and rightfully so; I think he wanted to be recognized as
a person first and not solely as a black athlete. He
knew that his fame and stature gave him a different
level of treatment compared to ordinary African
Americans of the day, and I think this bothered him. If
he weren’t a famous basketball player, then he would
have been sitting in the back of the bus, or in the back
of the restaurant, or whatever. I think these were some
of the things that made him appear – to the average
white fan, at least – as an angry person. He is just an
incredible person.
Malcolm Graham played two seasons with the Boston
Celtics, winning NBA titles as a backup point guard in
1968 and 1969. Mr. Graham then gave up basketball to
pursue his law degree, and ultimately became a judge.
As governor in 1986 you promoted him to the Superior
Court. Please tell me a little about Judge Graham.
MICHAEL DUKAKIS
Mal Graham was a very good basketball player, and the
Celtics had high hopes that he would become the
successor to KC Jones in the backcourt. But he had to
give up on his dream of playing professional
basketball. He had a condition (sarcoid) that causes
fatigue in the body. He took a year off to see if his
condition would improve, and then retired from
basketball. That's when he decided to pursue a law
degree.
Mal is a very solid guy, and a very good lawyer. I
couldn’t be more proud of him for what he has achieved
in his life. He deserves the best.
Continue to Page 4
- Return to Previous Page
|
