Michael Dukakis

Michael Dukakis, three-term governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who served longer in that post than any other person in history, is best remembered in history as the 1988 Democratic candidate for President in an election in which Ronald Reagan's vice president, George Bush, effectively used "Swift Boat" tactics to undermine Dukakis' candidacy. Born Michael Stanley Dukakis on November 3, 1933 to Greek-immigrant parents in Brookline, Massachusetts (the birthplace of both John F. Kennedy and his 1988 Presidential opponent Bush). Dukakis' father was a Harvard-educated physician and his mother was a Massachusetts schoolteacher. She worked to eliminate first her native Greek accent and then her New England accent to remove imperfections from her speech pattern that might hinder her teaching ability. In a time and place where non-Anglo-Saxon ethnicity was looked down upon (even that of the Irish Americans who emigrated to the U.S. with the ability to speak English and a knowledge o