When I think about Kitty Dukakis, I think about a woman who was smart and independent, strong yet vulnerable, charming and ambitious, and blunt and unscripted — qualities that, in the context of a fierce presidential campaign, are quickly judged as assets or liabilities.
As anyone who watched them together could see, former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis adored his wife, who died last week at age 88. But what made Kitty Dukakis the special and complex person she was also put her under great pressure during the 1988 White House race, when Dukakis ran against Republican George H.W. Bush and a vicious attack team led by Lee Atwater.
I was one of many political reporters from Massachusetts who covered Dukakis, first as governor and then as a presidential candidate. Where he is cerebral, disciplined, and famously frugal, his wife brought emotion and a human touch, including human frailties, to the campaign trail. She warmed him up and loosened him up. But my dispatches from that long ago campaign trail also highlight the tension between an outspoken woman and her personal struggles and the demands that are put on a candidate’s spouse to be the perfect surrogate.
I was there in July 1987 when Kitty Dukakis revealed at a carefully choreographed news conference that she was treated for a dependency on prescribed diet pills in the midst of her husband’s 1982 gubernatorial reelection campaign, while the public was told she was suffering a bout with hepatitis.
As I wrote at the time, “Both the governor and his wife insisted that her decision to reveal the information was not prompted by any concerns that it would become public during the course of Dukakis’ bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.” But everyone understood the mission was to put out this sensitive news in the most positive way, before someone else did it less kindly.
At one early campaign stop in Iowa, she talked about how she would continue the job she then had at Harvard’s Kennedy School while Dukakis campaigned for president. She also suggested she would like to hold an outside job if Dukakis won the White House, telling voters, “I’ll be darned if I’m going to let” her professional identity “go by the wayside.” Afterward, she walked that back a bit, saying she would only work part time. Even that was probably edgy for the era, given that Jill Biden was the first wife of a president or vice president to hold a paying job during her husband’s tenure.
In a story from Minneapolis in January 1988, I wrote that Dukakis volunteers “quietly discussed how much improved” Kitty Dukakis was as a campaign surrogate. Maybe that’s because phrases like “Michael believes” and “Michael thinks” were now laced through her remarks.
At a campaign stop in April 1988, at a senior center in Brooklyn, Kitty Dukakis — who was Jewish — sprinkled her talk with Yiddish expressions and also talked seriously about Middle East politics. She also said that if, as president, her husband undertook a policy for that region that she opposed, she would discuss it with him. “We’re a normal couple who agree most of the time and share the same values,” she said. “But we settle our disagreements together and I do accept that he’s the ultimate decision-maker.”
Ultimately, Kitty was Kitty. As I reported in July 1988, just before Michael Dukakis accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in Atlanta: “Finished with one interview, she is smoking a cigarette before the next. No pictures until she’s done, she tells the photographer. She is still trying to prevent confirmation of the habit her husband hates.”
In the post-convention whirlwind, Kitty Dukakis was a passionate advocate for her husband — and, behind the scenes, for not bowing to the brutal Bush campaign assault on his patriotism, integrity, and liberal principles.
In an interview given at their Brookline home shortly after Dukakis lost to Bush, she said that she had advised him to fight back hard and early, but that he had followed his own instincts. “Clearly, the negativism was difficult and impacted on the campaign,” she said. “I think the most difficult part of all that was they were being very effective in all their distortions.”
One tactic used against him was also used against her. For example, she recalled how a false rumor that she had once burned an American flag was reported on the national news.
In that interview, she also said she was looking forward to a return to a normal life. Yet this was a woman who described her husband’s earlier gubernatorial loss as “a public death.” Imagine how hard it must have been for her after his loss on the national stage.
In her 1990 memoir “Now You Know,” Kitty Dukakis bravely told the full story of her struggle with alcoholism and depression. During the presidential campaign, she wrote, she became “an episodic binge drinker” dealing with “a gaping emptiness I could not endure.”
In light of that gaping emptiness, how hard it also must have been to face the judgment that goes with being a candidate’s spouse — and how sad if she did not know her true value in that endeavor.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.