Economic Security in a World of Change: Can We Have Both?

Michael S. Dukakis

Michael S. Dukakis was born in 1933 in the Boston suburb of Brookline, the child of Greek immigrants. A graduate of Swarthmore College (’55) and Harvard Law School (’60), he also served for two years in the Army, attached mostly to the U. N. Delegation to the Military Armistice Commission in Munsan, Korea.

Dukakis began his political career as an elected Town Meeting Member for Brookline, winning a seat in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1962 and serving four terms. In 1974, he was elected governor, and in 1988, halfway through his third term, won the Democratic Party’s nomination for President.

Following his defeat by George Bush, Dukakis served out the remainder of his term as governor and retired from public office. Since June of 1991, he has been a visiting professor at Northeastern University’s Department of Political Science, and has taught in the Senior Executive Program for state and local managers at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also taught for the past three years at Florida Atlantic University.

Recently, Dukakis has concentrated on national health care reform and the lessons national policymakers can learn from state reform efforts. He has written several articles on the subject for the New England Journal of Medicine and other publications, as well as co-teaching a graduate seminar and participating in a series of public forums and an all-day conference that produced a widely-distributed Northeastern University monograph, “Insuring American Health for the Year 2000.”