Brookline, Massachusetts. Kitty Dukakis, the wife of former Governor of Massachusetts and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who talked openly about his struggles with depression and addiction, has died. She was 88 years old.
Dukakis died Friday night surrounded by his family, said his son, John Dukakis, Saturday by phone. She fought to improve the world, “share their vulnerabilities to help others face their own,” said her family in a statement.
“She was loving, fighter and fun, and had a great sensitivity to people in all areas of life,” said the family. “She and our father, Michael Dukakis, shared an enviable association for more than 60 years and loved them deeply.”
Dukakis won high grades as a political activist during her husband’s presidential efforts in 1988, pursued tirelessly for him. He was called a key influence on his decision to seek the presidency.
She even thought about the initial question of an 1988 presidential debate, when her husband was asked: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis was raped and killed, would it favor an irrevocable death penalty for the murderer?” Dukakis said he wouldn’t, and his response without emotions was widely criticized.
Previously in the campaign, in 1987, Dukakis revealed that he had exceeded a 26 -year -old addiction to amphetamines five years before after receiving treatment. She said she started taking diet pills at age 19.
Her husband caused anti -drug efforts to be an important problem and became prominent in the effort to educate young people against the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse.
But a few months after Michael Dukakis lost the elections to Vice President George Hw Bush, Kitty Dukakis entered a 60 -day treatment program for alcoholism. Several months later he suffered a relapse and was hospitalized after drinking alcohol.
In his 1990 autobiography, “now you know,” he blamed his mother for much of his alcohol addiction and drugs and a long history of low self -esteem. In 2006, he wrote another book, “Shock”, which proves electroconvulsive therapy that began in 2001 for relieving the depression he had suffered for years. The treatment, he wrote, “opened a new reality for me.”
The current governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, called Dukakis “a force for good in public life and behind the scene”, a leader in the effort to ensure that the holocaust never forgets and a defender of children, women and refugees.
“She spoke with courage about her struggles with substance consumption disorder and mental health, which serves as an inspiration for all to wear out stigma and seek help,” Healey said in a statement.
Dukakis used his personal pain to help others, Massachusetts Attorney, Andrea Joy Campbell on Saturday, in a statement on social networks.
“His legacy will live in the policies that helped to shape the people he inspired to tell his own truths,” Campbell said.
Dukakis and his future husband met while attending high school in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was boring and frugal; She was dramatic and elegant. He is Orthodox Greek; She was Jewish.
Dukakis, who divorced and had a 3 -year -old son, married Dukakis in 1963, and had two children, Andrea and Kara.
Dukakis, whose late father, Harry Ellis Dickson, was associate director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, won titles in modern dance and transmission.
After the presidential elections, in 1989, Bush appointed her to be a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
He previously served in the president’s commission on the Holocaust in 1979 and on the Board of Directors of the refugee policy group. He has also been a member of the task force on Cambodian children.
At the end of the 1990s, Dukakis and her husband divided her time between Massachusetts and California, where she was a social worker and he was a professor during part of the year at the University of California, Los Angeles.
