Kitty Dukakis, the previous first girl of Massachusetts who was an outspoken advocate for folks with psychological sickness and habit within the face of her personal experiences with these illnesses, has died.
Her son, John Dukakis, advised WBUR she died peacefully Friday night time with household at her facet. She was 88 years outdated.
The spouse of former governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, Kitty was recalled by family and friends members as somebody who was drawn to those that had been struggling, labored tirelessly to assist them, and superior each coverage and consciousness on social points and human rights.
However she could also be most remembered for going public about her battles with melancholy and habit in an period when most public figures wouldn’t dare — particularly if their partner was operating for president.
Michael Dukakis launched his run for the White Home in 1987. A number of months later, Kitty revealed publicly that she’d been handled 5 years earlier for a decades-long habit to weight loss supplements.
“I knew it was an issue, as a result of I gave these tablets credit score for all the things optimistic that occurred to me and thought that I couldn’t exist with out them,” she mentioned on WGBH’s Ten O’Clock Information the identical day.
Getting her story out earlier than the Republicans may need performed so proved to be a wise transfer; after a flurry of headlines, the information light and didn’t appear to hamper Kitty or her fast-paced calendar as campaigner and first girl of Massachusetts.
Steeped within the arts
Kitty Dukakis was raised within the arts, not politics. She was born Katharine Dickson in Cambridge. Her father, Harry Ellis Dickson, was an affiliate conductor of the Boston Pops and a violinist within the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In 1990, Kitty advised a ladies’s Democratic group in Washington, D.C. about her father’s affect.
“It was due to dad that our home was a really particular place,” she mentioned. “He introduced his world house with him. And for a few years, Jinny and I — my sister and I — thought that each household had a string quartet enjoying Vivaldi of their front room on Sunday mornings.”
Kitty studied fashionable dance and taught it at Lesley School and the Brookline Arts Heart. She finally earned levels in training, broadcasting and social work.
In 1961, she was arrange on a date with Michael Dukakis. They’d each gone to Brookline Excessive Faculty, the place he was a star pupil and athlete. Michael was cerebral, safe and a mannequin of rectitude. Kitty was whip-smart, heat and tempestuous.
They received married in 1963. One in every of their two daughters, Andrea Dukakis, mentioned they shared the identical values — together with their perception in equality.
“They used to knock on doorways of residences and kind of pose as individuals who wished to hire. This was an house that had been denied to somebody of shade,” she mentioned. “And in order that was a part of their activism of attempting to be sure that folks of shade had been handled equally to white folks.”
Michael Dukakis served three phrases as governor, beginning in 1975. Kitty had an workplace on the State Home — and he or she had her husband’s ear.
“There’s story after story after story … about how she would, if she did not agree with one thing her husband was doing, she’d let him know and he or she’d let all of us know. And he or she was often proper,” mentioned Phil Johnston, who served as well being and human companies secretary within the Dukakis administration and have become associates with Kitty. “They’d an excellent marriage … And when she cared about one thing, he cared about it.”
A robust voice
Associates mentioned Kitty Dukakis knew her voice might make a distinction on a spread of points.
“Kitty instinctively understood the facility that was afforded her by her place as the primary girl of Massachusetts,” mentioned Anne Hawley, who labored on cultural causes with Kitty beginning within the late Seventies and later turned the longtime director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “She actually knew how you can use [that power], and he or she did use it for different folks’s profit, not for herself.”
Amongst those that benefited had been folks experiencing homelessness. Kitty co-chaired the governor’s advisory committee on the homeless beginning in her husband’s second time period. Her activism helped to dramatically enhance the variety of state-funded homeless shelters. She visited the amenities and received to know many shelter company nicely, in keeping with Johnston.
Happy with her Jewish heritage, she was obsessed with elevating consciousness surrounding the Holocaust. She was appointed by a number of U.S. presidents to serve on a nationwide Holocaust fee and was a founding member of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. She pushed to get classes on the Holocaust taught in colleges.
Her exploration of the historical past of genocide and the Holocaust led Kitty to take up the plight of refugees. She was particularly centered on refugees from the Vietnam Battle and Cambodian genocide, and he or she labored to carry a lot of them to the U.S.
“Lots of of 1000’s of Cambodians — typically kids who barely managed to outlive — are actually in refugee camps,” she advised an viewers in Iowa in 1987. “They aren’t statistics or mere pictures on the nightly information. They’re households. They usually want our assist.”
A type of children within the Cambodian camps was Pich Hout. He was born in Cambodia and is now a doctor assistant in Massachusetts.
Hout misplaced most of his household to the Khmer Rouge regime of dictator Pol Pot within the late Seventies. His one surviving sister ended up in Massachusetts, sponsored by a household right here. She wrote a letter in 1984 asking Kitty Dukakis to assist rescue her brother from the camp the place he was residing.
Early in 1985, Kitty traveled to Thailand and crossed the border into Cambodia, an image of Hout in hand. He remembers the day she arrived at his camp, escorted by armed troopers. He solely knew she was an vital particular person.
“She kneeled down and talked to me on the stage of my sight, you recognize? She’s very calm and really, like, courageous,” Hout mentioned. “She grabbed my fingers tight. She by no means let go when she noticed me, till she had to return within the automobile and drove again out of the border.”
One month later, Kitty had Hout flown to Massachusetts. She and the governor greeted him at Logan Airport, as did his sister.
The 2 saved in contact and visited one another over time, Hout mentioned, including that he considered Kitty as a mom determine.
“With out her, you recognize, I would not be sitting right here in the present day,” he mentioned.
Darkish years
Kitty Dukakis modified lives whilst she desperately wanted assist.
Johnston, who was a state lawmaker earlier than he joined the Dukakis cupboard, mentioned Kitty reached out to folks on Beacon Hill who had been coping with alcohol habit and received them into restoration applications.
“I might discover out by members, colleagues of mine, within the legislature [who would] say, ‘Effectively, you recognize who saved me was Kitty Dukakis,’ ” Johnston recalled.
Kitty saved her personal chemical dependency nicely hidden for a time.
In 1988, Michael Dukakis gained the Democratic nomination for president. And Kitty campaigned arduous. She thrived on the continuous schedule of speeches and fundraisers. Later, she mentioned she’d managed to maintain her ingesting to 1 vodka a day — however that she appeared ahead to that drink all day.
Then, on Election Day, the underside fell out. Michael Dukakis misplaced to George H.W. Bush. After his defeat, Kitty spiraled down into melancholy and ingesting.
“It was fairly devastating, a loss like that, after such intensive involvement for each Michael and myself and for our kids,” she advised NPR in 2017. “It was tough and affected me psychologically so much.”
One yr after the election, she ingested some rubbing alcohol at house. She was hospitalized. The incident made headlines.
Quickly after, Kitty printed a memoir referred to as “Now You Know,” by which she defined that she used alcohol to numb the ache of her melancholy. When she couldn’t discover liquor in the home, she typically appeared for merchandise with alcohol in them.
She spoke across the nation about her e-book and her struggles with habit and melancholy.
“As all of you recognize, I am a drug addict and an alcoholic,” Kitty mentioned on the 1990 ladies’s Democratic membership assembly. “Alcohol and drug habit strike men and women with out regard for his or her intercourse, and but our society nonetheless attaches a particular stigma to the feminine alcoholic or drug addict.”
She cycled out and in of melancholy and therapy for greater than a decade. Michael Dukakis described his spouse’s decline this manner:
“Right here was this stunning, brainy spouse of mine. And but each eight or 9 months, she’d begin happening — [she’d] undergo three or 4 brutal months,” he mentioned within the 2017 NPR interview. “And to have this taking place over and time and again was devastating for her and irritating for the remainder of us.”
Remedy and turnaround
Lastly, in 2001, Kitty discovered a therapy that eased her melancholy: electroconvulsive remedy, or ECT. The process delivers electrical energy to the mind to induce a seizure. It will possibly alleviate melancholy in folks for whom different therapies don’t work. It’s additionally identified to trigger some reminiscence loss.
The process was controversial on the time. Many individuals thought it was barbaric. However Kitty turned an evangelist for it. She wrote a e-book with journalist Larry Tye, referred to as “Shock: The Therapeutic Energy of Electroconvulsive Remedy.”
For years, Tye mentioned, folks emailed him and Kitty to share how grateful they had been that after studying the e-book, they’d lastly taken their docs’ recommendation to attempt ECT — and the therapy had labored for them, too.
“I would get the emails. I might be floored by them,” Tye mentioned. “I might ahead them to [Kitty], and he or she would insist on getting in contact with all people who had emailed to attempt to assist them.”
Kitty even let the CBS Information program 60 Minutes document and present considered one of her ECT classes.
Her household by no means tried to dissuade her from being so open about her psychological well being points, in keeping with her son John.
“Speaking my mom out of most something was typically a idiot’s errand,” he mentioned. “And, you recognize, ECT — my dad and mom really feel very strongly about — saved my mom’s life. So the concept of form of sharing that message extra broadly, there was by no means any query about it.”
Andrea Dukakis mentioned she’s pleased with her mom.
“All of us have secrets and techniques and issues that we’re uncomfortable about,” she mentioned. “And I believe she actually wished to assist different folks get higher.”
In recent times, Kitty even ran a help group in her Brookline front room, with husband Michael by her facet, for folks coping with melancholy and present process ECT or contemplating it.
Arts chief Anne Hawley received help from Kitty, too, and the 2 turned shut associates. Early on of their realizing one another, Hawley was combating melancholy herself, she mentioned. The primary girl helped her cope.
“She had a manner of turning demons into potentialities for others,” Hawley mentioned. “It is simply extraordinary.”
