Michael Dukakis

Michael Stanley Dukakis (/dᵿˈkɑːkᵻs/; born November 3, 1933) is an American politician who served as the 65th and 67th Governor of Massachusetts, from 1975 to 1979 and 1983 to 1991 respectively. He is the longest-serving Governor in Massachusetts history and only the second Greek American Governor in U.S. history, after Spiro Agnew. In 1988, he was the Democratic nominee for President, but lost to the Republican candidate, Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Early life and education

Dukakis was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father Panos (1896–1979) was a Greek immigrant from Adramyttion (Edremit), in Turkey, which was then the Ottoman Empire, who settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1912, and graduated from Harvard Medical School twelve years later, subsequently working as an obstetrician. Dukakis' mother Euterpe (née Boukis; 1903–2003) was a Greek-Aromanian immigrant from Larissa, in Thessaly, northern Greece; she and her family emigrated to Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1913.