Kitty Dukakis, who battled addiction and depression, advocated for people without homes or nations, and championed the presidential campaign of her husband, Michael, has died. She was 88 and died Friday night of dementia complications at her home in Brookline, Massachusetts, her family said. A statement said she "lived a full life fighting to make the world a better place and sharing her vulnerabilities to help others face theirs," the New York Times reports. Dukakis was criticized as being overbearing in her advocacy for causes, including her husband's career. "Have you ever heard the words assertive or aggressive used to describe the male spouse of a candidate?" she once asked the Los Angeles Times. "I think there's a real double standard when it comes to strong, assertive women."
Kitty Dukakis described herself as "fiercely proud" of her Jewish heritage; her husband was Greek Orthodox. She was involved in the creation of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. As first lady of Massachusetts during her husband's terms as governor, Kitty Dukakis had an office in the statehouse for her advocacy campaigns. She was a modern dance instructor, a social worker, and a patron of the arts, as well. She also was a chain smoker who preferred to travel first class and favored designer clothes, contrasts to her husband's somewhat stiff persona in public, per the Washington Post.
A few months after Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis lost the presidential election to Vice President George HW Bush in 1988, his wife began a 60-day treatment program for alcoholism. Months later, she was hospitalized after relapsing and drinking rubbing alcohol, per the AP. She had revealed earlier in the campaign that she'd overcome a long addiction to amphetamines that began with diet pills at age 19. She credited electroconvulsive therapy with helping her with yearslong depression and became an advocate for the treatment, which she wrote "opened a new reality for me."
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Beginning in the late 1970s, Dukakis worked to resettle Vietnamese, Laotian, and Afghan refugees in the US. On a trip to the Thai-Cambodian border in 1985, she once begged a Thai colonel on her knees to be allowed into a refugee camp. When he at last relented, she told the Boston Globe, Dukakis found a Cambodian orphan inside who had survived Khmer Rouge rule and whose only remaining relative lived near Boston. She brought him back to Massachusetts, where he eventually went to high school and college. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey called Dukakis "a force for good in public life and behind the scenes," per the AP, saying she was a leader in ensuring that the Holocaust is not forgotten and an advocate for children, women, and refugees. Her survivors include her husband. (More obituary stories.)
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