The Big Blow of Defeat :...

BOSTON —  If humor is therapy, Michael Dukakis shows signs of recovery. On a chilly morning shortly after the Nov. 3 elections, he’s doing something jarringly out of character, even courageous. He’s trying to crack jokes.

“I’m glad you asked me to talk about the presidential race,” he tells those attending a Harvard University seminar on U.S.-Japanese relations. “But seriously, folks, if I knew anything about the White House, I sure as hell wouldn’t be up here today.”

There’s a smattering of laughter, and the man who had hoped to be the 41st President of the United States plows on: “You’re lucky I didn’t come here in a tank,” he says, joking about his most disastrous TV outing during the 1988 campaign. “But at least I didn’t throw up on the prime minister of Japan.”

It’s not exactly golden material, and Dukakis the Comic might be booked indefinitely at Catch a Falling Star. But this is a friendly audience, and he eventually wins applause for a thoughtful address on Pacific Rim issues. Jokes stuffed back in his pocket, he greets the crowd and pumps hands like a pro.

After shunning the spotlight for several years, the tough little guy in wingtip shoes is back. Now a political science teacher, Dukakis has begun making public appearances and is slowly returning from the dead. He’s determined to erase the stigma of his humiliating 1988 loss to George Bush, yet he knows it won’t be easy. The television images of Dukakis as a distant, humorless man are deeply entrenched, and America is not kind to losers.

“Send a message to Michael,” hooted Bush at the GOP convention in Houston four years ago, and voters took up the cry. Rejecting the former Massachusetts governor as an icy technocrat, they propelled him into a nose-dive that few U.S. politicians have experienced to such a public degree.

“We’ve looked at some very tough times, no doubt,” says Dukakis. “And for us it didn’t stop with the election. It was one thing after another.”

Two years after his defeat, Dukakis’ poll ratings plummeted along with the economy, and he decided not to seek reelection as governor. At the same time, his wife, Kitty, was hospitalized for alcohol dependency. Much of her trouble, she said, was related to the stress of her husband’s losing campaign.

Shunned by Democratic Party leaders, Dukakis found himself unemployed and with no clear vision for the future. In one sense, it was a replay: The Duke, a Harvard-educated lawyer, had lost the governorship in 1978 but recaptured the job in 1988. He viewed himself as the Comeback Kid long before Bill Clinton appropriated the term, and had assumed that the worst was behind him.

As 1990 dawned, Dukakis wrestled with growing anxiety. His children were still smarting from the defeat, his elderly mother, Euterpe, was outspoken in her anger at the GOP campaign, and his phone wasn’t ringing off the hook with job offers. Briefly, Dukakis taught government at universities in Florida and Hawaii before returning home to Brookline, Mass., and a brand-new attitude.

“We came back rarin’ to go,” he says. “We let time pass, and the wounds began to heal. You reach a point where you just get on with your life.”

These days, the candidate who once held a 17-point lead over Bush grades papers in a small third-floor office at Northeastern University near Boston. Drivers once whisked him to campaign dinners, but now he walks two miles to work and makes his way through the cafeteria lunch line like everyone else.

“This is a guy who always prided himself on his austerity, so I don’t think these changes rattle him all that much,” says Richard Ben Cramer, author of “What It Takes,” an epic retelling of the 1988 race.

“But for a lot of voters, it began to wear thin. The average-guy routine works only so much, and then people begin to want something more. He didn’t have it.”

Dukakis remains the butt of political jokes and is a sour memory for millions of supporters. Yet the once-heralded Democratic front-runner says he has made peace with the past and is happy with his new life. He feels vindicated by Bush’s loss--not out of spite, but because of a grim collegiality that only losers know. When it comes to misery, Dukakis is no longer alone.

“You hear all these stories about Bush being depressed,” he says, sitting behind his office desk. “But what else do you expect him to be? Here’s a guy who’s devoted his entire life to public service. I might not agree with him. You might not agree with him. But he poured himself into his job on a daily basis and experienced a major rejection. Why shouldn’t he be unhappy?”

Warming to the topic, Dukakis offers Bush advice on how to recover, urging him to relax for three or four months before plunging back into the workaday world. The ex-President should ultimately focus on one or two public projects, he suggests, resisting offers to become a commentator or university leader.

Given what he’s been through, Dukakis might just as well be talking about himself. He hopes that historians will be kinder to him than late-night comics, but realizes that such a rehabilitation could take years.

“I’ve been called everything,” he says calmly. “Stiff. Undemonstrative. Unemotional. Humorless. Nobody saw the real me. They just know I lost.”

Dukakis, 58, admits that he has no one to blame but himself.

“We screwed up,” he says with a shrug. “And I’ve had to accept that.”

Looking back, Dukakis admits that his campaign did not properly respond to Bush’s daily barrage of attack ads. There was no central theme to connect with voters, he adds, and Americans never saw him in a relaxed setting, as they saw candidates this year on television talk shows like Larry King’s.

“I don’t rerun the mistakes we made in my mind, over and over,” he says. “I knew then that we were in deep trouble, even though we were trying to do the very best that we could, like Bush was this year. I mean, he gave it everything he had, and even then it still wasn’t enough.”

For a man who was beaten up so badly by the GOP, Dukakis’ generosity toward Bush is surprising. But it seems genuine, largely because the former governor insists that he and his GOP rival were victimized by superficial media coverage.

In one of Dukakis’ most embarrassing moments, for example, he was asked in a television debate whether his opposition to the death penalty would change if his wife were raped and murdered. He gave a cold, rambling answer that showed no emotion and is believed to have alienated millions of viewers.

Dukakis admits he should have given a different answer but doesn’t believe his entire campaign should have been pilloried over that one question.

Four years later, Bush had an equally traumatic moment: Asked in a TV debate how America’s declining economy had affected him, his answer was unfocused and seemed out of touch with ordinary Americans. The media had a field day and replayed the snippet endlessly on news broadcasts.

“I think the emphasis on Bush’s response was unfair,” says Dukakis. “The actual question was how the national debt was affecting him. And you know, if I’d been there, I’d have said, ‘Well, I don’t have any government bonds.’ ”

For some, there’s no clearer proof that Dukakis still doesn’t get it. But he insists that TV coverage has trivialized the debates. Nobody wants to talk about issues, he says, and the media simply pounces on perceived mistakes.

As he speaks, Dukakis’ thin smile tightens a bit more, and he folds his arms almost defensively in front of him. It’s early in the morning, and he’s one of the first faculty members in the department to arrive at work.

“When it comes to healing, you can’t dwell on these things,” he says softly. “In life, you win and lose. You pick yourself up and go on. I’m satisfied with my professional life and the direction it’s taken.”

As for Kitty, the news is more upbeat. She bared her soul in a 1990 memoir, “Now You Know,” then disappeared from public view. Next month, after completing 700 hours of fieldwork, she will complete a certification program at the University of Massachusetts to become an alcoholism abuse counselor.

“Kitty’s very good at this kind of work,” Dukakis says proudly, “and in a sense she’s really embarked on a new career path. You might say that out of all this unhappiness, something new and positive has emerged for her. For Kitty, it could be a major change, something very different.”

Dukakis himself, however, seems remarkably the same. Despite a new humility and an occasional flash of humor, he shows little emotion. Losing may have taught him many things, but introspection doesn’t seem to be one of them.

“I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by going into all of that,” he says, when asked about the grief he may have felt in 1988. “You just have to accept the decision voters made and go on with your life. You keep busy.”

When a visitor rephrases the question, asking what Dukakis learned personally--about himself as a human being--the answer is clipped and dry:

“The most important thing I learned was that it is extremely difficult for me to both campaign and to govern if I don’t have a lot of close continuing contact with real, average people. You get a lot of feedback and energy from average folks on the street.”

To his friends, Dukakis has suffered enough and should be spared the indignity of further media dissection. Why should he bleed in public, they ask, when it’s more important for him to simply get on with his life?

“This country is not very nice to people who went through what he went through,” says Prof. Ezra Vogel, a friend and Harvard specialist in Japanese affairs. “He gave it his best shot. And now he’s onto something new.”

On a Monday night, 15 of Dukakis’ students are crammed into a seminar room waiting for him to arrive. The class is tough, they say, but well worth it.

“I can’t say enough good things about him,” says one graduate student. “He has a lot to say, political things, but he also knows how to listen.”

Tonight’s topic is long-term health care for the elderly, and much of Dukakis’ message is taken up with statistics and charts. But he can’t help spicing up his comments with anecdotes about the political world he once knew and now looks on from a distance. Dressed in black slacks, a pullover sweater and tennis shoes, he munches on an apple and gets down to business: How many students have been following the news about Clinton’s transition team?

A few hands go up, but Dukakis is astonished when no one seems to know much about the backgrounds of Vernon Jordan and Warren Christopher.

“You guys gotta start reading the paper,” he complains. “What’s the deal, folks, am I working you too hard?”

Moments later, Dukakis seems to lose them altogether. When discussing the appointment of Judith Feder, Clinton’s health policy adviser for the transition, he stops the class cold with an unexpected question:

“If Clinton calls you down to Little Rock and asks you to be his secretary of health and human services, what’s your first question?” he demands. “Something about AIDS? Maybe the President’s health-care plan?

“No way,” says Dukakis, answering his own question. “You want to know, whom does Feder work for? Does she work for you, or does she report directly to Clinton?”

The next morning, Dukakis begins talking about Social Security taxes to a class of undergraduates. Then, digressing altogether, he recounts his budgetary crises as governor, his political problems with the state Legislature and his experiences during a 1987 Democratic candidates’ debate.

“One of my better moments came with Tom Brokaw,” he says. “He had a question designed to stiff each one of us. And when he came to me he said, ‘So, Governor, are you in favor of taxing Social Security benefits?’ And I said, ‘We already do, Tom.’ And boy, that ended his question.”

Dukakis looks at the students busy scribbling down his comments, just like reporters used to do. Then he crosses his arms confidently across his chest. A man in control once again.

“That debate was one of my better days,” Dukakis says with a smile. “I’ve had some bad days, too, as you all know. But, folks, you do survive.”