Kitty Dukakis, wife of the former governor Michael Dukakis, in 2009. (Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Kitty Dukakis, the former first lady of Massachusetts who was an outspoken advocate for people with mental illness and addiction in the face of her own experiences with those diseases, has died.
Her son, John Dukakis, told WBUR she died peacefully Friday night with family at her side. She was 88 years old.
The wife of former governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, Kitty was recalled by friends and family members as someone who was drawn to those who were suffering, worked tirelessly to help them, and advanced both policy and awareness on social issues and human rights.
But she may be most remembered for going public about her battles with depression and addiction in an era when most public figures wouldn’t dare — especially if their spouse was running for president.
Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis hugged his wife, Kitty, after winning the Democratic primary in Manchester, New Hampshire on Feb. 16, 1988. (Jim Cole/AP)
Michael Dukakis launched his run for the White House in 1987. A few months later, Kitty revealed publicly that she’d been treated five years earlier for a decades-long addiction to diet pills.
“I knew it was a problem, because I gave those pills credit for everything positive that happened to me and thought that I could not exist without them,” she said on WGBH’s Ten O’Clock News the same day.
Getting her story out before the Republicans might have done so proved to be a smart move; after a flurry of headlines, the news faded and did not seem to hamper Kitty or her fast-paced calendar as campaigner and first lady of Massachusetts.
Steeped in the arts
Kitty Dukakis was raised in the arts, not politics. She was born Katharine Dickson in Cambridge. Her father, Harry Ellis Dickson, was an associate conductor of the Boston Pops and a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In 1990, Kitty told a women’s Democratic group in Washington, D.C. about her father’s influence.
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“It was because of dad that our house was a very special place,” she said. “He brought his world home with him. And for many years, Jinny and I — my sister and I — thought that every family had a string quartet playing Vivaldi in their living room on Sunday mornings.”
Kitty studied modern dance and taught it at Lesley College and the Brookline Arts Center. She eventually earned degrees in education, broadcasting and social work.
In 1961, she was set up on a date with Michael Dukakis. They’d both gone to Brookline High School, where he was a star student and athlete. Michael was cerebral, secure and a model of rectitude. Kitty was whip-smart, warm and tempestuous.
They got married in 1963. One of their two daughters, Andrea Dukakis, said they shared the same values — including their belief in equality.
“They used to knock on doors of apartments and sort of pose as people who wanted to rent. This was an apartment that had been denied to someone of color,” she said. “And so that was part of their activism of trying to make sure that people of color were treated equally to white people.”
Michael Dukakis served three terms as governor, starting in 1975. Kitty had an office at the State House — and she had her husband’s ear.
Kitty Dukakis on Nov. 6, 1974, the day after her husband, Michael Dukakis, was elected to his first term as governor. (Paul Benoit/AP)
“There’s story after story after story … about how she would, if she didn’t agree with something her husband was doing, she’d let him know and she’d let all of us know. And she was usually right,” said Phil Johnston, who served as health and human services secretary in the Dukakis administration and became friends with Kitty. “They had a great marriage … And when she cared about something, he cared about it.”
A powerful voice
Associates said Kitty Dukakis knew her voice could make a difference on a range of issues.
“Kitty instinctively understood the power that was afforded her by her position as the first lady of Massachusetts,” said Anne Hawley, who worked on cultural causes with Kitty starting in the late 1970s and later became the longtime director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “She really knew how to use [that power], and she did use it for other people’s benefit, not for herself.”
Among those who benefited were people experiencing homelessness. Kitty co-chaired the governor’s advisory committee on the homelessstarting in her husband’s second term. Her activism helped to dramatically increase the number of state-funded homeless shelters. She visited the facilities and got to know many shelter guests well, according to Johnston.
Proud of her Jewish heritage, she was passionate about raising awareness surrounding the Holocaust. She was appointed by multiple U.S. presidents to serve on a national Holocaust commission and was a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She pushed to get lessons on the Holocaust taught in schools.
Her exploration of the history of genocide and the Holocaust led Kitty to take up the plight of refugees. She was especially focused on refugees from the Vietnam War and Cambodian genocide, and she worked to bring many of them to the U.S.
“Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians — often children who barely managed to survive — are now in refugee camps,” she told an audience in Iowa in 1987. “They are not statistics or mere images on the nightly news. They are families. And they need our help.”
Pich Hout looks through photo albums he put together documenting his 1985 rescue from a Cambodian border camp by Kitty Dukakis and times he spent with her over the years. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
One of those kids in the Cambodian camps was Pich Hout. He was born in Cambodia and is now a physician assistant in Massachusetts.
Hout lost most of his family to the Khmer Rouge regime of dictator Pol Pot in the late 1970s. His one surviving sister ended up in Massachusetts, sponsored by a family here. She wrote a letter in 1984 asking Kitty Dukakis to help rescue her brother from the camp where he was living.
Kitty Dukakis wrote back to Pich Hout’s sister after receiving a letter from her in 1984 asking for the first lady’s help to rescue her brother from a border camp in Cambodia. Dukakis located Hout in the camp about a month later and then brought him to Massachusetts. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Early in 1985, Kitty traveled to Thailand and crossed the border into Cambodia, a picture of Hout in hand. He remembers the day she arrived at his camp, escorted by armed soldiers. He only knew she was an important person.
“She kneeled down and talked to me at the level of my sight, you know? She’s very calm and very, like, brave,” Hout said. “She grabbed my hands tight. She never let go when she saw me, until she had to go back in the car and drove back 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.
One of the many photos Pich Hout collected from when Kitty Dukakis had him flown to Massachusetts and greeted him at Logan Airport in 1985. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
The two kept in touch and visited each other over the years, Hout said, adding that he viewed Kitty as a mother figure.
“Without her, you know, I wouldn’t be sitting here today,” he said.
Dark years
Kitty Dukakis changed lives even as she desperately needed help.
Johnston, who was a state lawmaker before he joined the Dukakis cabinet, said Kitty reached out to people on Beacon Hill who were dealing with alcohol addiction and got them into recovery programs.
“I would find out through members, colleagues of mine, in the legislature [who would] say, ‘Well, you know who saved me was Kitty Dukakis,’ ” Johnston recalled.
Kitty kept her own chemical dependency well hidden for a time.
In 1988, Michael Dukakis won the Democratic nomination for president. And Kitty campaigned hard. She thrived on the non-stop schedule of speeches and fundraisers. Later, she said she’d managed to keep her drinking to one vodka a day — but that she looked forward to that drink all day.
Then, on Election Day, the bottom fell out. Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush. After his defeat, Kitty spiraled down into depression and drinking.
“It was pretty devastating, a loss like that, after such intensive involvement for both Michael and myself and for our children,” she told NPR in 2017. “It was difficult and affected me psychologically a lot.”
One year after the election, she ingested some rubbing alcohol at home. She was hospitalized. The incident made headlines.
Soon after, Kitty published a memoir called “Now You Know,” in which she explained that she used alcohol to numb the pain of her depression. When she couldn’t find liquor in the house, she sometimes looked for products with alcohol in them.
She spoke around the country about her book and her struggles with addiction and depression.
“As all of you know, I’m a drug addict and an alcoholic,” Kitty said at the 1990 women’s Democratic club meeting. “Alcohol and drug addiction strike women and men without regard for their sex, and yet our society still attaches a special stigma to the female alcoholic or drug addict.”
She cycled in and out of depression and treatment for more than a decade. Michael Dukakis described his wife’s decline this way:
“Here was this beautiful, brainy wife of mine. And yet every eight or nine months, she’d start going down — [she’d] go through three or four brutal months,” he said in the 2017 NPR interview. “And to have this happening over and over and over again was devastating for her and frustrating for the rest of us.”
Treatment and turnaround
Finally, in 2001, Kitty found a treatment that eased her depression: electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. The procedure delivers electricity to the brain to induce a seizure. It can alleviate depression in people for whom other treatments do not work. It’s also known to cause some memory loss.
The procedure was controversial at the time. Many people thought it was barbaric. But Kitty became an evangelist for it. She wrote a book with journalist Larry Tye, called “Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy.”
For years, Tye said, people emailed him and Kitty to share how grateful they were that after reading the book, they had finally taken their doctors’ advice to try ECT — and the treatment had worked for them, too.
“I’d get the emails. I would be floored by them,” Tye said. “I would forward them to [Kitty], and she would insist on getting in touch with everybody who had emailed to try to help them.”
Kitty even let the CBS News program 60 Minutes record and show one of her ECT sessions.
Her family never tried to dissuade her from being so open about her mental health issues, according to her son John.
“Talking my mother out of most anything was often a fool’s errand,” he said. “And, you know, ECT — my parents feel very strongly about — saved my mother’s life. So the idea of kind of sharing that message more broadly, there was never any question about it.”
Andrea Dukakis said she’s proud of her mother.
“We all have secrets and things that we’re uncomfortable about,” she said. “And I think she really wanted to help other people get better.”
In recent years, Kitty even ran a support group in her Brookline living room, with husband Michael by her side, for people dealing with depression and undergoing ECT or considering it.
Arts leader Anne Hawley got support from Kitty, too, and the two became close friends. Early on in their knowing each other, Hawley was struggling with depression herself, she said. The first lady helped her cope.
“She had a way of turning demons into possibilities for others,” Hawley said. “It’s just extraordinary.”
This segment aired on March 22, 2025.
