A Tale of Two Childhoods

Each summer of his childhood, George Bush went with his family to a sprawling shingle-and-stone cottage in Kennebunkport, Me., joined by assorted cousins and friends who could always find a spare bedroom, an extra tennis racquet. Days were crammed with sailing and tennis at the River Club, fierce games of backgammon and Scrabble at night. After Prescott Bush Sr., the imposing (6 ft. 4 in.) patriarch, arrived by sleeper car from Manhattan on the weekends, he would recruit a vocal quartet from the assembled company for after-dinner harmonizing. Family Friend Bill Truesdale describes those summers: "It's hard to imagine anything better."

One vacation that the Dukakis family embarked on when Michael was growing up lasted less than a day. Euterpe Dukakis had persuaded her husband, a doctor, to rent a house on the Massachusetts shore for a week. The day the family arrived, Panos Dukakis got word that one of his patients had gone into labor. The family immediately headed back to Boston. They never planned another long vacation.

The contest between Dukakis and Bush will be less about ideas and ideologies than about clashing temperaments and styles. Assessing such traits is always tricky, and never more so than in a campaign that provides little more than snippets of carefully programmed candidates. But the puzzle can sometimes be pieced together by examining the contenders' backgrounds, including the values and formative experiences of childhood.

From their earliest days, Bush and Dukakis were very different. Bush was the outgoing, eager-to-please son to whom athletics and grades came easily; Dukakis was a serious, hardworking achiever. Bush always wanted to be liked, and would do just about anything toward that end; Dukakis was willing to settle for respect, and may have even preferred it. Bush joined every social club that would have him (and most would); Dukakis spurned them.

Bush has an easygoing disposition and a raft of friends he swamps with notes and phone calls. Generous to a fault, he once opened his cramped apartment at Yale to a former Andover teacher beset by alcoholism. Dukakis is frugal to the point of cheapness. He has never made many friends; two school chums he did have were sacrificed to his career. In high school, Dukakis cared so little for peer approval that he went around scolding fellow students for not putting milk cartons into the trash bin. His yearbook calls him "Chief Big Brain-in- Face." He did not have his first date until the second half of his senior year. Sandy Cohen, the girl he wanted to take to his senior prom, went with one of his rivals, so he checked coats instead.

The paradox of this campaign is that Bush, for all his youthful grace and charm, is now displaying neither. The effortless way he assumed leadership at Andover and Yale has vanished. By contrast, Dukakis, who lacked Bush's early ease, is having some success using the determination from his early days to master the political art of appearing warm.