Matt Bennett can still hear the reporters laughing, all 90 of them. He can still picture Sam Donaldson doubled over, guffawing, on a riser that looked out over a dusty field in suburban Detroit. Bennett was a 23-year-old political rookie in 1988 when he was sent to a General Dynamics facility in Sterling Heights, Mich., to organize a campaign stop for Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis: a ride in a 68-ton M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. The visit, meant to bolster the candidate’s credibility as a future commander-in-chief, would go down as one of the worst campaign backfires in history.

Following the event, after the reporters’ laughter subsided and Dukakis’s entourage was preparing to leave, one of the candidate’s traveling aides approached Bennett. “Nice event, Matt” he deadpanned. “It may have cost us the election. But beside that, it was great.”


* * *

Dukakis and the tank. The image of the diminutive Massachusetts governor pretending to be something he wasn’t and, in the process, making a fool of himself on Sept. 13, 1988, has haunted me, as it has every other advance person who has been entrusted—for a few hours or even a few minutes—with a candidate’s fate.

Like Bennett, I too worked on the Dukakis campaign, and we went on to serve together in the Clinton White House. I sat in countless meetings in which some smartass warned that a stop on the president’s schedule had the makings of a “Dukakis in the tank moment.” The caution usually came when some type of costume was involved, and the tank ride is still to this day invoked anytime politicians decline to put hats on their heads—as President Obama did earlier this year when he was handed a Navy football helmet but refused to try it on. (“You don’t put stuff on your head if you’re president,” he said. “That’s politics 101.”) But the story of the disastrous tank ride also endures as an example of the broader laws of unintended consequences in political stagecraft.

And that, to me, has always been the most fascinating part of this disaster story, a mystery to be solved: Why had an event that everyone now agrees was such a terrible idea ever happened in the first place?

Twenty-five years after the notorious disaster, I set out this summer—with help from Steve Silverman, a fellow advance man from 1988 and a longtime Clinton colleague—to discover what had set the infamous tank ride in motion and why no one had put a stop to it. In more than 20 lengthy interviews, I found a story that surprised me: The truth is, many of Dukakis’s advisers did try to forestall the tank ride even while others were convinced the photo op was essential. They argued with each other over it, sent warnings back to headquarters, huddled in anxious meetings and even dispatched an expert fixer, all to no avail. That some tried to stop it but couldn’t is, in its own way, a very human story about simple inertia, the difficulty of changing course once a plan is set in motion. But it’s a story about accountability, too—a failure of leadership that led a candidate who was busy proclaiming his technocratic “competence” to run a myopic and incompetent campaign.

WATCH: The Making of a Political Disaster.

To unravel the tale, I started with Bennett, an old friend from the Clinton years. He shared with me his quarter-century-old journal entry about the tank debacle, six typewritten pages printed out in the old dot-matrix style.

Bennett’s diary made for an excellent start. But I also wanted to talk to others who were there, including Dukakis’s hosts at General Dynamics Land Systems, the campaign aides flying on the Dukakis plane and the governor’s foreign-policy advisers, James Steinberg and Madeleine Albright, both of whom were in Sterling Heights that day and had helped shape the campaign's message behind the tank ride.

Members of the headquarters staff told me what it was like to plan the trip from Boston, and about the queasy feeling they had watching the tank ride unfold on television. In Washington, the Bush-Quayle team was watching, too. Deputy campaign manager Rich Bond recalls that the tank was “a huge gift” whose impact was clear on the morning of Sept. 14 as his team reviewed news clips from the evening before and studied photos from that day’s papers.

The Republicans I tracked down were happy to chat; the Democrats less so. Several did not want to be quoted. Others sparred over perhaps the most pivotal detail: just how that idiotic-looking tank-commander’s helmet ended up atop the candidate’s head.

Victory, as they say, has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

* * *

Matt Bennett

Bennett arrived in Sterling Heights, in the center of Michigan’s Macomb County—a Detroit suburb rich in Reagan Democrats that Dukakis needed to court—on Thursday, Sept. 8. He had gotten his orders from Katie Whelan, his scheduler at headquarters: Orchestrate a tank ride for the governor, to be followed by a speech. At the time, it seemed logical enough.

Katie Whelan

Dukakis had prevailed in the fight for the Democratic nomination that year, touting a business renaissance in the Bay State, the so-called “Massachusetts Miracle,” and his personal story of a Greek immigrant family’s embrace of the American Dream. If only he had used his biography to greater advantage during the general election. Instead, he fixed his message on competence and left himself vulnerable to a fusillade of attacks from Vice President George H.W. Bush’s team that ushered in a new era of political combat. One target was Dukakis’s policies on national defense. Although future events would prove him prescient, Dukakis had positioned himself too far ahead of the Cold War’s end. He argued that President Ronald Reagan had spent too much on the country’s nuclear arsenal and shortchanged conventional weaponry. The Abrams tank that Dukakis would ride in was the physical representation of that argument. At least that was the idea.

Bennett checked into his hotel, met the other members of his team and introduced himself to his hosts at General Dynamics, the makers of the $4.3 million M1A1 tank.

Members of advance teams are slated into specific roles: lead, press, site, crowd, motorcade and hotel. In Sterling Heights, Paul Holtzman was the overall lead while Bennett was the site lead, essentially the event’s producer, responsible for the choreography and stagecraft of the visit.

Bennett believed the visit was a bad idea and tried to warn headquarters, but his initial concerns had little to do with presidential image-making. As an undergraduate, he’d written his senior thesis on the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

“I argued General Dynamics is the wrong company for the Democratic nominee for president to be in bed with,” he wrote in his journal. “Not surprisingly, I was told, in so many words, to shut up and do my job.”

LISTEN: Matt Bennett: "I was very nervous about this event from the beginning."

The decision to visit General Dynamics had been made by senior advisers far above Bennett’s pay grade, and it grew from a message developed much earlier in the campaign. While Dukakis was still cementing his lead in the Democratic primary, he made a stop at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Derry, N.H. It was two days before the first-in-the-nation primary in February and Dukakis gave a speech billed as “Renewing America's Strength: A Foreign Policy for the 1990's.” As Jim Steinberg told me, “The idea was to try to figure out an angle that would give him some credibility on national security and foreign policy.” The angle turned, in pragmatic Dukakis style, on arithmetic and cost savings. “A focal point of the argument,” Steinberg says, “was that he was against all these nuclear weapons because we didn’t need them and it was taking away money from conventional weapons that we did need.” Weapons like a tank, for example.

The primary season ended on June 7 with Dukakis as the presumptive Democratic nominee. The next stop was Atlanta for the convention, the first I attended, missing none since. A year out of college, I relished being in the Omni Coliseum, watching Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards verbally lash Vice President Bush and Bill Clinton run into overtime to nominate his fellow governor from Massachusetts. When Clinton finally wrapped up, we all hailed Dukakis as he arrived to accept his party’s nomination. It was a spectacular entrance, with Dukakis making the long walk from the back of the Omni accompanied by Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” the singer's ode to the classic immigrant story. It was, by any measure, the high-water mark of Dukakis’s candidacy.

Afterward, things went quiet—disastrously so. With a 17-point lead in the polls, Dukakis returned to Massachusetts for his annual pilgrimage to the western part of the state.

While the candidate burned August travel days in Massachusetts, the Republicans filled the news void, launching volleys at him from all sides, questioning everything from his patriotism (“What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” Bush asked a crowd in Los Angeles, mocking a 1977 Dukakis veto of a mandatory pledge-in-schools bill) to his mental fitness ( “I’m not going to pick on an invalid,” Reagan said, referring to a rumor that the governor had undergone treatment for depression). These new attacks built on an assault earlier in the summer that focused on the furlough of a murderer named Willie Horton. (“By the time we’re finished,” Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, gloated, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”)

By Labor Day, Bush had overtaken Dukakis in the polls. “They have two weeks to turn the campaign around,” Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank told the New York Times. Sept. 17 would mark the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, drawing eyes away from politics. Every day on the campaign trail until then was precious.

Both the Bush and Dukakis campaigns had explored visiting the Garrison-Detroit Arsenal, owned by the Department of Defense, where the M1A1s were assembled. The Pentagon rebuffed these requests on the grounds that their facilities were off-limits to politicking. In stepped Gordon England, a vice president at General Dynamics Land Systems and future secretary of the Navy, who offered to host Dukakis at the company’s own facility in Sterling Heights.

The campaign’s Michigan director, John Eades, wanted his candidate in Macomb County, but he was wary of Dukakis’s ability to pull off the event. “All of a sudden,” he recalls, “the campaign wanted to turn him into a hawk who loves the military and wants to hug a tank.”

Eades was far outranked by campaign advisers Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who counted General Dynamics and its largely union workforce among his constituents. Both Nunn and Levin backed the visit.

Joyce Carrier

Senior staff sketched out the rough outlines for a campaign swing focused on national defense, including a stop in Sterling Heights.

“The highest people in the campaign heard exactly how the event was playing out,” Joyce Carrier, the director of advance, told me. “It was a three- or four-day discussion where everyone knew he was in the tank. No one was surprised.”

* * *

The campaign staff knew they had a steep hill to climb on national defense. Dukakis had served in the Army for two years after college, but his terms as a state representative and then governor left him with a thinner resume on national security than his opponent. Bush, after all, was a World War II aviator, ambassador, director of Central Intelligence and two-term vice president.

In a national survey taken by the Los Angeles Times the same weekend Bennett was drawing up plans for the tank ride, Dukakis beat Bush better than five-to-one on the attribute of “cares about people like me.” But on the key Cold War question—“Which candidate do you think would do the best of job of securing the national defense?”—54 percent said Bush, while only 18 percent said Dukakis.

“That needed to be addressed, and addressed strongly,” Leslie Dach, the communications director, told me.

Staff at campaign headquarters fought with each other over how aggressively the candidate should assert his military credentials. “There were very strong positions,” recalls campaign manager Susan Estrich. On one side was the hawkish Democratic Sen. Nunn, who pushed for using campaign days to narrow the national-security gap with Bush. On the other side was Arkansas Gov. Clinton, another campaign adviser, who argued that Dukakis should play to his strengths—jobs, health care and education—instead of pretending to be something he wasn’t.

Susan Estrich

“If Mike Dukakis walked into a school or a hospital or a jobs site, there was no cap he could have put on that would have gotten him into trouble,” Estrich says. “He was a guy who would have belonged in those places.” But by Saturday, Sept. 10, three days before the visit to Sterling Heights, the debate was settled: Over dinner in Boston that night, Dukakis and his advisers briefed their newly minted national co-chairs, including Nunn, on plans for a national-security campaign swing over the next few days. There would be speeches in Philadelphia and Cincinnati on Monday, and another in Chicago on Tuesday, followed by the tank ride and a fourth speech in Sterling Heights. The campaign swing would climax with a major address in Georgetown on Wednesday.

In Sterling Heights, Bennett rehearsed every move Dukakis would make at General Dynamics. Dukakis would give a speech laying out his policies on national defense, and the tank ride would offer “the visual” for news coverage.

Leslie Dach

But this was no ordinary visual. The tank stood eight feet high, with Dukakis’s torso sticking up another three feet. A press riser would have to be built higher than normal to keep the cameras and the candidate at the same level, a hard-and-fast rule from the advance manual. Bennett also grappled with the tricky choreography of getting Dukakis aboard the M1A1 while avoiding unflattering imagery of a 5’8” man climbing up an eight-foot-high tank. That problem was solved by arranging for Dukakis to board the tank behind closed doors in a massive garage at the General Dynamics site.

But then there was the matter of the helmet, which General Dynamics insisted was necessary both for safety, if the tank ran at its full speed of more than 40 miles per hour, and for communications among the riders.

Joyce Carrier, the campaign’s director of advance, recalls that the Dukakis campaign up to that point had been particularly hat-averse. “Beside the fact that he didn’t look good in them,” she told me, “you could just never imagine him with a hat on.” The standing rule was that headwear given to the governor could be appreciatively received and cheerfully waved on stage but should not, under any circumstances, rest on his head.

LISTEN: Matt Bennett: "Our reservations all were about awkwardness."

All of which made Bennett nervous. “This is going to be a freaking disaster,” he recalls telling Whelan. (She declined to comment on the record for this article.)

Neal Flieger

Bennett’s warnings went unheeded, so he focused on the tasks at hand. He recounted in his diary a rehearsal ride he took atop the tank with the team’s press advance lead, Neal Flieger: “I wanted to brief Dukakis on what it would be like; Neal wanted to check the shots from the risers; both of us wanted to ride in the damn tank. We did, and boy was it fun.”

Dukakis listens to questions during a press conference on his plane. | George Widman/AP Photo

The trip began well enough in Philadelphia but hit a snag at a General Electric jet engine plant outside Cincinnati. Ohio Sen. John Glenn, the former Marine test pilot and astronaut, introduced Dukakis but was met by catcalls that continued during the governor’s remarks. The Chicago Tribune carried the headline “Defense Workers Jeer Dukakis.”

Joe Lockhart

The campaign couldn’t afford another pitfall in Detroit, and Joe Lockhart, the deputy press secretary, knew that the advance team there was uneasy about the tank ride

In Cincinnati, the staff on the Dukakis campaign plane huddled and decided to send trip director Jack Weeks, who had been traveling with Dukakis, ahead to Michigan. Their biggest worry was a repeat of the engine-plant debacle—hecklers in the crowd—but the helmet also needed attention.

LISTEN: Matt Bennett: "I didn’t want to make the decision myself."

Weeks, then 36, was an imposing presence to young advance men like Matt Bennett. A veteran of four presidential campaigns, he had a tough exterior, the product of a South Boston upbringing, but he had also graduated from Harvard. Although Weeks was now among the elite who traveled on Dukakis’s plane, he still thought of himself as an on-the-ground operative. A backslap from Jack meant everything to one of the Dukakis road warriors, but he could chew apart your well-laid plans if he didn’t like what he saw. Weeks had a simple mission in Sterling Heights—avoid another screwup. Containing hecklers was the easy part. With just hours to go, Weeks saw few good options on the helmet question.

The tank ride should have been nipped in the bud in Boston well before Weeks arrived, he told me. “There was a time when you go, ‘Someone’s not getting it,’ and it wasn’t just Mike Dukakis.” Weeks is reluctant to name names even 25 years later, but his general disdain for the effete advisers from Washington is palpable. His view is that the tank ride would not have been reconsidered at the eleventh hour. And with good reason. Scuttling the tank ride would have brought a host of questions from the press corps. Simply kicking the tank’s treads would have seemed like a cop out. And taking a slow crawl around the test track without the helmet would have invited its own chorus of ridicule.

Weeks met with Bennett and the rest of the advance team early on the morning of game day. Weeks recalls Holtzman, the lead advance man, modeling the coveralls and the helmet. “Paul puts on the overalls, and I say, ‘That’s fine, Paul.’ And he says he’s got this helmet. And I say, ‘Put the helmet on.’ I say, ‘There’s a mirror. Go look at the mirror.’ He looks at the mirror. I say, ‘You look like a goofy fuck. No helmet.’”

But Weeks’s directive turned out to be wishful thinking. It didn’t matter if everyone on the campaign wished the helmet would go away. If Dukakis was going to get a 40-mile-per-hour ride, and not simply climb atop the tank for a photo, General Dynamics protocols required the protective headwear.

It was a rule the candidate was unlikely to disregard. “Dukakis would never go anywhere without wearing his seat belt,” recalls Nick Mitropoulos, Dukakis’s ever-present body man.

Advance people consider themselves more practical and logistics-minded than headquarters staff, but how they—who were actually responsible for guiding Dukakis through the General Dynamics facility—addressed the issue remains a matter of dispute. Bennett wrote in his 1988 diary that they developed a compromise, then crossed their fingers: Dukakis would emerge from the garage with the helmet on and make a full-speed demo run. He would then take off his helmet, and the tank would make a slower pass by the cameras. “I told Weeks the brutal facts: Dukakis would look like a goof if he wore the helmet, but he wouldn’t be able to hear, and he would feel genuinely unsafe without it," Bennett wrote in his diary. "Jack ruled that he would wear the helmet for the fast passes, and doff his headgear for a slow, picture taking pass."

Flieger would not comment on the record for this article and Holtzman did not respond to multiple phone calls or emails.

Two things are clear: Bennett was at least mistaken on the order of the passes—Dukakis emerged from the garage without a helmet, not wearing one—and Weeks maintains there was no compromise plan, that he stuck to his initial instincts. “There was supposed to be no helmet,” he told me. Bennett, meanwhile, is just as adamant that Dukakis was fully briefed on the slow pass/fast pass choreography. “I remember it like it was yesterday," he says. "And I wrote it down.”

Jack Weeks says he was surprised when he saw Dukakis wearing the helmet. "There was supposed to be no helmet," he says. | Elise Amendola/AP Photo

Dukakis's campaign plane touched down in Detroit on Sept. 13 and the motorcade began its quick trip to Sterling Heights. Upon arrival, Dukakis met with representatives from General Dynamics while the press assembled on the risers. The candidate then pulled on protective coveralls emblazoned with his name and made his way to the awaiting M1A1. Per Bennett’s plan, he then climbed aboard the tank behind closed doors.

Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright, who was a Dukakis advisor on national security, saw the scene unfold. “The people at [General Dynamics] gave him this helmet, and they told him—and he hesitated—‘You have to wear this because this is where the audio equipment is so you can hear what the instructions are,’” she told me.

Mindy Lubber

“Michael is a Boy Scout,” Mindy Lubber, the scheduling director, says. “He is a guy who likes to follow rules, especially if they’re sensible.”

A photograph that appeared in a 1989 coffee table book by former Newsweek photographer Arthur Grace shows Dukakis, wearing no helmet, atop the turret of the tank as it emerges from the garage. If only the event had ended then and there.

The M1A1 cruised slowly to the far end of the test track as the photographers and cameramen tracked its moves with their long lenses. It then paused for long a moment before turning back toward the onlookers.

“My reaction is, ‘Holy shit, the tank ran out of gas,’” Weeks told me. “The headline running through my head is, ‘Dukakis campaign runs out of gas.’ All of a sudden, it kicks up into speed, it comes running by, and he’s got the helmet on.”

Weeks told me he was surprised to see the helmet, and he regrets that, as the campaign’s top advance person, he wasn’t there during the ride to keep it off his boss’s head. “If anyone asks me what the screw-up was, it was not having an advance person with him to protect him.” But there was space for only four in the M1A1: the candidate and Gordon England up top, a Secret Service agent and a General Dynamics driver down below.

England rejects the idea that donning the helmet was a decision made during the tank ride. “The matter of the helmet was settled with the advance team well before the day of the event and there was no improvising (of anything!) during the ride,” he wrote me in an email. “I well remember having a helmet discussion in a conference room leading up to the event.”

On the final pass in front of the press riser, the tank approached the cameras head-on, veering away at the last second, the tank’s barrel swerving so close that reporters had to duck to avoid decapitation. Had the tank kept its distance, the iconic image of Dukakis never would have been captured.

LISTEN: Matt Bennett: "I knew we were in trouble."

Instead, the close-up shot, capturing a smiling Dukakis—pointing a finger and wearing a helmet with his name stenciled across the brow like a summer-camp nametag—would grace the next day’s front pages.

When the tank completed its rounds and returned to the garage, Bennett was there to greet the candidate. As Bennett wrote in his diary, Dukakis “didn’t yet know of the humiliations to come when he arrived back in the shop to dismount, and he was bubbling with the same kind of enthusiasm that Neal and I ended our rides with. As he was climbing out of the tank, we all told him that he’d looked great (we had really thought that), and he was pumped up for his speech when he hit the rope line.”

Joe Lockhart, the deputy press secretary, recalls someone on the campaign plane later that afternoon asking Dukakis why he wore the helmet. Dukakis said he wanted to hear England’s narration. “This is quintessential Mike Dukakis,” Lockhart told me. “For everybody else, this was a photo op. Dukakis wanted to understand how the tank worked.”

* * *

Reporters raced to file their stories. Bernard Weinraub of the New York Times filed just 274 words. “Forget John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Forget Rambo. Meet Macho Mike Dukakis,” he wrote

The New York Times ran a short piece about the tank ride the next day, Sept. 14, 1988.

In another corner of the makeshift press room, the network correspondents traveling with Dukakis—Sam Donaldson for ABC, Bruce Morton for CBS and Chris Wallace for NBC—worked on their scripts. Wallace turned in a two-minute segment that began with the tank footage but also included soundbites from Dukakis’s speeches in Chicago and Sterling Heights.

“Dukakis did not offer any bold initiatives today,” Wallace concluded. “He said little that hasn’t been said by Ronald Reagan. But for a candidate who’s trying to show he’s in the mainstream on foreign policy, that may not be so bad.”

Several TV producers complimented Lockhart on the event; they’d been frustrated, after eight years of covering Reagan and his Mike Deaver-orchestrated presidency, that Dukakis gave them so few memorable visuals. Lockhart and the others on the ground were just relieved it hadn’t been worse. “I wasn’t sure it was the best thing we ever did,” Lockhart told me. “I wasn’t sure it was the worst thing. I just knew we had another event in an hour.”

Back in Boston, though, the headquarters staff had a clearer assessment. “The second we saw that picture on the six o’clock news, we had pains in our stomach,” recalls Lubber. “Regardless of anything that came out of the governor’s mouth, we saw the picture, which was Mike Dukakis with his head sticking up in that goofy hat.”

Four hundred miles to the south, the news footage also caught the attention of staff at Bush-Quayle headquarters in Washington. Rich Bond, the deputy campaign manager and future chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me that it was the next morning, at his usual 7 a.m. meeting with campaign manager Lee Atwater, research director Jim Pinkerton and others that he realized the magnitude of the gift they’d just been handed.

“Somebody said, ‘My God, he looks like Alfred E. Newman,' who was a Mad magazine character. Atwater, Pinkerton and I all grew up reading Mad magazine. And we just, literally, convulsed with laughter,” Bond told me.

David Demarest, Bush’s communications director, had a team of young aides who spent their mornings combing through clips to develop the “Line of The Day.” This single page of talking points was run past Atwater and campaign chairman James Baker for approval in the early afternoon and then blast-faxed to surrogates across the country.

“We actually had great fun with the tank issue,” Demarest told me. “For about three days, we highlighted it in our line of the day, all replete with ‘Tank you very much’ and ‘No tanks.’” In the Sept. 15 edition, two days after the tank ride, Demarest’s team was still having fun at Dukakis’s expense. “Sitting in a tank does not make America stand tall,” the talking points read.

Traveling aboard Air Force Two, Bush got the memo. “Now he rides around in a tank. He jumps out of the tank, takes off the helmet and comes on with different positions,” Bush told reporters in Ohio the next day. “You cannot fool the Soviet leadership by knocking America’s defenses for 10 years and then riding around in a tank for 10 minutes.”

On Monday, Sept. 19, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak offered perhaps the most devastating press account yet in their syndicated column. “Howls of laughter echoed through Bush headquarters in Washington,” they wrote, “where ridicule was prepared for the candidate’s speech Friday. Democratic insiders could only shake their heads in dismay.”

By Tuesday, one poll found that Dukakis had lost significant ground, with 25 percent saying they were less likely to vote for him because of the tank ride.

Election Day was seven weeks away.

Sig Rogich had just returned to his apartment on the evening of Sept. 13 when he turned on his television and saw news footage of the ride in Sterling Heights. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe they put him in that position,’” Rogich told me. The images gave Rogich, Bush’s director of advertising, an idea for a new spot. He grabbed a yellow pad and began to sketch out a 30-second ad.

LISTEN: Sig Rogich: "I knew it was a mistake...the minute I saw it."

Rogich had been part of the “Tuesday Team” of ad men who created spots like “Morning in America” for Reagan’s 1984 campaign. Now, four years later, he had been lured back to Washington from his Las Vegas advertising agency to work for Bush. Rogich recruited Jim Weller, another ’84 veteran, to join him. The team was headed by Roger Ailes, Bush’s media adviser, now the head of Fox News.

Rogich shared his notes with Weller the next morning, and they wrote a script. But they couldn’t make an ad without footage from Sterling Heights, and none of the networks would sell their tape for political purposes. As Rogich remembers, “We finally found an 11-second snippet from an independent guy and we bought it. If you look at the commercial closely, it’s just looped. We used it over and over so we filled out the 30-second spot. And then we froze the frame at the end.” The freeze-frame at the ad’s conclusion was the helmeted Dukakis smiling, pointing to the camera.

Rogich and Weller added sound effects of grinding gears to mimic tank treads, mixed with engine noise. As initial cuts of the ad were screened and tested, Ailes insisted that additional “supers,” or scrolling text, be added to make the spot equally effective if muted. The supers might strain the artistic vision of the ad, but they twisted into Dukakis like a rusty knife.

The final element was the grave-voiced narrator reading the script:

Michael Dukakis has opposed virtually every defense system we develop.

He opposed new aircraft carriers.

He opposed antisatellite weapons.

He opposed four missile systems, including the Pershing Two missile deployment.

Dukakis opposed the Stealth bomber and a ground emergency warning system against nuclear attack.

He even criticized our rescue mission to Grenada and our strike on Libya.

Now he wants to be our commander in chief?

America can't afford that risk.

During that time, I left my role in the Dukakis fundraising department and went on the road as an advance man. I saw firsthand—at rallies I helped organize in Detroit and Portland—how Dukakis finally found a rhythm with a new “I’m on your side” populist message. We hadn’t forgotten the lessons of Sterling Heights—Dukakis never wore another hat—but two decades before YouTube and smart phones, footage of the tank ride couldn’t spread virally beyond the Sept. 13 news.

WATCH: The Bush campaign's attack ad.

It seemed a rapidly fading memory. But that would soon change.

“We were comfortably ahead in the polls,” Rogich recalls. “I questioned whether we should use the Dukakis commercial. I called [campaign chairman] Jim Baker and said, ‘I’m just not sure we need it, and wouldn’t it be better to close the campaign out on a real positive note?’ He said, ‘We took a vote, and you lost.’”

Sig Rogich, Bush's advertising director, saw the tank ride on the evening news and immediately sketched out an ad. | Ron Edmonds/AP Photo

The tank ad premiered on the evening of Oct. 18, during the third game of the World Series in which the Oakland A’s beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 2-to-1. The ad freezes on the governor, his white teeth a thin strip of ivory on the screen halfway between the “Mike Dukakis” label on the governor’s helmet and the concluding super of the ad— America can’t afford that risk—that would be repeated, over and over, in the news accounts that followed.

On Friday, Oct. 21, the Dukakis campaign aired a response. The one-minute spot—written, shot and edited in three days—was twice as long as the ad it sought to rebut. It opens on a TV monitor showing the M1A1 motoring toward the camera. Just as the Bush narrator is about to weigh in, a hand emerges from the lower right side of the monitor and flicks off the TV. The camera pulls back to reveal that the censor is Dukakis himself.

“I’m fed up with it,” he says. “Never seen anything like it in my 25 years of public life: George Bush’s negative TV ads. Distorting my record. Full of lies and he knows it.” The script goes on, with Dukakis making the kind of rational and, for an ad, long-winded argument you would expect him to make. Then the screen fades to black.

The hurried, reactive Dukakis ad only called more attention to the embarrassing tank ride. David D’Alessandro, Dukakis’s chief ad man, would later tell the Los Angeles Times that the members of the ad team “were never given a strategy. They were never given polling data. They were never given research. It was pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey advertising."

WATCH: Dukakis's response ad.

There was one last person who could settle, once and for all, the mystery of how the helmet ended up on the candidate’s head.

Michael Dukakis celebrated his 80th birthday on Nov. 3, 2013, almost 25 years to the day after Bush beat him by 7 million votes and a lopsided 426 to 111 electoral votes.

Dukakis served out the remainder of his term as governor. He is today, by all accounts, content as a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston. He and his wife, Kitty, have eight grandchildren and recently celebrated their 50th anniversary. If he ever muses on the catastrophe of Sept. 13, 1988, he keeps his thoughts largely to himself.

“Should I have been in the tank?” he told U.S. News & World Report in 2008. “Probably not, in retrospect. But these days when people ask me, ‘Did you get here in a tank?’ I always respond by saying, ‘No, and I’ve never thrown up all over the Japanese prime minister’”—a jab at Bush, who did just that at a banquet in 1992. “But, you know, things happen.”

Bennett kept a souvenir from Sterling Heights: the gray General Dynamics coveralls Dukakis wore. For years he put them on for Halloween. He once called the Smithsonian Institution and left a message offering the suit to the American History Museum, but no one ever called him back. According to three sources, Dukakis’s helmet made its way back to Dukakis headquarters in Boston and eventually landed in possession of campaign adviser John Sasso, where it remains today.

Matt Bennett still has the tank suit Dukakis wore. For years he wore it on Halloween.

Bennett never forgot the lessons of Sterling Heights. He applied them when he became Vice President Al Gore’s trip director—the role Jack Weeks had played in the Dukakis race. As he told me recently, “If an advance person said to me, ‘This is going to be bad,’ I spent serious time thinking about that because I’ve been that guy.”

Earlier this year, I wrote Dukakis a note, mentioning the work I had done for him in 1988, our shared alma mater and even the fact that he and my mother were high school classmates. “I know this is not your favorite topic,” I wrote, “but I hope you would allow me to talk with you about it and get your unique perspective a quarter century later.”

He wrote back the next day:

July 9, 2013

Josh:

I am very grateful for all you did in 1988, and I don't want to sound uncooperative, but I think the tank thing has run its course. I didn't lose the election because of it any more than Romney lost his election because of “America the Beautiful.” I lost the election because I made a decision not to respond to the Bush attack campaign, and in retrospect it was a pretty dumb decision.

Mike Dukakis

Josh King served as director of production for presidential events at the White House from 1993 to 1997. He is the host of the weekend show Polioptics on SiriusXM Satellite Radio's POTUS Channel. King lives in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @Polioptics.