Governor Michael S. Dukakis called on the federal government to adopt his urban renewal program, which he credited with saving the dying cities of Massachusetts, in the keynote address of this weekend's Kennedy School conference on leadership in large cities.

By targeting certain rundown cities for redevelopment and committing sustained investments to these targets, the "financial and economic basketcase" that was urban Massachusetts recovered "beyond our wildest expectations," Dukakis said Saturday morning.

The two-day conference, which began Friday evening, brought together former mayors, public officials and journalists to examine the changing nature of city government since the 1960s.

Dukakis cited the town of Lowell as evidence of the advantages of flexibility in state spending of federal grant money.

"When I took office in 1975, Lowell had an unemployment rate of 17 percent," he said. As a result of this urban renewal program, "Lowell has an unemployment rate today of 3.2 percent.

"I think I can safely say there is not a single sick city in this state today," Dukakis said.

Many who attended Dukakis' talk complained that it sounded like a campaign speech. "He did a lot of patting himself on the back," said one Kennedy School official who participated in the conference, which was sponsored by the Kennedy School's State, Local and Intergovernmental Center (SLIC).

Besides Dukakis' speech, SLIC also put on two panel discussions; one examined citizen involvement in the city and the other looked at the relationship between the press and city government.

In the panel on citizen involvement, panelists and audience members expressed nostalgia for the 1960s when, as one participant put it, "there was a conviction that the world could be made better and the United States was rich enough to do it."

Former New Orleans Mayor Ernest "Dutch" Morial said that "we are in an era of broader citizen participation," brought about by the programs of the 1960's and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which dramatically increased Black voter registration.

However, he said legislation can rarely assure that the disadvantaged will receive an equal share of resources. "That has to come from leadership," he said.

Members of the panel on the role of the press found that the 1974 Watergate scandal ended the days when reporters were "cheerleaders" for the administration, making them far more willing to hurt the municipal government's image.

"The best reporters are outsiders," but they are often "outsiders who crave to be insiders," said Pulitzer Prize winning author J. Anthony Lukas, quoting author Gay Talese.

Watergate "more than ever crystallized the notion that you're an outsider," said Milton Coleman, who is the associate editor for city coverage at the Washington Post.

Although editors "smart" under pressures to avoid muckraking, "the sign of a good reporter is that when you're talking to a politician, a bell goes off in your head and you say, 'now, why would he be lying to me?'" he said.

Coleman and former Newark mayor Kenneth Gibson, the two Black panelists, also complained that white-owned newspapers, especially the New York Times, were condescending towards him and his administration.

Gibson cited a meeting which was being covered by Times reporter Fox Butterfield in which someone in his administration, who objected to having reporters at town meetings, walked over to Butterfield and broke his pencil.

Butterfield then demanded that Gibson arrest the man who broke his pencil, saying, "I was assaulted," according to the former mayor.

Gibson said that because he refused to arrest the man and because he refused to apologize for the pencil breaking, the Times pulled their bureau out of Newark.

"The New York Times has only pulled bureaus out two times in its history--from Newark and Communist China," Gibson said.