Muskie, Edmund Sixtus

(b. 28 March 1914 in Rumford, Maine; d. 26 March 1996 in Washington, D.C.), U.S. senator, vice presidential nominee, presidential candidate, and secretary of state whose legislative legacy was a landmark series of laws renewing and protecting the environment.

A tall, plainspoken New Englander whose regional accent and cadences remained unchanged throughout his life, Muskie was one of two sons and four daughters born to Stephen Marciszewski, a tailor, and Josephine Czarnecki. His mother came from a Polish-American family in Buffalo, New York, and his father was a Polish immigrant who officially simplified his surname to Muskie when he was naturalized as a citizen of the United States. The second-oldest child, Muskie was educated in the local public schools, graduating from Stephens High School in Rum-ford as valedictorian—and high-scoring center on the basketball team—in 1932. His father taught him carpentry and sewing, each a lifelong hobby for Muskie, and he developed an enduring love of the outdoors, returning regularly to his vacation home in Kennebunk, Maine, to hunt, fish, and sail.

Muskie worked his way through Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, supplementing his scholarship by waiting tables in the dining hall and at resort hotels in the summer. “The only Democrat on campus,” as he said later, he was chosen class president, became a champion debater, and won election to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a B.A. in history, graduating cum laude in 1936, and went on to Cornell Law School, again on scholarship, graduating with an LL.B. in 1939. Admitted to the Maine bar that same year, he set up practice in the small south-central Maine city of Waterville.

When America entered World War II, Muskie became an officer in the U.S. Navy (1942) and as a lieutenant junior grade served on destroyer escorts in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 1945 he resumed his fledgling law practice in Waterville and, like many other returning veterans, entered local and state politics. Over the next decade, he almost single-handedly revived Maine’s moribund Democratic Party. He was elected to the Maine House of Representatives (1946) and at the conclusion of his first term in 1947— the legislature then met only in odd-numbered years—ran unsuccessfully for the mayoralty of Waterville. He was the Democratic floor leader of the state legislature in 1949 and quickly won the respect of the Republican majority, who found him intelligent, cooperative, and a man of his word. In 1951 he resigned from the legislature to become district director for Maine in the Office of Price Stabilization, a position he held until 1952, when he resigned to become a Democratic national committeeman. He married Jane Frances Gray, a bookkeeper for a local women’s shop, on 29 May 1948. They had two sons and three daughters.

In 1954, running on a platform that emphasized a need for change in leadership and economic policies (including new roads, incentives to attract industry, and higher pay for teachers), Muskie scored a personal triumph in the race for governor of Maine, emerging victorious over the Republican incumbent to become the first Democrat elected to the state’s highest office in twenty years, and the first Roman Catholic ever to hold it in his own right. (There had been an interim appointment of a Roman Catholic in 1843 to complete the term of a governor who resigned to enter the U.S. Senate.) His reelection in 1956 was equally impressive, but, as in 1954, he faced a Republican majority in the legislature and was forced to pursue his legislative agenda with diplomacy and moderation.

As governor, Muskie gained a reputation for integrity, common sense, and the ability to work with his opponents. He was known as well for a ferocious temper that remained famously short-fused until his death. Despite his outbursts—some of his supporters claimed they were staged for dramatic effect—he was admired for not holding grudges or putting on airs. Urged by his party to seek a third term as governor in 1958, he ran instead for the U.S. Senate, easily beating the incumbent to become the first Maine Democrat to serve in either house of Congress. He was not seriously challenged in any of his three bids for reelection.

As he began the first of his four terms in 1959, Muskie allied himself with the liberal wing of the Senate, earning the enmity of Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic minority leader, by refusing to support Johnson’s successful effort to block a change in the chamber’s filibuster rules that made it easier for the majority to end filibusters. In retaliation, Johnson denied Muskie his first three choices for important committee assignments and acted coolly toward him for the next several years. Yet after he became president, Johnson grudgingly admitted that Muskie had become “a real powerhouse,” one of the few liberal Democrats who in his opinion had mastered the Senate’s arcane rules and thus was able to challenge southern conservatives and Republicans in drafting and floor managing legislation.

Banished to the relatively minor Public Works Committee, Muskie used the appointment to make his mark in the Senate. He became an expert on environmental matters, in the process earning the nickname “Mr. Clean.” He was chief sponsor and floor manager for the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Water Quality Act of 1965, and for Senate passage of a multimillion-dollar appropriation for pollution control in 1966. Throughout the next fourteen years, he beat back every effort to weaken the protections he helped put into place. He also played important roles in developing the Johnson administration’s model cities program and antipoverty measures (1965–1966). A fiscal conservative, he took a continuing part in largely unsuccessful efforts to hold down government spending (especially on pork barrel items) and to secure a balanced budget. He sought to reshape the relations between the federal bureaucracy and the states by strengthening the role of state agencies in carrying out federal mandates, a concern that carried over into his retirement years. He saw no contradiction in his votes for federal expenditures he considered necessary to the nation’s well-being. Thus, he was a leading figure in supporting increased federal aid to education, key civil rights measures, and Medicare, as well as a broad range of social legislation proposed by liberals during his Senate years. In contrast to many of his colleagues, he preferred to do his own reading on major issues rather than rely on his aides’ research summaries.

The Democrats chose Muskie as their vice presidential candidate in Hubert Humphrey’s run for the presidency in 1968. He had become the party’s favorite for vice president largely because of his centrist position on Vietnam, the principal issue of the campaign and the source of bitter, sometimes violent, divisions in the American electorate. Neither “hawk” nor “dove,” Muskie’s calm, conciliatory approach to the voters led many commentators to conclude that he was a more credible candidate than either Humphrey or Richard Nixon, the Republican challenger. Had Muskie rather than Humphrey headed the ticket, many observers maintained, the Democrats might well have won the election that instead returned the Republicans to the White House by a narrow margin.

Muskie emerged from the 1968 election as the principal Democratic spokesman, well positioned as his party’s candidate for president four years later. By January 1972 he was the clear front-runner, well ahead in the polls and seemingly unstoppable. But during the New Hampshire primary, the conservative Manchester Union Leader, owned by William Loeb, published an anonymous letter accusing Muskie of making ethnic slurs against the state’s French Canadians, along with an article claiming that Jane Muskie was “unladylike” and given to excessive drinking and cursing. It was later revealed that these stories—both fabrications—had been planted by Kenneth W. Clawson, a Nixon aide, as part of “a dirty tricks” campaign to discredit Democrats. Muskie, exhausted from an extended multistate tour and visibly angry, went directly from the Manchester airport on a snowy Saturday to the Union Leader building, where he castigated the paper and its publisher. While defending his wife, he broke down and seemed to weep—though later he said the tears were melting snowflakes—and his campaign was effectively over. As reports of the incident spread, supporters abandoned him nationwide, and he suffered a drop in the polls. In April he withdrew from the race, saying that voters were looking for “a strong, steady man, and here I was [seeming] weak.”

He returned to the Senate, retiring in 1980 to serve for eight months as President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state. His appointment received nearly unanimous bipartisan support (the two Republicans who voted against him did so in protest against Carter’s foreign policy), but he was little more than custodian of the office. His principal achievement was helping secure the release of American hostages held in Iran.

Following the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Muskie resumed the practice of law as a Washington-based partner in the New York firm of Chadbourne and Parke. He served as chairman of the Nestle Infant Formula Audit Commission assembled by Nestle to monitor its compliance with international rules governing the sale of infant formula. He also sat on the president’s special review board (1986–1987) that investigated charges that the Reagan administration had secretly sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to finance opponents of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. With McGeorge Bundy, he co-authored Presidential Promises and Performance (1980). He contributed chapters to several books, including “Congressional Overreaching in Foreign Policy,” in Robert A. Gold-win and Robert A. Licht, eds., Foreign Policy and the Constitution (1990); and “The Carter Presidency and Foreign Policy,” in Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., The Carter Presidency: Fourteen Intimate Perspectives of Jimmy Carter (1990). He also wrote Exploring Cambodia: Issues and Reality in a Time of Transition; Findings and Recommendations from the Visit to Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia by Former Senator and Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie (1990).

Muskie was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital on 18 March 1996 for surgery to remove a blocked artery in his right leg. The surgery was successful, but within a week Muskie suffered a heart attack and died without regaining consciousness. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C.

During his years of public service, both in Maine and Washington, Muskie was widely admired for his flinty integrity, his intellectual powers, and his commitment to liberal issues. His legislative leadership helped secure the passage of key social and environmental programs during the unsettled political years of the Vietnam War, when he was seen as a man of reason and moderation. In a memorial tribute, President Bill Clinton called Muskie “a leader in the best sense… [who] spoke from his heart and acted with conviction.”

Muskie’s papers are in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. In addition to his personal papers, office files, and memorabilia, the archives include photographs, videotapes, motion-picture film, and audiotapes covering Muskie’s public appearances as governor and senator. Muskie’s only autobiographical work was his anecdotal memoir, Journeys (1972), published for his presidential campaign. Two political biographies written by sympathetic journalists on the eve of the 1972 elections—Theo Lippman, Jr., and Donald C. Hansen, Mustie (1971), and David Nevin, Mustie of Maine (1972)—transcend some of the limitations imposed by the authors’ viewpoints, offering solid and generally balanced reporting. Katharine Whittemore’s article, “Farewell to a Tailor’s Son,” in Yankee Magazine (Feb. 1997), features a number of photographs by Stephen O. Muskie, a professional photographer and one of Muskie’s five children. See also William Lee Barnet, “An Analysis of the Rhetorical Effectiveness of the 1972 Presidential Primary Election Campaign of Senator Edmund S. Muskie,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh (1976); Bernard Asbell, The Senate Nobody Knows (1978); and James Gardner Ross, “As Maine Goes … The Early Years of Edmund Muskie,” unpublished thesis, Bates College (1986). Posthumous appraisals by Muskie’s colleagues are in United States Senate, Memorial Tributes Delivered in Congress: Edmund S. Mustie, 1914–1996, Late a Senator from Maine (1996). An obituary is in the New York Times (27 Mar. 1996).

Allan L. Damon