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By SUSAN M. COVER
Staff Writer 11/26/2007

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Today's Top Headlines
from the Kennebec Journal

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from the Kennebec Journal

Today's Top Headlines
from the Morning Sentinel

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Biathlon might skip out on Fort Kent
HUSKIES COLLECT 1ST WIN

All of today's: News | Sports
from the Morning Sentinel

It was April 1947 and Muskie, then a 33-year-old Waterville lawyer serving his second year as a legislator, was jokingly nominated by his peers as a candidate for governor.

"One of the gubernatorial nominees was a gangling, jut-jawed Democrat from Waterville who always seemed to have trouble sliding his six-foot, four-inch frame out from behind his representative's desk," wrote Portland Sunday Telegram reporter Clayton LaVerdiere.

"Fellow legislators roared good-naturedly when they witnessed the spectacle of a Democrat in the governor's chair -- a rare sight indeed in rock-ribbed Republican Maine."

Seven years later, Muskie defeated an incumbent Republican governor to lead Democrats back to the Blaine House after a 20-year dry spell.

The win left Mainers "breathless and bewildered," according to an editorial in the Daily Kennebec Journal, which had endorsed his opponent.

Edmund Sixtus Muskie served Maine and the nation in one elected office or another for 35 years, and continued to work on issues close to his heart after he left public service.

He ran for vice president in 1968 as Hubert Humphrey's running mate. And he led the Democratic pack for the 1972 presidential nomination until his campaign -- mired in debt and reeling from a run-in with a New Hampshire newspaper publisher -- crumbled in April of that year.

The son of a Polish immigrant tailor from Rumford, he is a fascinating former governor, the fifth in a Kennebec Journal six-part series.

"He was a very complicated person," said Don Nicoll, who knew Muskie for more than 40 years. "He was brilliant, highly principled and almost obsessed with public service."

EARLY YEARS

Born in 1914, Muskie was one of six children.

As the Ellis Island story goes, his father -- or an immigration official -- shortened the family name from Marciszewski to Muskie.

Muskie graduated in 1932 from Rumford High School and, four years later, from Bates College, where he was described as a "star debater." He earned his law degree from Cornell Law School.

During World War II, Muskie enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve and served three years.

His political career began in 1946, when he was elected to the Maine House of Representatives. He married Jane Gray of Waterville in 1948, and they had five children.

After six years in the House, he was elected Democratic National Committeeman at the national party convention in 1952.

Two years later, he ran for governor and became the state's first elected Roman Catholic governor and first Democrat to serve as chief executive in Maine in 20 years.

UPSET ELECTION

In the summer of 1953, Muskie invited Frank Coffin, a lawyer who was chosen to write the party platform that year, to his China Lake camp for a late summer barbecue, Coffin said.

The men discussed the names of several possible candidates to fill a variety of positions that would become open the following year, said Coffin, who later would serve as a judge in the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Muskie, with a strong interest in foreign policy, toyed with the idea of running for Congress, said Nicoll, who was working in radio at the time, but would later take a job working for the Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, after they exhausted all other possibilities, Muskie stepped forward to run for governor.

"It was almost by default," Nicoll said. "It was part of an effort to rebuild the party. The party didn't expect to win that year."

Coffin and Nicoll said they had several things working in their favor.

The Republican incumbent, Gov. Burton Cross, was not universally supported by Republicans, and had a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Television was still young, and relatively cheap, so Muskie bought air time and spoke directly to voters who didn't have a lot of channels to choose from.

And the candidate himself was a good speaker.

"We were very lucky and we worked very hard," Coffin said.

The party had only $18,000 to spend on five major campaigns -- three Congressional seats, one Senate seat and the governor's race, Coffin said.

In "Muskie," a 1972 book by Theo Lippman Jr. and Donald C. Hansen, the campaign was described as "laughable even by rustic Maine standards."

"There is no documented evidence that Muskie stayed even once in a hotel or motel during the campaign; while on the road he would sleep at the homes of obliging local Democrats," they wrote.

"Whenever possible he tried to spend the night in Waterville, where Jane could iron shirts and wash out underwear."

It's important to note, too, that the campaign faced long odds.

Of the 480,658 registered Maine voters, 55 percent were Republicans, 25 percent were unenrolled and 20 percent were Democrats.

On Election Day in September, Muskie beat Cross by 22,000 votes to pull off what the Associated Press called "a stunning upset."

IN OFFICE

Nicoll described Muskie as a "fiscal reformer" who changed the way the state budget is prepared, and stopped the state agency practice of storing up funds to spend at the end of the year.

He started water pollution control programs and signed into law the Sinclair Act, a major overhaul of the state's school systems that put in place modern-day school administrative districts.

He established a state economic development office and called for a study of state government as a way to save money.

Lippman and Hansen wrote that Muskie, who worked with a Republican-controlled Legislature, won passage of about 65 percent of all bills he supported and that nearly 90 percent of his "most important proposals were accepted."

Muskie won approval for a $24 million highway bond and a $13 million bond to improve hospitals and higher education. At his request, lawmakers approved a 1 percent increase in the sales tax.

Muskie, who served two two-year terms, also convinced lawmakers to change the governor's term to four years by assuring them that he did not intend to run again, according to Lippman and Hansen.

Instead, his eyes were set on the U.S. Senate, where he knocked off Republican incumbent Frederick Payne to become the first Democrat elected as a U.S. senator in Maine.

It's a position he would hold for the next 22 years, a period marked by accomplishments with environmental legislation, urban and metropolitan planning, historic preservation and budget reform, Nicoll said.

"It's an extraordinary record," he said, noting that Muskie's papers are available at Bates College in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives.

TEAR OR SNOWFLAKE?

No Muskie story would be complete without at least some discussion of the incident in which he stood on the steps of the Manchester Union Leader and angrily responded to attacks published in the paper.

It was February 1972, and Muskie was the Democratic front-runner in the presidential race. The New Hampshire newspaper had run an editorial -- and a letter to the editor -- that alleged that Muskie had used a slur against people of French-Canadian descent.

And the paper ran a story from Women's Wear Daily that depicted his wife as "smoking, drinking and cussing," wrote David Broder, a Washington Post reporter who covered the Muskie race.

Muskie was incensed at that attack on his wife and wanted to fight back against Union Leader Publisher William Loeb, said Severin Beliveau, an Augusta lawyer who was chairman of the Maine Democratic Party at the time.

Beliveau and others had breakfast with Muskie before he made his remarks on a flatbed trailer outside the newspaper. They stood behind him while he spoke on that snowy day.

Broder described it this way: "With tears streaming down his face and his voice choked with emotion, Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) stood in the snow outside the Manchester Union Leader this morning and accused its publisher of making vicious attacks on him and his wife, Jane."

Muskie went on to win the New Hampshire primary, but not by the expected margin, Beliveau said. Some interpreted Muskie's reaction as an indication that he wasn't ready for the rough-and-tumble presidential arena.

Muskie insisted that he did not cry, but that heavy falling snow made it look as if he did. Beliveau said he's not sure.

"I don't know, I was standing behind him," he said. "He was emotional for certain. He can be very forceful, very aggressive."

What no one knew at the time was that the "Canuck" letter printed by Loeb was planted by the Nixon administration in an attempt to discredit Muskie, Broder wrote in a 1987 story explaining how he covered Muskie's Union Leader speech.

"That was the defining moment of the campaign," Beliveau said. "That was the beginning of his political downfall."

By April, Muskie pulled out of the race.

LATTER YEARS

Muskie would continue to serve in the U.S. Senate until 1980, when he left to take over as Secretary of State for President Jimmy Carter.

Carter called on Muskie after Cyrus Vance resigned in the wake of the failed rescue of 53 U.S. hostages in Iran.

Even after he left the public spotlight, Muskie continued to work on causes he felt strongly about, such as legal representation for the poor, those who knew him said.

He died in 1996, at the age of 81.

Beliveau, who grew up in Muskie's hometown of Rumford, described Muskie as intelligent, engaging and demanding. He said efforts to push for the national legislation on clean air and clean water can be traced to Muskie's mill city upbringing.

"It was driven in great part by his life in Rumford," he said. "When he was a child, the Androscoggin River was polluted. Ice never formed on it.

"That drove him to promote the air and water legislation he sponsored."

Susan Cover -- 623-1056

scover@centralmaine.com

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