Muskie Dies at 81; Served as Senator, Secretary of State

Edmund S. Muskie, for years one of the Senate’s most respected and innovative members and secretary of state in the final months of the Carter administration, died Tuesday after suffering a heart attack. He would have been 82 on Thursday.

The Maine Democrat was perhaps best known because of his campaign for an office that he never held: the presidency. While seeking votes in the 1972 New Hampshire primary, he reacted angrily while standing in the back of flatbed truck in a snowstorm--tears apparently running down his cheeks--to a newspaper story containing insults about his wife.

The incident “changed people’s minds about me, of what kind of guy I was,” Muskie later told author Theodore H. White. “They were looking for a strong, steady man and here I was weak.”

Whether Muskie actually had shed tears was hotly debated. But his campaign took a downward turn and Sen. George S. McGovern of South Dakota won the nomination.

Because of his 6-foot-4 frame and his handsome but craggy features, Muskie was commonly described as “Lincolnesque.” It became a cliche that endured to his death and seldom failed to bring an embarrassed smile to Muskie’s face.

He tended to be very soft-spoken and low-key and, like many New England Yankees, reserved and taciturn. “When you have nothing to say, don’t try to improve on silence,” he liked to say.

Yet when aroused by an issue, he could be a passionate and eloquent speaker, particularly in Senate debates.

“He is one of the few men I have seen who could literally pull a bill through the Senate with his arguments,” former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) once said.

Although Muskie wanted to be president--and many people thought him well-suited for the job--his passion for the office was not all-consuming, and he took his 1972 presidential primary defeat gracefully.

President Clinton, citing Muskie’s caring and dedication to public service, said Tuesday that he was “a leader in the best sense. He spoke from his heart and acted with conviction.”

Muskie, the first Democrat in Maine’s history to be popularly elected to the Senate, was nearing the end of his fourth six-year term when President Carter asked him to become secretary of state.

The opening occurred on April 28, 1980, when Cyrus R. Vance resigned in protest over Carter’s orders to go ahead with the ill-fated military effort to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. Vance considered it a rash move that could endanger the hostages’ lives.

The only doubt some of his Senate colleagues had was whether Muskie’s well-known temper might prove a handicap in diplomatic negotiations.

“He has the most violent temper of any human being I have ever met,” said one senator, speaking anonymously, who had been a target of Muskie’s wrath more than once.

But even that senator went along with the majority as the Senate approved the Muskie nomination, 94 to 2.

“His coolness under pressure and his sound judgment helped him play a crucial role in bringing all the American hostages home from Iran to safety and freedom, and he was always careful to give credit to others for this achievement,” Carter said.

Leon Billings, Muskie’s chief Senate aide who accompanied him to the State Department as executive assistant, said that Muskie changed the policy in dealing with the hostage crisis. He switched it “from constant attention to the hostage issue to more or less putting it on the back burner,” Billings said. “We took the advice of our Iranian experts who said as long as you keep the issue up front the Iranians won’t settle. They will settle in their own time and that is what happened. We took the approach of just waiting.”

From his earliest days, Muskie was noted for three qualities more significant than his temper: brilliance, caution and shyness.

He was not greatly learned in many disciplines but he had a powerful intellect. His cautiousness--wanting to know every side of a question before making a decision--was both a strength and a weakness. His Senate colleagues tended to trust him when he took a strong position because they knew that he had explored all sides of an issue.

But his caution also sometimes hurt him politically. He was slow in moving toward opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War--a factor in the 1972 presidential campaign. McGovern had based his candidacy on opposition to the war.

Shyness plagued Muskie from childhood. As he told an interviewer in 1976: “I can remember the first time I was given a birthday party. I wasn’t more than 4 years old. I was so shy that I wouldn’t stay in the same room with the guests. I took my ice cream and went into another room to eat it.”

Edmund Sixtus Muskie, the second of six children, was born in the textile-mill town of Rumford, Maine, on March 28, 1914. His father, born Stephen Marciszewski, fled his home in Russian-occupied Poland at 17 to escape being drafted into the czarist army. Because Americans found his name hard to pronounce, he changed it to Muskie.

Young Muskie, in an effort to overcome his shyness, became a star debater and graduated from high school as class valedictorian. He worked his way through Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors.

He earned his law degree from Cornell and opened a law office in Waterville, Maine, shortly before the United States entered World War II. Enlisting in the Navy, Muskie served on destroyer escorts in the Pacific and Atlantic before being discharged as a lieutenant in 1945.

Returning to Waterville, Muskie became active in Maine’s minuscule Democratic Party and decided to run for the state Legislature while waiting for his law practice to grow.

In 1946, he was elected to the first of three terms in the Maine House, where he soon became leader of a lonely band of minority Democrats.

In 1954, in what he and almost everyone regarded as a quixotic quest, Muskie was persuaded to run for governor. In an upset that surprised the entire nation, he won by 22,000 votes, becoming Maine’s first Roman Catholic governor and the first Democrat to hold the office in 20 years.

He proved to be highly popular, and he won a second term in 1956 by 56,000 votes, the largest margin ever given a Maine governor at that point.

Muskie scored another upset in 1958 when he challenged one of Maine’s two Republican senators, Frederick G. Payne, and won by 60,000 votes.

On arriving in the Senate, Muskie promptly ran afoul of then-Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Texas), who wanted him to help defeat an effort by Senate liberals to make it easier to cut off filibusters. Muskie refused. Johnson retaliated by giving Muskie unwanted committee assignments.

In 1963, Muskie was named chairman of a newly created Public Works subcommittee on the environment. In those days, concern over clean air and clean water was far down the list of national issues. But Muskie, who always tried to make the best of every opportunity, studied the subject and made himself an expert on it. He also conducted a series of hearings across the nation and soon created a national constituency for problems of the environment.

The result was a succession of clean air and clean water laws, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Muskie’s becoming known as “Mr. Environment.”

In 1968, when then-Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey won the Democratic presidential nomination at that year’s bitter and tumultuous national convention in Chicago, he chose Muskie as his running mate.

Although Muskie was relatively unknown nationally, his low-key style proved highly effective, and he shortly was regarded as the brightest star of that campaign year.

By the campaign’s end, many people were saying that the Democratic ticket should have been Muskie-Humphrey instead of the other way around.

By early 1972, he was the clear front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But then his troubles began. His staff overbooked him on travel and speeches. Muskie, who had never had much stamina after breaking his back in a nasty fall in his Waterville home in 1953, was constantly fatigued.

What had served him well in 1968--a centrist position, a soft-spoken campaign style and a certain fuzziness on the issues--proved disastrous in 1972.

Muskie was reelected handily to the Senate in 1976 for what turned out to be his final term.

After stepping down as secretary of state, he was named head of the Washington office of Chadbourne & Parke, a New York law firm specializing in international law.

He continued to be active in public affairs, serving on the Tower Commission, which investigated the role of the National Security Council staff during the Iran-Contra affair; leading a delegation to Vietnam in 1993 to explore lifting the embargo against that country, and chairing the Center for National Policy, a Democratic think tank.

He is survived by his wife, the former Jane Gray, whom he married in 1948, five children and seven grandchildren.