Edmund S. Muskie: let us now praise honorable men

Commonweal, May 3, 1996 by Abigail McCarthy

When former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie died recently, a neighbor couple came to call on his wife Jane. "We always liked and admired your husband," they told her, "but we didn't really know that he was a great man." In a way it was as if, like those neighbors, the whole country came belatedly to that realization and to the realization of what we owed him. But it was not only a belated but a limited realization.

Columnist David Broder, perhaps, as he has been called, the pre-eminent American political journalist, wrote that Muskie was an apostle of civility and a politician of rare vision. "The obituaries of Muskie were appreciative but barely did justice to the clarity with which he addressed two overriding national issues decades before most other politicians came to grips with them." One was the necessity of equalizing the relationship between the federal government and the states as governmental responsibilities grew and widened. The other was the need to put order into congressional spending, and in response to that need, he led the way to the establishment of the budget process.

Few people can and do appreciate these fine but important points of governance and their effect on the country, but we can all give thanks for Muskie's greatest gift to us--clean air, clean water--a livable world. Commentator Mark Shields said it best:

Before he began his work, there were no national laws and no international agreements governing the quality of the country's air and water. None. When he began his work, nearly three-quarters of the nation's rivers were unswimmable and unfishable. The Great Lakes were dying. In too many places, the air was a threat to a child's lungs and even to a community's life.

In no small measure because of the laws he wrote, twenty years later three-quarters of the nation's rivers were both swimmable and fishable. The Great Lakes were alive--recreationally, economically and spiritually. More than 95 percent of the lead had been removed from the nation's air.

To do that Muskie had to change the way people thought. He had to stem the unbridled despoliation of field and river and lake and terrain that for two hundred years Americans had accepted as necessary for progress. He had to bring about a revolution in the way people lived and acted, convert them from selfish heedlessness to healthy, sane, and safe practices that benefit the whole community. And he did just that quietly and effectively. How?

The way lay in his character. A striking example of one of his basic beliefs is recounted in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post after his death. Former ambassador Julius Walker told of a staff meeting at which Muskie presided when secretary of state. One of the subjects was how the United States should vote on a forthcoming resolution at the UN. All the attending assistant secretaries advised against voting for it. It might split the NATO countries, cause problems with other states, etc. Secretary Muskie ended the discussion by saying that nevertheless the United States would vote for the resolution. "Because it is right," he said. Principle outweighed politics.

As secretary of state he could enforce what was right by fiat. It was one of his very human characteristics that, as he often frankly said, he preferred being governor of Maine and secretary of state--offices in which he exercised final authority--to being in the Senate where legislation was a matter of consensus. Yet he was the quintessential legislator; almost reflexively, the eulogists at his funeral called him Senator. He was the master of achieving consensus, of persuading colleagues of both parties to unite in support of ground-breaking and politically threatening initiatives. He could do that because he was fair, open to other senators' problems, deliberative, and convincing. But in the end he could do it because what he was advocating was right and others recognized the basic integrity on which his cause was based.

In his tribute at the final service, President Jimmy Carter said that no man was more presidential or more worthy of being president than Ed Muskie. That he never became president is attributed now to the shabby press handling of an incident during the 1972 primary campaign, an incident unfortunately exhumed by far too many news shows at the time of his death. He was a victim of several of the Nixon-planted "dirty tricks" during that campaign. He was finally driven to an emotional public attempt at refutation in New Hampshire when the infamous Manchester Union Leader was fed and published a scurrilous attack on his wife. A man of deep feeling, he is said to have wept. At the time his emotion and frustration were depicted as signs of instability and weakness. His campaign languished and eventually died.

Reflecting on this at the time of Muskie's death, David Broder wrote that he still has a guilty conscience about "unwittingly helping the Nixon saboteurs do their work by publicizing Muskie's response to their libel." Others noted the sea change in public opinion that now welcomes and approves a display of feeling by a president. There was ironic and touching evidence of this in the speech Stephen Muskie, the eldest son, gave to gathered friends. He spoke emotionally, with unabashed love and sentiment, of a father dear to his wife and five children, of a grandfather who delighted his grandchildren with mischievous play, and was met with emotion in return.