The story that still nags at me - Edward S. Muskie

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1987 by David Broder

Second, it is now clear that the incident shouldhave been placed in a different context: Muskie was victimized by the classic dirty trick that had been engineered by agents of the distent and detached President Nixon. The Loeb editorial that had brought Muskie out in the snowstorm had been based on a letter forged by a White House staff member intent on destroying Muskie's credibility. But we didn't know that and we didn't work hard enough to find out.

Mt. Muskie

To understand how such slip-ups happen, oneshould understand the work habits and psychology of reporters. It is not an accident that we refer to "news stories' as the basic ingredient of the news. Reporters are essentially storytellers in the narrative tradition. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we constantly devise the scripts we think appropriate for the events we cover.

Explicitly in my mind and, I think, implicitlyin the Post story I wrote from Manchester, there was a specific context into which the Muskie performance fit: the unraveling of a presidential front-runner's campaign.

The fourth paragraph of my story saidMuskie's appearance at the Union Leader "was designed to counter a threat to his support in the March 7 presidential primary from the voters who had read the Union Leader's charge Thursday that Muskie was unsympathetic to Franco-Americans.'

But that was only part of the threat. For weeks,the Post's coverage had emphasized that the senator, who was running even with President Nixon in the polls and well ahead of any opponent for the nomination, had chosen a high-risk, early-knockout strategy. He would run in all the early primaries in an effort to "collapse the opposition' and nail down the nomination by April 25, when Massachusetts and Pennsylvania completed the run of the first six contests.

Another theme was clearer in the conversationsof the journalists on the scene than in the copy we were filing. That was the possibility that Muskie might crack under the strain of his schedule and the tension of the most important election in his career. Deep down in a February 14 story, I alluded to this: "If sensitivity is the measure of insecurity, there is plenty of evidence that the Muskie camp feels some pressure from McGovern's campaign. . . . Several times this week, Muskie reacted with anger to questions from high school students he charged were "planted' by the McGovern camp.'

The scenes were uglier than that blandparagraph suggested. At one school, a teenager who asked an uncomfortable question was interrogated by the senator as if he were a prosecutor trying to shake the alibi of an accused wife-killer.

Lou Cannon witnessed those high schoolblowups and gained further insight into the state of Muskie's temper when he was invited to join in a friendly poker game aboard a Muskie charter. As Cannon described in his book, Reporting: An Inside View, "On the first hand Muskie was dealt four cards to an inside straight and threw down his hand with an oath when he failed to make the straight on the fifth card. I liked Muskie just fine, but I made a personal decision right then that he seemed a little temperamental to be president of the United States.'