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

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1987 by David Broder

Cannon asked the right question:

What does a political reporter do withthis kind of insight? As in this instance, it is rarely written as a hard news story the first time the thought arises. Most reporters have a healthy reluctance to play amateur psychiatrist. Often, the incidents are trivial in themselves. Sometimes, as with the poker game, they occur in semiprivate settings, which many reporters--myself included-- feel uncomfortable in exploiting directly for journalistic purposes.

What we tend to do is to store such incidentsin our minds and then use them to interpret major incidents when they occur.

Such was the case with Muskie's emotionaldisplay in Manchester. One reason Jack Germond reacted as swiftly and surely as he did to the television pictures of the scene was that he had been present--as I was--at an off-the-record session almost a year before, where a group of political reporters had dinner and a long evening of discussion with Muskie. What all of us remember about the evening was that much of the time Muskie was in a bellowing rage, brought on by persistent efforts to draw him forth on the Vietnam war.

We all suspected that under the calm, placid,reflective face that Muskie liked to show the world, there was a volcano waiting to erupt. So we treated Manchester as a political Mt. St. Helen's explosion, an event that would permanently alter the shape of "Mt. Muskie.'

It was not an accident that in the fifthparagraph of my story, I wrote: "The 60 to 70 newsmen and supporters huddled in the snowstorm to hear the senator's speech watched with surprise as the normally disciplined Muskie let his anger and his frustration show.'

Nor was it unplanned that after clearly identifyingLoeb as a harsh critic of the senator and the chief supporter of his rival, Sam Yorty, I still gave front-page prominence to the publisher's response: "I think Senator Muskie's excited and near-hysterical performance this morning again indicates he's not the man that many of us want to have his finger on the nuclear button.'

It was the temper-tantrum theme that Muskie'spolitical foes such as Senator Robert Dole, then the Republican national chairman, used in their second-day comments that built the momentum for the story and kept it bubbling in the press.

A bad scene

With the advantage of hindsight, I think I wascorrect to treat the Manchester incident as a major event and to put it in the context of a highrisk, go-for-broke campaign strategy by an exhausted, emotional candidate who was unable to sustain the pace. Muskie himself said as much after the campaign in an interview with Theodore H. White for The Making of the President 1972:

That previous week, I'd been down toFlorida, then I flew to Idaho, then I flew to California, then I flew back to Washington to vote in the Senate, and I flew back to California, and then I flew into Manchester and I was hit with this "Canuck' story. I'm tough physically, but no one could do that--it was a bitch of a day. The staff thought I should go down to the Union Leader to reply to that story. If I was going to do it again, I'd look for a campaign manager, a genius, a schedule-maker who has veto power over a candidate's own decisions. You got to have a czar. For Christ's sake, you got to pace yourself. I was just goddamned mad and choked up over my anger.