Edmund S Muskie "President Jimmy Carter said that no man was more presidential, or more worthy of being president"
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL MINDS ABIGAIL MCCARTHY EDMUND S. MUSKIE Let us now praise honorable men When former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie died recently, a neighbor couple came to call on his wife...
...At the time his emotion and frustration were depicted as signs of instability and weakness...
...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...
...The way lay in his character...
...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...
...Principle outweighed politics...
...But it was not only a belated but a limited realization...
...The world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped by the will of men...
...A striking example of one of his basic beliefs is recounted in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post after his death...
...He was the master of achieving consensus, of persuading colleagues of both parties to unite in support of ground-breaking and politically threatening initiatives...
...Because it is right," he said...
...He walked by his own words spoken in 1970...
...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...
...Yet he was the quintessential legislator...
...More than 95 percent of the lead had been removed from the nation's air...
...Muskie could rage at injustice but exhibited great reasonableness and a spirit of reconciliation in working for justice...
...There was ironic and touching evidence of this in the speech Stephen Muskie, the eldest son, gave to gathered friends...
...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...
...A man of deep feeling, he is said to have wept...
...His campaign languished and eventually died...
...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...
...Others noted the sea change in public opinion that now welcomes and approves a display of feeling by a president...
...Every Sunday at home saw him at his parish Mass and, a world traveler, he sought out a church wherever he was...
...And he did just that quietly and effectively...
...He was a victim of several of the Nixon-planted "dirty tricks" during that campaign...
...Secretary Muskie ended the discussion by saying that nevertheless the United States would vote for the resolution...
...Ed Muskie was a man of faith...
...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...
...All the attending assistant secretaries advised against voting for it...
...As secretary of state he could enforce what was right by fiat...
...Great men are essentially human...
...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...
...None...
...Like George Washington, he contended with a towering temper as he strove for moral rectitude...
...He spoke JOHN GARVEY 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...
...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...
...We shall miss him...
...he also loved golf and spectator sports...
...Like Lincoln, to whom he was often compared, he had a fondness for humorous and sometimes earthy stories and disarming candor...
...The Great Lakes were dying...
...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...
...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...
...In too many places, the air was a threat to a child's lungs and even to a community's life...
...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...
...To do that Muskie had to change the way people thought...
...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...
...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...
...When he began his work, nearly three-quarters of the nation's rivers were unswim-mable and unfishable...
...His fierce patriotism was rooted in his pride in a country in which he, the son of a Polish immigrant, could achieve a professional education and high office...
...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...
...He believed in his fellow man and practiced the politics of trust...
...He loved his books, especially histories...
...We always liked and admired your husband," they told her, "but we didn't really know that he was a great man...
...Former ambassador Julius Walker told of a staff meeting at which Muskie presided when secretary of state...
...It might split the NATO countries, cause problems with other states, etc...
...The Great Lakes were alive-recreationally, economically, and spiritually...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS ABIGAIL MCCARTHY EDMUND S. MUSKIE Let us now praise honorable men When former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie died recently, a neighbor couple came to call on his wife Jane...
...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...
...One of the subjects was how the United States should vote on a forthcoming resolution at the UN...
...One was the necessity of equalizing the relationship between the federal government and the states as governmental responsibilities grew and widened...
...almost reflexively, the eulogists at his funeral called him Senator...
...He could do that because he was fair, open to other senators' problems, deliberative, and convincing...
Vol. 123 • May 1996 • No. 9
