Muskie: The Longest Journey Begins

We have won elections in Maine. We have won more than anyone thought we could. But is that all there is? We now have a chance to reach out to the country, to the world.

THE speaker was Edmund Sixtus Muskie, the scene his state party's annual August clambake near Brunswick. The occasion was both a remembrance and a farewell. For it was just 17 years ago this month, at the age of 40, that he became Maine's first Democratic Governor in 20 years. This week Muskie embarks upon the longest and most difficult journey of American public life -the run for the presidency of the U.S. The race is starting earlier this year than ever before, a full seven months before the first primary in New Hampshire in March, eleven months before the Democratic Convention begins in Miami Beach in July, 14 months before the election. The costs of running have never been higher: between $30 million and $50 million. Yet Edmund Muskie embarks with an enormous advantage over his Democratic opposition: he is the front runner.

For Muskie the journey begins in earnest this week in California, which, with at least 271 convention delegates, will be a crucial state for any Democratic candidate. On Labor Day, Muskie's schedule had him seeking support among Catholic labor leaders in Los Angeles. He will talk strategy with Democratic leaders in Santa Clara, San Francisco and San Diego, pause for a hospital tour in Watts, then head north to line up more party support in Oregon, another vital primary state.

The trip is the first in a series of forays that will take Muskie in the next few weeks to West Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin. In October he will concentrate on New York and New England, but he will stop in Mississippi, Ohio, New Jersey, Kansas and Missouri as well. By Nov. 1, he will have visited 14 of the 23 states -counting the District of Columbia -that will hold primaries next year. His strategy at this early stage is to drum up intersectional support and create enough political momentum to last through the hazards of the primaries and finally through the balloting next summer at Miami Beach's convention hall.

Search for a Winner

With so many other candidates in the field, Muskie plans to hold the center. If his earnest, sometimes ponderous manner does not project a specific magic, neither does it repel any constituency within the party. His hope is that his personal style will be so suited to the Democratic need for unity that he will become the inevitable candidate. He is counting on building a partywide feeling that he is the man who can engineer victory in '72 by pulling together the right and left, young and old, white and black.

As early as Muskie's lift-off seems in comparison with past political schedules, he has in fact been slow, even sluggish in going after the nomination seriously. Some politicians thought his congressional Election Eve TV speech last November gave him a virtual lock on the nomination. On that occasion, Muskie spoke right after Nixon's shrill broadcast, taped in Phoenix, in which the President obliquely linked his Democratic opponents with radical rock throwers. With the aid of onetime Robert Kennedy Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, Muskie conveyed an air of quiet and genuine outrage: "Honorable men have been slandered. They imply that Democratic candidates actually favor violence . . . That is a lie and the American people know it is a lie. How dare they!"

Moral Stature

The speech may or may not have contributed to the Democratic gains next day at the polls, but it unquestionably endowed Muskie with a certain moral stature and cast him as an earnest and moderate spokesman for the party. For the first time, he jumped ahead of Nixon in opinion polls. Both Democrats and Republicans believed that Muskie would waste no time moving to sew up the nomination, somewhat in the way that Barry Goldwater established his claim on the G.O.P. in early 1964.

Such expectations reckoned without the Muskie style, compounded of the hesitation, privacy and conviction that are simultaneously his strengths and his weaknesses. Another man-John Kennedy with his single-minded strategic will, or Lyndon Johnson with his visceral instinct for power-might have seized the chance, pressed for delegate guarantees throughout the country. "If he weren't so damned cautious," says an unannounced candidate, "he would now overwhelm the field."

True enough. Muskie went through the candidate's motions, stepping up his speaking schedule, traveling to Europe, the Middle East and Russia last January. But he displayed little of the killer instinct. He is a ruminative man who for most of his political career has proceeded with an almost elaborate deliberation, a perhaps understandable quality in a Democrat from traditionally Republican Maine. "I hated," says his wife Jane, "to see Ed so undecided, as he was a great part of last year. It was as if he was fighting inside himself." Says one aide: "He looks for seven sides to a four-sided question."

Now that he has begun to move, Muskie must consider some truly complex partisan geometries. So far, three major candidates and eight lesser contenders are in the running.

In the first rank with Muskie are: HUBERT HUMPHREY. Never expert at hiding his feelings, Humphrey clearly wants to try again. "I've got my sails up," he told reporters when he turned 60 last May. "I'm testing the waters." He allowed that he might enter the New York and California primaries next spring if the early heats fail to produce a winner. His centrist campaign contributors are waiting for him, still holding out on Muskie or anyone else; Humphrey has asked them to keep their purses locked until November. Labor still likes him. He is well known and has a following among party regulars, although he ran second to Muskie (37%, to 15%) in a Gallup poll of Democratic county chairmen. He is a close third in polls of registered Democrats (after Muskie and Edward Kennedy). But his 1968 defeat hurts badly, he is probably a too familiar face, and his nomination might touch off a schismatic fourth-party movement to the left. EDWARD KENNEDY. He has repeatedly forsworn any notion of running, although he has stopped short of a Sherman statement. He has made none of the quiet moves of a man who, despite public coyness, means to become a candidate. He almost certainly will not enter any primaries-but in eight states his name, as a prominently mentioned contender, may automatically appear on the ballot. He has kept his name and face before the public, with a trip to India last month. Another is planned shortly to Russia. His national health insurance program has organized labor's support, and its greatest appeal is to older people, who were among those most deeply offended by Chappaquiddick. Kennedy can afford to wait out the primaries and see whether Muskie stumbles. If that happens, Kennedy, with his name and following, could conceivably be the man that the convention would turn to. Observes a Nixon political aide: "Suppose he gets out there and says, 'Help me finish what my brothers began.' You can't say how people would respond." But trying for the presidency might involve, for him, an unacceptable personal risk.

In the heavily populated second level of Democratic contenders, declared or possible, are:

SOUTH DAKOTA SENATOR GEORGE McGOVERN.

The first announced candidate, McGovern has support among the young for his long stand against the war-a stand that makes his something of a one-issue candidacy. Knowing that, McGovern is now focusing more on economic issues. He is trying to organize the primary states down to the grass roots;' his campus organizations (more than 300) are the best in the field. But he is anathema to organized labor, has a tendency to shoot from the hip (his prompt labeling of the President's wage-price freeze as "economic madness," for example), and suffers from an image as "the Wally Cox of the campaign."

INDIANA SENATOR BIRCH BAYH. He faces even more trouble in establishing the credibility of his candidacy. A Gallup poll of registered Democrats last month made him the choice of only 2%. His Senate record is impressive-he organized the fight against the Haynsworth and Carswell Supreme Court nominations, helped lead the battle for amendments on presidential succession and the 18-year-old vote. But as one politician says: "He looks like the fellow who is running for Lieutenant Governor." He has good financial backing and a strong professional organization.

WASHINGTON SENATOR HENRY M. ("SCOOP") JACKSON.

His best asset is the clear line drawn between himself and the rest of the field. Although liberal enough on civil rights, he is a hard-liner on national defense, Viet Nam and law-and-order; he is the Democrat whom Richard Nixon wanted as his Secretary of Defense. The White House believes that he would be a tough opponent because he would cut into Nixon's conservative strength. But his nomination, even more than Humphrey's, might trigger a fourth-party split on the left.

OKLAHOMA SENATOR FRED HARRIS. He is preaching economic self-interest in his effort to put together an old-style populist coalition of whites and blacks among those with lower and middle incomes. The arithmetic of populism is persuasive, but it is probably easier to count such factions than to coalesce them, for enormous racial and ethnic fears would have to be overcome. Harris suffers from being little known, and to reach the masses with the kind of campaign he envisions would cost money he does not seem likely to raise.

NEW YORK MAYOR JOHN LINDSAY. He has glamour and attraction for the young, blacks and other minorities. Since he just last month quit the Republican Party, his candidacy would be called opportunistic. It would most severely damage McGovern, although Lindsay's TV presence and the fact that his popularity seems to increase as he gets farther from home, could hurt Muskie in California.

EUGENE MCCARTHY. He is scouting now, will probably announce his candidacy this fall. In 1968, he had the perfect foil in L.B.J., but now the villain is Richard Nixon, and McCarthy would have to share him widely. He still has a following from his 1968 crusade, as one politician says: "There are some people who think that only they and Gene understand things." The Gallup poll of Democrats gave him the support of only 6%. A long shot for the nomination, he could lead a leftward fourth party in the November election -a move that might split the party sufficiently to ensure Nixon's reelection.

ARKANSAS CONGRESSMAN WILBUR MILLS.

The power broker of the House, he is shopping around. His presidential chances are slim, but he might establish himself as broker for Southern and Border State delegations, and then bargain for second spot on the ticket.

WISCONSIN SENATOR WILLIAM PROXMIRE. He gained a measure of national recognition for leading the successful Senate fight against the supersonic transport, but otherwise lacks any broad constituency. He speaks often of the need for reordering priorities, cutting funds for the military and the space program in order to upgrade health and education. Proxmire believes that the economy will be the most important factor in the 1972 election and is waiting to see how Nixon's new policies fare. If he enters the April 4 primary in his home state, he may deny a victory there to any major candidate.

Measure of Cadence

Set against these personalities, Muskie is at once an unusually simple and an unusually complex man. For a politician, his public and private personalities fuse to a remarkable extent-he is what he seems, whether his mood is lofty or merely testy. Yet he is a difficult man to understand. "You don't really know Ed Muskie," says one friend. "You may think you do, or you may sense him. But you don't know him." To some he is a political platitude, espousing honesty, sincerity, hard work, independence and loyalty. But he really believes in such ideals and lives by them.

Muskie moves and works in a measured cadence-slow, methodical, studied. Says Gene Letourneau, a friend who sometimes hunts birds with him in Maine: "When Ed goes out in the woods, he is just as cautious as when he makes a big political decision. He wants to know where he's going. He always has the compass out."

His critics call such qualities indecisiveness. His staff finds the charge peculiar. They know Muskie as a tough, demanding boss with extraordinarily high standards that reflect an almost excessive decisiveness. On the draft-reform bill this year, for example, there were some 65 amendments in the Senate. On each one, Muskie demanded a staff memo. Adding to the burden, Muskie made a major speech on the bill that required six redrafts. He is a cool, cerebral and persistent plodder, insisting on thorough research, wary of hasty conclusions, suspicious of headline-grabbing pronouncements. Says George Mitchell, his deputy campaign director: "He's simply not a guy who will do things because someone says he should. He demands to know the reasons."

His Vesuvian temper is legendary. One of his biographers, Theo Lippman Jr., reports that "he gave us ten interviews for the book [Muskie], and in the last one, we brought up the subject of his temper. He lost his temper." The Republican National Committee, as part of its research on Muskie, has an affidavit from a Maine telephone operator swearing that during a Muskie vacation a few years ago, a telephone repairman had to go up to the Senator's cottage three times to fix a phone that had been ripped off the wall.

"He does blow his stack occasionally," says Jane Muskie, "but then it's over. It's probably a damned good reason why he doesn't have an ulcer." With all his temper, observes former Senator Albert Gore, "Muskie is a gentle man. He has a whimsical sense of humor that doesn't go over the heads of people like Adlai's sometimes did." Set against his cautious decision-making processes, his temper would be a doubtful target for his political opponents. No one who knows Muskie can imagine him making a major decision in a fit of rage.

Although their characters are very different, Muskie and Nixon share some qualities. Both are ill at ease in small talk. During his trip to the Middle East and Europe last January, Muskie was obviously uncomfortable in making little toasts and speeches at the endless diplomatic receptions. Like Nixon, he relished his meetings with heads of state -Kosygin, Brandt and Anwar Sadat. Employing a Nixonian phrase, Muskie says he liked "the mental combat."

Shadow Cabinet

In part it was Muskie's caution that caused him to delay for months in reorganizing his staff, tooling it to the needs of a presidential candidate. As his campaign director, Muskie hired 42-year-old Berl Bernhard, a bright attorney who used to be staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Bernhard quickly proved to be a demanding and effective organizer with a touch of humor.

It was a good choice, for Muskie is absorbed by issues and bored by the details of campaign organizing. All he requires from his manager is that operations run smoothly. But he uses his staff intensively as intellectual instruments. Twice a month, his legislative aides prepare a 30-to 40-page, single-spaced briefing book that covers major foreign and domestic events of the previous two weeks. Muskie's latest book contains a long selection on the Middle East, another on developments since Nixon's China initiative, a third on the balance of payments. Chief Legislative Assistant Dan Lewis assembles the material, indexes it and puts it into a loose-leaf notebook for Muskie's use.

Muskie has assembled a shadow Cabinet for advice and tutoring. Former Ambassador Averell Harriman, former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke brief him on foreign affairs and national security. On economics, he consul s Arthur Okun and Walter Heller, from Lyndon Johnson's Council of Economic Advisers, and Pierre Rinfret, a New York-based economic consultant, who also advises Nixon on occasion. The Johnsonesque cast of the group does not help Muskie's image, but Deputy Campaign Director George Mitchell insists that the Senator consults a much wider variety of specialists, whose identities have not yet leaked out.

Muskie's intelligence is tenacious rather than spectacular. Says one of his economic advisers: "What I've seen of Muskie so far, I like very much.

He sits still better, listens better than Hubert Humphrey, for example. If you are talking about a quick flash of insight of the kind Jack Kennedy had all the time, none of the Democratic candidates have that. It took us a while to get Muskie to home in on the subject, but after we finally captured his attention, he was terrific."

To handle communications, especially television, Muskie has Robert Squier, who will try to re-create the success of Muskie's 1970 Election Eve broadcast. "He has a totally integrated personality for television," says Squier, who met Muskie in 1968 when he was one of Humphrey's television consultants. Squier believes that Muskie has a great advantage over the other potential candidates, except John Lindsay, in using TV. Humphrey, says Squier, "can't stop talking. He's too much, too hot for the medium. Bayh is interesting on the tube, but it is difficult to find 45 consecutive seconds of Bayh that make sense. Jackson is not good on television and neither is McGovern. Harris may be the best of the lot, but his personal appearance is not good. He has to lose about 30 pounds. Now he comes across as a big, toady frog."

Squier likes to look past the convention to the general election. "I'll tell you what I dream about," he says. "I dream about Muskie-Nixon debates. I don't say that television can win it for Muskie, but I do think Muskie can win it on television."

The Money Thing

A principal problem now is raising the $1,000,000 that Muskie will need to sustain and build his operation before the New Hampshire primary. Muskie dislikes rattling the tin cup. When the subject comes up, he grumbles: "This money thing-my God."

But money troubles have already caused two staff cuts, necessitated salary slashes among campaign workers -some simply became unpaid volunteers-and spawned hard-to-come-by loans that will have to be repaid promptly. Muskie has enlisted talented money-raisers-former Democratic National Committeeman Paul Ziffren in Los Angeles, Northeast Theater President Sumner Redstone in Boston, United Artists' Arnold Picker in New York. But some major sources of Democratic campaign funds are still wary. "These guys," says a Muskie agent, "want to make investments, not contributions." They want a sure winner. Not until the fall and winter, if Muskie remains high in the opinion polls as the primaries approach, will some checkbooks begin opening.

Muskie's men are trying to set up organizations in all of the primary states. They want to be ready for a campaign in any one of the 23, although they know that entering all of them would cost a preposterous $12 million. They also know that as the campaign gathers momentum, all the other candidates are going to be gunning for the front runner, trying to knock him out in states where they think they can beat him.

Muskie will present himself to voters as a healer and a unifier-striking the same "bring us together" theme that Richard Nixon sounded in his Inaugural Address. "I think the country wants to believe in itself again," says Muskie, "not only in its purpose or moral values, but also its quality to achieve whatever it sets as a national goal." He uses the word manage repeatedly, suggesting that besides suffering from racial and ideological ills, the nation has become rather incompetent. "We're not even sure we can manage ourselves or do anything that requires management," he says. "We have doubts about whether we can manage our welfare program, manage our environmental problems, manage our city problems. This is a rather traumatic American doubt. In the area of management, we have always felt that we surpassed other peoples, and now we are not so sure of it any more."

The Marciszewslcis

It is characteristic of Muskie to emphasize expertise rather than ideology. His Maine background enforced a sense of the practical. The son of a Polish immigrant tailor who anglicized the family name from Marciszewski, Muskie grew up in the mill town of Rumford. Fifty miles from the sea, Rumford is not part of the Maine that Americans see on postcards or during holidays. It lies in the sometimes impoverished wood country, among the mills that are at the heart of Maine's economy. Muskie's mother still lives there in a ramshackle neighborhood.

If his boyhood was somewhat straitened, it was not particularly deprived or, as some biographers claim, deeply clouded by bigotries against "Polacks." Muskie took some heckling as a Polish child in predominantly French-Canadian Rumford, but it was nothing traumatic. Like the Muskies, the other townspeople were largely Roman Catholic. Muskie was an earnest student, and was popular enough in high school to become president of the student council. He joined the debating squad and the basketball team-as a substitute. At Maine's Bates College, working his way through. Muskie was elected class president and graduated cum hiudc. His grades were equally good at Cornell Law School, where he graduated cum laude in 1939.

After Navy duty in the Atlantic and the Pacific during World War II, Muskie returned to practice law in Waterville. In 1948 he married Jane Gray, a bookkeeper, salesgirl and occasional model in a local fashion shop. Attracted by the New Deal, Muskie had joined the Maine Democratic Party and successfully run for the state legislature in 1946. Democrats were such a novelty that he soon became the Democratic house floor leader. In 1954 he was elected Governor, partly because thousands of down-Easters were simply looking for an alternative to granitic Republicanism.

In an effort to attract new income and jobs to the state, Muskie formed the Industrial Development Agency, which in subsequent years has become a villain to environmentalists. Otherwise, he earned a reputation as a progressive Governor and rapidly became the state's most popular personality. In 1958, after two terms in the Governor's mansion, Muskie ran for the Senate against the incumbent, Frederick Payne, who had had the bad luck to be involved in the Bernard Goldfine scandal.

"Mr. Clean"

In his 13 years in the Senate, Muskie has become known for his thoroughness and competence. "He is the best of us all," says Montana's Senator Lee Metcalf. "If I rated all Senators on a scale of 100, Muskie would be first." As a legislator, Muskie has probably made his greatest impact in promoting environment-protection bills, even before ecology became a crusade. As chairman of the Air and Water Pollution Subcommittee, he wrote the 1963 Clean Air Act, the initial major federal statute aimed at curbing air pollution. It was the first of a series of antipollution bills whose authorship earned him the title "Mr. Clean." In 1965 he wrote the Water Quality Act, establishing the federal Water Pollution Control Administration and creating a water quality standards program.

Although Muskie is the acknowledged Senate authority on environment legislation, Ralph Nader's raiders last year issued an air-pollution report that sharply criticized his 1967 clean-air amendments for establishing regional instead of national air-quality standards. "Muskie," said the Nader paper, "has never seemed inclined (either politically or temperamentally) toward taking a tough stand against private industry." The findings were accurate in some ways but unfair to Muskie in others. Even the raiders conceded that in 1967 Congress would not have approved national emission standards. Muskie's proposals have steadily gotten tougher as public concern over pollution has made stronger laws possible.

Voting Record

There is one area in which Muskie has been lenient on industry. On the issue of free trade v. protectionism, he has generally been a mild protectionist, reflecting his Maine constituents' fears of foreign competition in the shoe and textile industries. Otherwise, Muskie's voting record in the Senate is far more liberal than his current centrist image would suggest. Americans for Democratic Action gave him a 91% "right" grade on the last session; Kennedy, Bayh and McGovern all scored less than 90% . The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s COPE (Committee on Political Education) Scoreboard from 1959 to 1970 gave him 60 "right" votes and only two "wrong"-a pro-labor record matched or surpassed by only eight other Senators.

On questions of civil liberties, his record is equally liberal. He denounced the Nixon Administration's District crime bill, with its no-knock and preventive-detention provisions. He has attacked the FBI for its surveillance of an Earth Day rally he addressed last year.

Muskie has joined in proposing a special White House office on drug abuse and a program that would spend $340 million-nearly double the present federal expenditure-to establish local treatment centers for drug addicts. He can also count legislative contributions over the years in housing, urban affairs, revenue sharing and welfare reform.

In 1966 Muskie saved L.B.J.'s Model Cities program from Senate defeat by an exercise of homespun eloquence. The bill passed by a surprising 53-22 majority. Says Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield: "Senator Muskie is the only Senator I've known in my 19 years here who has been able to change a large number of votes to get a certain piece of legislation through."

His record on Viet Nam, however, is a liability in the eyes of many Democrats, especially those who tried to get the 1968 Democratic platform committee to adopt a strong antiwar plank. In January of 1968, Muskie wrote a private letter to L.BJ. urging a bombing halt as a step toward a negotiated settlement. Seven months later he defended the President's policy by supporting the convention's majority plank on Viet Nam, which leaves him open now to a charge of political expediency. Muskie tries to minimize the zeal with which he backed the plank.

Since Viet Nam is no longer the political issue that it was, voters may not be much bothered by the fact that Muskie did not oppose the war earlier. Besides, he was hardly alone. It was, one close associate says, "a case of Muskie not trusting his basic instincts. He sensed something was deeply wrong, but it was another case of his feeling he didn't have enough facts. In the future, he will trust his own instincts to a greater degree."

The Last Vacation

Muskie and his growing family occupy a colonial house in suburban Bethesda. A light drinker who likes an occasional Manhattan or martini, he avoids the Washington cocktail circuit, preferring to entertain small groups of neighbors at dinner. Among his best friends is Michigan's Senator Philip Hart, and the Harts are frequent dinner guests.

Muskie likes to read at least two hours a day-mostly committee reports, although he recently found time for Future Shock and The French Lieutenant's Woman. But the campaign increasingly encroaches. He is an amateur photographer with a taste for artistic shots, like dew on a cobweb. He takes his Roman Catholic religion seriously, and his staff has learned that a sure way to infuriate him is to make up a schedule that does not include time for Sunday Mass. He is an oldfashioned, even Victorian father, although not a strict disciplinarian. "I can remember being spanked only two times," says his oldest son Steve, now 22.

For four weeks before Labor Day, Muskie sequestered himself and his family in his rambling house at Kennebunk Beach. It was probably the last real vacation he will enjoy until after the Democratic Convention, and Muskie savored it. He would rise at 6 for a swim in the icy Atlantic, then jog back through the coastal fog. Then he would light a fire in the fireplace and read until lunchtime. After eating, he would slip through a hole in the hedge to the next-door Web-hannet Golf Club, where he would play what a friend calls "medicare golf." Muskie broke his back in a fall 18 years ago while fixing up his house in Maine. As a result, his golf swing is awkward. Still, in an intense, flailing exercise, he somehow manages to shoot in the mid-90s. One of the first times he played, he shot a hole-in-one, and he has been trying ever since to regain that glory.

What Edmund Muskie is now attempting politically is surely as difficult. His role as front runner is working quietly in his favor, and he has none of the slickness and insincerity associated with many politicians. But there is a real danger in his candidacy: he could become vaguely boring. An Olympian independence, a Lincolnesque candor can become dull in the unpredictable psychology of a long campaign.

Muskie's moral heft, his air of personal and political authenticity could be effective against Richard Nixon in the general election. The question now is whether Muskie will survive that long, or be eliminated in one of the primaries or at the convention. His campaign has, like the candidate himself, a certain steadiness, equilibrium rather than passion. Whether it is enough to be the sober centrist in a divided party remains to be seen, as does Muskie's capacity to adapt, grow and learn now that the race is beginning in earnest.

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