October 7, 1968
Page 29864
VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE EDMUND S. MUSKIE
Mr. McGEE. Mr. President, many candidates for high national office in this country have come from the Chamber of the U.S. Senate.
One of those who has comported himself with a dignity and a humility, that should cause us all extreme pride in this institution is the able Senator from Maine, EDMUND S. MUSKIE.
Campaigns, as we all know only too well, are hectic, harassing, and tiring. It is not difficult in an off moment to make a statement or to do something in a moment of passion that is beneath the normal dignity of a public official.
In this respect, no one has conducted themselves more creditably, with more propriety, yet with more humility and honesty than has our good friend and colleague ED MUSKIE. His performance should be a source of pride to all Members of this body – Democrat or Republican.
One who has managed to capture to some degree the cheerful yet determined attitude of Senator MUSKIE in this campaign year is the distinguished columnist Marquis Childs.
I ask unanimous consent that a column by Mr. Childs, published in the October 7, 1968, Washington Post be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows
A REWARDING EXPERIENCE FOR SENATOR MUSKIE
(By Marquis Childs)
LOS ANGELES. – Crisscrossing back and forth across the country, Sen. and Mrs. Edmund S. Muskie are having a ball. Grim as Democratic prospects are and demanding as the schedule is, the candidate for Vice President readily concedes that never before has he had such a fascinating and rewarding experience.
It took him a week or so to get acclimated to the bright, hot glare of national attention. Cautious and underrated at the start, he soon hit his stride. His relaxed and friendly manner is reflected in the ever-increasing crowds that come out to see this hitherto unknown Senator from Maine.
Again and again this reporter has heard both Democrats and Republicans say, "Of all four candidates I like him best." Recognizing that Muskie is one of the few pluses in his rugged uphill campaign, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey has given him a free hand to direct his own course with a minimum of official coordination.
Early in the game, Muskie acquired a gentle but effective way with hecklers. First, he listened.
Then as he began to do at Washington. Pa., where students of Washington and Jefferson College were booing aid to education, he got a leader to come up to the platform. What, you're booing aid to education? You, who are college students? With his mild irony he reduced them to silence.
Granted, of course, that his hecklers are nothing like as noisy and persistent as the young who disrupt Humphrey's meetings – Muskie carries far less of the burden of blame as the young see it for the Administration's Vietnam policy. His is a new face in a year when the two principals are old faces out of a past that the obstreperous young have completely rejected.
The Muskie face is a remarkable example of the conditioning of environment. Mrs. Alice Longsworth, one of the sharpest observers of the Washington scene over many decades beginning with her years in the White House with her father, Theodore Roosevelt, remarked the other day that While Muskie is only a generation removed from a Polish immigrant father, he looks like Leverett Saltonstall. One of the last of the New England Yankees in public life, former Senator Saltonstall of Massachusetts might have sat for a native wood carver doing the craggy figurehead for the prow of a Yankee clipper.
This observation amuses Muskie. He tells how, after his graduation from Cornell University Law School, he was interviewed because he had such a rugged New-England look. Finally they told him he had better go back to Maine because obviously he had a political future there.
In what has become his standard speech, really parts of three separate speeches assembled in various ways for various audiences, Muskie talks about the 40,000,000 people who at the turn of the century streamed into this country. They came in search of freedom and, he says with a quiet and yet moving dignity, they learned how to be free and how to use freedom. There are forces, he goes on, seeking to exploit the tensions and fears in society today, to build walls between peoples, and that can only lead to the destruction of the democratic system.
One of the flood of immigrants who came to the land of promise in the early years of the century Was Muskie's father. A tailor in his native Poland, the father's name was originally Marciszewski. But when he arrived at Ellis Island in 1903, knowing no English, the immigration officials followed a common practice and wrote him down as Muskie. His mother was a native of Buffalo, N.Y., where many Poles had settled.
The Muskie success story follows a familiar American pattern. He worked his way through Bates College in Maine, made Phi Beta Kappa and went to Cornell Law School. Because clients were scarce in Waterville, Me., when he started to practice law he went into politics. For a Democrat his rise in Republican Maine was spectacular. After the legislature he served two terms as Governor. Following a nonpartisan course he achieved with a Republican legislature a number of educational and economic programs. In 1958 be became the first popularly elected Democratic Senator in the history of the state.
He shows no signs today – a candidate for the second highest office in the land – of pride or pomposity. He and his wife, the former Jane Gray, laugh over the fact that in one day they occupied, however briefly, three presidential suites in hotels in three separate cities. But as he moves in and out of his chartered jet with official parties and flag-waving crowds out to greet him at each stop, back of the shock of surprise still evident – you mean all this is for me? – is a shrewd awareness of what he adds to the beleaguered Democratic ticket.
Muskie knows how telling is the contrast with Spiro Agnew, the Republican vice presidential candidate. While Agnew is at odds with his traveling press over Agnewisms that have made headlines, Muskie has established a friendly rapport with the reporters who follow him.
Entertained at the Governor's Mansion in Topeka' Kans., he noticed carved in the stone of the fireplace in the dining room the following inscription in Latin: Dum spiro spero. He translated it from his parochial school Latin as "While I breathe there is hope." I haven't dared to use that yet, he says with an impish grin.