October 14, 1968
Page 31277
TRIBUTE TO VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MUSKIE
Mr. McGEE. Mr. President, the distinguished Senator from Maine [Mr. MUSKIE] continues to add stature and responsible dimension to the current political campaign.
As many hecklers can personally attest, ED MUSKIE has not bowed to them, nor has he intimidated them – or threatened them – or placated them. He has met the issues of the day head on, with candor and good old-fashioned New England honesty.
ED MUSKIE's performance in this campaign has contributed much to raising the level of political dialog to its proper respective place in a democracy. He is a credit to his colleagues, to this body, and to this country.
Mr. President, a column by William S. White, published in the Washington Post of October 14, has paid proper tribute to ED MUSKIE's performance. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
WHATEVER THE OUTCOME MAY BE, ED MUSKIE IS BOUND TO WIN
(By William S. White)
There is one participant in the presidential campaign who cannot lose, no matter how the voting may go in November. Edmund Muskie has got it made, whichever way the ball may finally bounce.
That Richard Nixon is "The One" among the Republicans is the obvious standard operating procedure. But the curious fact is that among the Democrats it is Muskie, the vice presidential nominee, and not Hubert Humphrey, the head of the ticket, who is becoming "The One" – and this with the full consent and even the cooperation of Humphrey himself.
Ed Muskie's success story, indeed, is without example in our politics. Humphrey chose him as his running mate at a Chicago Democratic convention of unhappy memory for pretty routine reasons. His colleagues of the Senate knew him for a man of ability and poise, if with very little gift for attracting favorable headlines. But nobody else did. His home State of Maine was clearly no glittering prize in electoral votes. But there was one thing about Muskie, and at that time actually only one, that critically mattered then. This was the circumstance that he was of East European (specifically Polish) descent and the Russians had just attacked an East European country called Czechoslovakia.
Muskie was put on the ticket in short, primarily because he was presumed to have "ethnic appeal" to large minority groups in the big industrial states at an hour when that sort of appeal was deemed doubly necessary.
Still, if art imitates life, life sometimes turns about and outdoes both political art and artifice. This has been the case with Edmund Muskie. First off, he astonished the perceptive among a convention that knew him not by a brilliant acceptance speech which, though hardly noted outside the convention hall in the steamy running crises of Chicago, was not wholly overlooked as a token of things to come.
For as the campaign progressed Muskie proved that his achievement at Chicago was no one-shot job. As a stump speaker he moved from calm triumph to triumph; even the campus hippies began, here and there, to allow him grudging half-respect. A tall, gangling man, he showed an improbably Lincolnesque touch; this scion of an immigrant family began somehow to look more Yankee than the Yankees. And as it turned out, his own capacity and political sophistication were highlighted again and again by the political errors of his opposite number, Spiro Agnew, the Nixon running mate.
Thus, the man nobody really knew at the start progressively became the man nearly everybody was talking about. The hard-pressed Hubert Humphrey, frantically seeking sources of strength whenever and however he could find them, got the message without difficulty. Now, the head of the ticket who is Humphrey is speaking of his second man as his "greatest asset." President Johnson is helping along by contrasting the undeniably savvy Muskie with the solid and courageous but undeniably less savvy antagonist who is Agnew.
The long and short of it is that Ed Muskie has become in some respects the biggest gun in the Democratical arsenal and in some respects is overshadowing his chief in this contest.
Now, all this does not mean that the Humphrey-Muskie ticket is going to win; the probabilities seem to be quite otherwise. But it means a great deal all the same. It means that win or lose in the official sense, Muskie will come out of this campaign incomparably bigger than when he entered it. Even assuming a Nixon-Agnew victory, Ed Muskie will return to the Senate with national credentials that will not be overlooked. He will, as the saying goes, "be heard from" in that place. He will at the very minimum be well on the way to high leadership there.