ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 28, 1996 TAG: 9603280028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
THE DEATH Tuesday of Edmund S. Muskie, 81, has taken from America another leader from the remarkable generation that came of age during the Great Depression, fought and won World War II, and then presided over postwar prosperity.
If they remember him at all, most Americans probably remember Muskie as the man who lost the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination because he choked up in a primary-campaign appearance in New Hampshire. This is unfortunate because, first, the story is more complicated than that and, second, the memory obscures more important aspects of a long and productive public life.
Muskie was responding to a scurrilous letter in a New Hampshire newspaper- planted, it was later learned, by the dirty-tricks division of a Nixon re-election campaign that saw Muskie as the strongest potential Democratic opponent. Apart from the question of what really happened at the campaign stop, which remains debated to this day, the fact is that Muskie won the New Hampshire primary. What he could not do, in that turbulent year of Watergate offenses on the Republican side and anti-war zeal on the Democratic, was win enough votes in subsequent primaries.
Highlights of Muskie's career include his success in building a two-party system in what had been overwhelmingly Republican Maine, his role as first chairman of the Senate Budget Committee in keeping federal deficits within bounds, and his negotiation, while secretary of state for a few months in 1980, of the release of 52 Americans held hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Iran.
Nothing stands out more, however, than Muskie's work on landmark environmental legislation, including authorship of the 1963 Clean Air Act and the 1965 Water Quality Act. Before him, environmental protection was a low priority, widely regarded as merely a hunting and fishing issue. Influenced by the difficulties posed by polluted streams in recruiting industry to Maine, Muskie was among the first politicians to see the issue in broader terms.
In public life almost from the moment he was discharged from the Navy at the end of World War II through 1981 - as a state legislator, a governor, a U.S. senator, a secretary of state - Muskie was a career politician. The term today has acquired an ill odor, but don't blame Ed Muskie. Incorruptible, thoughtful, beholden to no particular interest except the public good, Muskie was the kind of politician for whom Americans yearn and of whom they see too little.
LENGTH: Short : 49 linesby CNB