Humphrey's Polish Yankee

MAINE Senator Edmund Sixtus Muskie looks and sounds like the prototype of the ancestral Down-Easter. Craggy-faced, big-boned and monumentally tall (he is 6 ft. 4 in.), he displays the New England legislator's characteristic attention to detail and distaste for florid rhetoric. It was hardly foreseeable before last week that the Democratic vice-presidential nominee--who is in fact the son of a Polish-born tailor--would be matched against a Republican opposite number from Maryland with a curiously similar background. Muskie and Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's running mate, are both sons of immigrants. Both grew up in straitened circumstances. Both have foreshortened surnames, and both are generally unfamiliar to the American electorate.

Unlike Agnew, who after less than two years as Governor of Maryland was little known among politicians outside his state until he received the G.O.P. vice-presidential nomination, Ed Muskie has a hard-earned reputation on Capitol Hill as a diligent and imaginative politician. As Maine's first Democratic Governor in 20 years (1954-58) and subsequently the first popularly elected Democratic Senator in the state's history, he cracked the granitic G.O.P. fortress in Maine, creating a new independent-minded breed of voters known as Muskie Republicans.

After his two terms as a progressive, popular Governor, the New England liberal came to Washington with an understanding of legislative procedure that served him well in skirmishes against the Bourbon craftsmen of the Senate's Southern bloc. In 1966, when Lyndon Johnson's Model Cities proposal was foundering, Muskie called the White House and explained why he felt the bill could not be passed as drafted. He then set to work hammering out an acceptable substitute, which he later guided to passage with a combination of eloquence and parliamentary skill. "The pages of history are full of the tales of those who sought the promise of the city and found only despair," he told the Senate. "From the Book of Job to Charles Dickens to James Baldwin, we have read the ills of the cities. Our cities contain within themselves the flowers of man's genius and the nettles of his failures." Robert Kennedy called it "the best speech I ever heard in the Senate."

Muskie's preoccupation with the crisis of the cities is unusual in a man whose native state is predominantly rural. Yet even Maine has felt the deleterious effects of water and air pollution, and the Senator was in the forefront of those who drafted the 1963 Clean Air Act and the 1965 Water Quality Act and pushed them through the Senate.

In other respects, Muskie's political career has been somewhat improbable. In accent and countenance, the New Englander might be mistaken for a cousin of Leverett Saltonstall. In fact, he is a Roman Catholic whose father anglicized the family name from Marciszewski. Muskie, second of six children, grew up in the textile-mill town of Rumford, earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Maine's Bates College and a law degree from Cornell in 1939. After Navy service in the Atlantic and Pacific during World War II, he returned to Maine to set up law practice in Waterville and began his political career in the Maine house of representatives. Democrats were in such a minority there that Muskie rapidly became the Democratic House floor leader.

Over the years he has maintained a stubborn political independence. In Washington, he immediately ran afoul of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who asked the freshman to join him in a fight against Senate liberals who were seeking to make it easier to break filibusters. Muskie refused, and Johnson retaliated by denying him his first three choices for committee assignments. "They tell me that Lyndon trades apples for orchards every day," Muskie said ruefully. Johnson later came to appreciate Muskie as a thorough craftsman who approached his work with quiet diplomacy. In 1964, Johnson even seriously considered naming Muskie as his running mate.

At 54, Ed Muskie does not bring youth to this year's Democratic ticket, although his forceful, low-key manner will be attractive to many of the young. He is most knowledgeable in federal-state relations and problems of the cities. Even though he led the convention fight for the majority plank on Viet Nam, he has seldom spoken out on the war and privately has serious reservations about current American policy in Southeast Asia.

Muskie's family should be an asset to the ticket. He and his wife have five children ("three queens and two jacks"), aged 19 to seven. Jane Muskie, who was a Protestant and a Republican when, as a clerk in a Waterville dress shop, she first met her future husband in 1946, later converted to his political and religious faiths. They now live in a six-bedroom colonial house in Bethesda, Md., but also maintain a vacation cottage in Kennebunk Beach, Me. The Senator fishes and hunts in the Maine woods, sails off the coast, and is an amateur carpenter. He has also become an enthusiastic golfer in the last four years, although his game sometimes looks like spring plowing. The golf can hardly be easy on his nerves. While usually self-effacing, Muskie has been known to have a volcanic temper.

He enjoys cooking the duck, goose and turkey that he bags on shooting expeditions. He also likes to sew--a talent he picked up from his tailor-father. His dress runs to conservative dark suits. When he was Governor, Muskie invariably wore a clip-on bow tie, but he has since returned to four-in-hand ties. Though his tall, ruggedly handsome figure is an undoubted contribution to the image of the ticket, his five-inch advantage over Humphrey will inevitably invite Mutt and Jeff caricatures.

Muskie's friendships within the Democratic Party have been ecumenical. He was close to John Kennedy, is a friend of both Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. However much he admires Humphrey, he did not accept the vice-presidential nomination with any excess of zeal. Muskie loves his work and independence as a Senator, and despite his commanding speech at the convention, does not relish political campaigning.

Still, as the vice-presidential candidate, his gift for dry wit and understated oratory should appeal to a far wider audience than the New Englanders and big-city Poles who claim Ed Muskie as their own.

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