Still looking for the answer to Gene Willman’s question: ‘Who’s Ed Muskie?’ The first Muskie book in 35 years gives us some clues

By Paul Mills

It’s the wee hours of Tuesday morning Sept. 14, 1954. The phone rings in Portland TV news photographer Gene Willman’s Yarmouth home. The sleep of the young veteran of some recent near death military experiences of the Korean War era – who only a few months earlier had helped put one of Maine’s first TV news departments on the air – was being disturbed yet again. On the other end of the line now is Willman’s boss, the fiery, cigar chomping WGAN-TV news director Nunzi Casavola.

“Saddle up. We’re going to Waterville,” Casavola commanded.

“Ed Muskie just became governor.”

Willman’s response: “Who’s Ed Muskie?”

By the time Willman and Casavola had arrived in the Elm City an hour later they would still have to wait until dawn to capture an interview. The virtual unknown who had just sent shock waves throughout the country by jolting the Republican establishment to win an upset victory over incumbent Governor Burton Cross was so besieged with well wishers and other reporters that Willman and Casavola by that time had to settle for an interview with his wife, Jane. They would, however, a day or so later win one with Muskie himself.

More far-reaching phenomena than those that interrupted Willman’s sleep that night in 1954 would unfold in the ensuing years. Among them: Muskie’s national legislative leadership in crafting federal environmental laws of the 1960s and early 1970s, not to mention his position from mid-1969 until the spring of 1972 as the almost certain Democratic nominee for president. Muskie was, in effect, leading the country’s majority party as the head of a three-year shadow government during most of the eventful Nixon period in American history. He would also go on to become America’s Secretary of State during the final months of the Iranian hostage crisis.

Almost as astonishing as Muskie’s remarkable and dramatic public career is the absence of any full-fledged definitive biography. Though several popular books including one by Muskie himself have been issued, none on Muskie have emerged in the last 35 years. Not one of these purport to be comprehensive treatments of his life and legacy.

Issuance of any book at all on Muskie is thus a major event. That’s something that has just occurred. It’s James Witherell’s Ed Muskie, Made in Maine, 1914-1960. Though Witherell takes Muskie’s story only to the doorstep of Muskie‘s admission to the U.S. Senate, no book so far has given such a detailed examination of Muskie’s early life and career. For this reason alone – even if 2014 were not the centennial of his birth – it’s worth reading.

Witherell does an admirable job portraying Muskie and I like the book. The verve and skill that Witherell brings to the task is enhanced by what he shares in common with him. Like Muskie, Witherell was born and raised in Rumford, the year before Muskie was elected governor. He graduated from high school there in 1972, the same year that saw the collapse of Muskie’s three-year reign as America’s leading Democrat. Like Muskie, Witherell, a Registered Maine Guide, is an impassioned outdoors Maine sportsman. (Among Witherell’s previous books is a biography of L.L. Bean.)

Witherell is at his best when he delves into these facets of Muskie’s early life. Those in Oxford County, for example, will find pleasure in reading about the interaction Muskie had with such evocative Rumford area family names as Anastasio, Bartash, Gagnon, and McQuade, to name a few. Those familiar with Muskie’s fishing venues in the Rangeley area will also be inspired by Witherell’s accounts of the lasting impressions Muskie’s experiences in that part of Maine left with the future forebear of national clean air and water laws.

Though Witherell’s account is both sympathetic and supportive of Muskie, it’s not all hero worship. He credibly describes Muskie’s notoriously short-fused temper and a disposition in which anger was too easily aroused. (It’s a trait that would lead to the undoing of Muskie’s crusade for the presidency when it was excessively unleashed in the direction of New Hampshire newspaper publisher William Loeb.)

Writing so much about the first 45 years of the life of a person with as many different experiences as Muskie is a tall order. Witherell’s work is the obvious outcome of prodigious research on his part. He also draws upon significant input from such long-time Muskie protégés as Frank Coffin and Donald Nicoll. Witherell is also a good writer. He is not always equal to the task, however. A shortcoming of the book is Witherell’s occasionally limited appreciation of the canvass on which his portrait of Muskie is painted.

This is illustrated by gaffes that would not have been committed by a person with a deeper grounding in the era in which Witherell’s story takes place. Among them is Witherell’s reference to Maine Senator Owen Brewster’s investigation of Howard Hughes’s contract to produce a flying boat – one made famous by the 2004 Leonard DeCaprio movie, The Aviator – as having occurred during World War II when it in fact was part of a Senate Committee probe that occurred two years after the end of the War.

The book also mistakenly recites that Senator Margaret Chase Smith had run against Brewster, a man who was at once one of the most brilliant yet one of the more corrupt political figures in Maine history. It’s a confrontation which if true would have made for one of the more sensational spectacles of mid-20th century Maine politics but it simply didn’t happen.

Other distracting mix-ups occur in Witherell’s references to three other prominent Maine political figures, Senator Smith’s husband, Clyde, “Big Jim” Oliver, and Ernest Malenfant. His book says Clyde Smith was a U.S. senator, (He was only a U.S. House member.). Oliver he has serving in the Maine Legislature in the 1930s and early 1940s. (He was not there at any time but instead at this time was in Congress.). Malenfant, a colorful and memorable Lewiston mayor in the 1950s he inexplicably counts as a Republican. (He was a Democrat.)

The book, in short, could have benefited from some pre-publication fact checking and proof reading.

Despite the book’s drawbacks, Witherell attempts to explore as well as anyone some of the more inscrutable characteristics of Muskie’s personality. As a child and adolescent he was shy and a bit personally clumsy. As an adult he had few close personal friends though at the same time very few ardent personal enemies. He was a difficult person to know well.

We will continue to be plagued with some of the same bewilderment TV news photographer Gene Willman expressed in 1954 with his “Who’s Ed Muskie?” even though Witherell’s book gives valuable insight in helping to respond to this important question.

Paul H. Mills, is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net.