Edmund S. Muskie papers

Edmund Sixtus Muskie was born March 28, 1914 in Rumford, Maine to Stephen Muskie (1883-1956), a tailor and Polish immigrant, and Josephine Czarnecki Muskie (1891-1973), a Buffalo, N.Y.-born daughter of Polish immigrants. He was the second child and the first son born to the Muskies, who had a total of six children.

Edmund Muskie attended public schools in Rumford and was the Stephens High School Valedictorian in 1932. Muskie attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he was president of his class, vice president and secretary-treasurer of the Student Council, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and the nationally acclaimed Debating Council led by Prof. Brooks Quimby. To earn money during his summers while attending Bates, Muskie worked in the kitchen and on the service staff at a beach resort in Kennebunk, Maine. He also worked as a waiter and a dormitory assistant at Bates during the school year. In 1936 he graduated cum laude with a major in history and government.

After receiving his law degree from Cornell University, Muskie was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1939 and the Maine bar in 1940. He began practicing law in Waterville, Maine, but his career was interrupted in 1942, when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during World War II, and was an active member of AMVETS throughout his life. Muskie married Jane Gray, a Waterville shopgirl whom he met at an AMVETS event, in 1948. They had five children together, Stephen (1949- ), Ellen (1950- ), Melinda (1956- ), Martha (1958-2006) and Edmund S., Jr. (1961- ).

Muskie began his political career in the Maine House of Representatives, to which he was elected in 1946, 1948 and 1950. A Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican state, he was able to rise to the position of minority floor leader during his second term. Shortly after he began his third term, he resigned from the House to become state director of the federal Office of Price Stabilization, a position he held until July 1952. He also represented Maine on the Democratic National Committee from 1952 to 1956, ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Waterville in 1947, was a member and secretary of the Waterville Board of Zoning Adjustment from 1948 to 1955, and served as Waterville's city solicitor in 1954.

During this period Muskie and other activists led a drive to build the Maine Democratic party into a force that would challenge the Republican party, which had dominated state politics since the Civil War. Their breakthrough came in 1954, when Muskie was elected governor of Maine, defeating an incumbent for the first time in state history. Although the Republican opposition controlled the legislature, Muskie used his considerable negotiating skills and his growing popularity to secure enactment of a number of sweeping measures during his governorship, including a major reorganization of state government.

After two successful terms as governor, Muskie challenged incumbent U.S. senator Frederick Payne in 1958 and again was victorious. He served in the U.S. Senate for 21 years, winning overwhelming reelection in 1964, 1970 and 1976. During his tenure he served on the Banking and Currency, Foreign Relations, Government Operations (later Governmental Affairs), and Environment and Public Works Committees, the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Affairs and the Special Committee on Aging. In the 1970s he was the founder and first chair of the Senate Committee on the Budget, co-chaired the National Study Commission on Water Pollution, chaired the Legislative Review Committee of the Democratic Policy Committee, and was a member of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. In these positions, he sponsored landmark federal environmental protection laws, including the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972, oversaw efforts to strengthen cooperation between federal, state and local government agencies, and worked to provide stricter congressional oversight of the federal budget-writing process.

In the late 1960s Muskie emerged as a national political figure. The 1968 Democratic president nominee, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, selected Muskie as his vice presidential running mate. Although the ticket was defeated, his work that fall was credited with overcoming the deep divisions in the party over the Vietnam War and closing a wide gap with Republican candidates Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. Four years later he made a strong bid for the 1972 Democratic Party nomination for the presidency.

Muskie resigned from the U.S. Senate May 7, 1980, to become the 58th U.S. secretary of state, a position he held until January 20, 1981. During that brief tenure, he supervised the sensitive negotiations that eventually led to the release of 52 U.S. embassy personnel who were taken hostage in Iran on November 4, 1979.

After leaving federal employment, Muskie joined a law firm in Washington, D.C., and remained active in a number of organizations that dealt with foreign relations and the environment. He was president of the Center for National Policy, set up after the presidential election of 1980 to discuss and develop foreign policy alternatives for Democratic party leaders. He chaired the Nestle Infant Formula Audit Commission, which was established to review complaints that Nestle Corporation had violated World Health Organization guidelines on the marketing of breast-milk substitutes in undeveloped countries. He was a member of the President's Special Review Board (Tower Commission), which had been appointed by President Ronald Reagan to investigate secret U.S. arms sales to Iran and the diversion of proceeds from those sales to rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government. In 1989, he was made chair of the Maine Commission on Legal Needs, which the Maine Bar Foundation set up to recommend ways to provide low-income Maine citizens with equal access to legal assistance.

For over 30 years, Muskie was a member of the Roosevelt Campobello International Park Commission, which oversees the site of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's island summer estate on the border between Maine and New Brunswick. Founded at Muskie's urging in 1964, the park is dedicated to preserving and promoting Roosevelt's legacy. The commission chair is held by representatives of the U.S. and Canada in alternate terms. Until his death in 1996, Muskie presided over the commission whenever the United States had the chair.

Muskie was the author of the autobiographical Journeys, published in 1972, received over thirty honorary degrees from college and universities throughout the country, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. From 1957 to 1966 and again from 1970 to 1988, he served on the Bates College Board of Trustees.

Edmund S. Muskie died March 26, 1996 of heart failure following surgery to correct a blocked artery in his leg. Jane Gray Muskie died December 25, 2004 following a bout with Alzheimer's disease. Both they and their daughter Martha, who died of lupus January 2, 2006, are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.