Books in Brief: Muskie

Muskie, by Theo Lippman Jr. and Donald Hansen (Norton, 237 pp., $6.95).

The authors, two veteran newspapermen, obviously hope to help boost Edmund Muskie up toward the Presidency with this profile. Yet doubts about Muskie’s character and political convictions keep peeping out around the paeanic corners. The key word when discussing convictions seems to be “flexible.” In the mid-Sixties, Muskie was a hawkish “liberal cold warrior”; in the Seventies he emerges a dove. And the conversion wasn’t gradual. At the Democratic Convention in ’68 Muskie passionately attacked the minority “peace plank.” In ’69 he passionately attacked Nixon’s Vietnam policy using terms straight from the peace plank. Then there’s the pollution kick, Muskie’s own thing. Is he sincere? Well, the Androscoggin River, flowing through Muskie’s hometown, is “one of the ten most polluted rivers in the nation.” And the authors can’t quite refute the charge that in order to accommodate a friend’s potato-processing plant, Muskie helped turn Aroostook’s Prestile River from a first-class trout stream into an open sewer. And then there’s the man himself, at times phlegmatic (they compare him with Calvin Coolidge), at others “potentially explosive,” victimized by a “waspish temper.” Muskie has “a temper that can approach the volcanic,” and “his anger is often triggered by the trivial”— as when, for instance, he nearly hits his sister for winning at cards. I understand that sort of temper, owning one myself. I’d hate to see it in a President.

JC

About the Author

J. R. Coyne Jr.

Featured Tags

Muskie, by Theo Lippman Jr. and Donald Hansen (Norton, 237 pp., $6.95).

The authors, two veteran newspapermen, obviously hope to help boost Edmund Muskie up toward the Presidency with this profile. Yet doubts about Muskie’s character and political convictions keep peeping out around the paeanic corners. The key word when discussing convictions seems to be “flexible.” In the mid-Sixties, Muskie was a hawkish “liberal cold warrior”; in the Seventies he emerges a dove. And the conversion wasn’t gradual. At the Democratic Convention in ’68 Muskie passionately attacked the minority “peace plank.” In ’69 he passionately attacked Nixon’s Vietnam policy using terms straight from the peace plank. Then there’s the pollution kick, Muskie’s own thing. Is he sincere? Well, the Androscoggin River, flowing through Muskie’s hometown, is “one of the ten most polluted rivers in the nation.” And the authors can’t quite refute the charge that in order to accommodate a friend’s potato-processing plant, Muskie helped turn Aroostook’s Prestile River from a first-class trout stream into an open sewer. And then there’s the man himself, at times phlegmatic (they compare him with Calvin Coolidge), at others “potentially explosive,” victimized by a “waspish temper.” Muskie has “a temper that can approach the volcanic,” and “his anger is often triggered by the trivial”— as when, for instance, he nearly hits his sister for winning at cards. I understand that sort of temper, owning one myself. I’d hate to see it in a President.