Four of the Muskie children (above), including Edmund (right) in Rumford, Maine. Anonymous Photo.

Ed Muskie (far right) as a youngster. Anonymous Photo.

Stephen Muskie (below, seated) with employees in his Rumford, Maine, tailor shop. Anonymous Photo.

Muskie himself wasn't in the news so much anymore, instead working quietly on various pieces of litigation. People said he had heart trouble. But he looked strong, ruddy from pushing through the posthurricane winds, as boisterous as if this were a campaign rally. The "barefoot boy from Maine," as Senator Jacob Javits liked to call him, had been a state representative, governor, United States senator, Secretary of State, vice-presidential nominee, and presidential candidate. "There aren't many statesmen left," a woman named Leslie Finn told me. Finn was Muskie's office manager for ten years. "Edmund Muskie is a statesman."

I remember that the crowd that day (there were about 2,500 in the gymnasium of Bates College) was excited. Aside from the pols, I picked out many of Muskie's graduating class, here by his invitation, from their maroon-and-white caps (Bates's colors) emblazoned " '36." A good hundred former members of Muskie's staff were there, too. As Finn and many others confided, they liked to call themselves the "Faceless Bastards," or even "FBs." It was a reference to Muskie's fabled short temper.

At one endless motorcade in Pennsylvania in 1968, he'd shouted, "Who are the faceless bastards that are responsible for this schedule?"

As one staffer later told the press, "He's got a glare that would intimidate Mount Rushmore." Leon Billings, Muskie's former chief of staff, once said that his boss's crabbiness was "90 percent style, ten percent real -- but that ten percent was real real!" I quoted Billings to Finn, who laughed and said, "Yes, he was temperamental. But there was so much he wanted to do, and there wasn't time."