In his Capitol basement hide-away office.
Photo by Stephen O. Muskie

I knew Edmund Sixtus Muskie was a very good senator, but I didn't know he was the first Democrat Maine ever sent to Washington, back in 1954, a Polish Catholic in a Yankee Republican state. My father, who voted for Nixon, and my mother, who voted for McGovern, thought Muskie was a decent man. "Ed Integrity, the good country doctor," The Nation once called him, poking fun.

"He was the most productive legislator in this generation," Billings told me after the speeches. "Usually when you become powerful, you aren't creative anymore. Muskie was growing all the time."

As a freshman, he requested a spot on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but ran afoul of then-Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who banished him to Public Works. Undaunted, Muskie used the post to become the nation's leading environmentalist -- one of his nicknames was "Mr. Clean." At a time when the ice turned black in many Down East streams, Muskie served as point man for the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, the most significant antipollution laws ever passed. The two bills now rest in a glass case at the archives, next to a cartoon showing a Lincoln-whiskered Muskie, ax in hand, splitting a smokestack in half.

Yet he was also a tightfisted conservative about government spending; The New Republic called him "the fiscal conscience of the Senate."

Some say Muskie never reached the Oval Office because he didn't want it enough. His aides urged him to drop the line, "Maybe I'm not the best man to be president," from his speeches. Others say it was because he symbolized "the sensible center" in an era of polarities. "I was trying to project the image of someone who could reach out to all segments of the Democratic Party and establish a common cause with them," he told a reporter for The New Yorker in 1975. "I managed to come out second with all of them."