Humphrey's Polish Yankee

MAINE Senator Edmund Sixtus Muskie looks and sounds like the prototype of the ancestral Down-Easter. Craggy-faced, big-boned and monumentally tall (he is 6 ft. 4 in.), he displays the New England legislator's characteristic attention to detail and distaste for florid rhetoric. It was hardly foreseeable before last week that the Democratic vice-presidential nominee—who is in fact the son of a Polish-born tailor—would be matched against a Republican opposite number from Maryland with a curiously similar background. Muskie and Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's running mate, are both sons of immigrants. Both grew up in straitened circumstances. Both have foreshortened surnames, and both are generally unfamiliar to the American electorate.

Unlike Agnew, who after less than two years as Governor of Maryland was little known among politicians outside his state until he received the G.O.P. vice-presidential nomination, Ed Muskie has a hard-earned reputation on Capitol Hill as a diligent and imaginative politician. As Maine's first Democratic Governor in 20 years (1954-58) and subsequently the first popularly elected Democratic Senator in the state's history, he cracked the granitic G.O.P. fortress in Maine, creating a new independent-minded breed of voters known as Muskie Republicans.

After his two terms as a progressive, popular Governor, the New England liberal came to Washington with an understanding of legislative procedure that served him well in skirmishes against the Bourbon craftsmen of the Senate's Southern bloc. In 1966, when Lyndon Johnson's Model Cities proposal was foundering, Muskie called the White House and explained why he felt the bill could not be passed as drafted. He then set to work hammering out an acceptable substitute, which he later guided to passage with a combination of eloquence and parliamentary skill. "The pages of history are full of the tales of those who sought the promise of the city and found only despair," he told the Senate. "From the Book of Job to Charles Dickens to James Baldwin, we have read the ills of the cities. Our cities contain within themselves the flowers of man's genius and the nettles of his failures." Robert Kennedy called it "the best speech I ever heard in the Senate."

Muskie's preoccupation with the crisis of the cities is unusual in a man whose native state is predominantly rural. Yet even Maine has felt the deleterious effects of water and air pollution, and the Senator was in the forefront of those who drafted the 1963 Clean Air Act and the 1965 Water Quality Act and pushed them through the Senate.

In other respects, Muskie's political career has been somewhat improbable. In accent and countenance, the New Englander might be mistaken for a cousin of Leverett Saltonstall. In fact, he is a Roman Catholic whose father anglicized the family name from Marciszewski. Muskie, second of six children, grew up in the textile-mill town of Rumford, earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Maine's Bates College and a law degree from Cornell in 1939. After Navy service in the Atlantic and Pacific during World War II, he returned to Maine to set up law practice in Waterville and began his political career in the Maine house of representatives. Democrats were in such a minority there that Muskie rapidly became the Democratic House floor leader.