The Negotiator

by George Mitchell

  I liked and was impressed by both Muskie and Nicoll. Don was short, precise, and methodical. Muskie was tall, lanky, more expressive. Both were generous and kind to me in that first meeting and thereafter. I didn’t want to mislead Muskie in any way, so I was frank about my goals. He said he understood. He asked me to draft and submit a memorandum on a legal issue then pending in the Senate. It was obviously a test, and I treated it that way. I worked hard to make my writing clear, responsive, and concise. Soon thereafter Don called again, this time to offer me the position of executive assistant to the senator. They understood and accepted my intentions; they asked, however, that I commit to remaining on the senator’s staff through his next election, in November 1964. They offered a substantial increase in pay over what I was getting at Justice, and I accepted. My life was about to change, much more quickly than I could imagine.

  Just seven days after I joined Muskie’s staff, a tall man with dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses walked up to my desk and asked, “What are you doing here?” He was Albert Abrahamson, professor of economics at Bowdoin College. Without thinking I replied, “What are you doing here?” “I’ve known the senator for a long time,” he replied. “I visit whenever I’m in Washington. Come on, let’s have cup of coffee and a chat.” Abrahamson had taught at Bowdoin for many years. I hadn’t known that he had also been involved in politics in Maine and had gotten to know many prominent persons in both parties. When I told him about my hopes he said immediately, “Mert Henry’s law firm in Portland is looking for someone.” “Who’s Mert Henry?” I asked. I then listened in amazement as he told me. Mert was born and raised in Maine, graduated from Bowdoin, then attended law school in the evening at George Washington University. While there he joined the staff of U.S. Senator Fred Payne of Maine, a Republican, who had been governor of the state. After one term Payne was defeated, in 1958, by the Democratic candidate, Edmund Muskie. Mert had then returned to Portland and joined the small law firm of Jensen and Baird. That firm, with five lawyers, was looking for a sixth. Abrahamson offered to call Mert to set up an interview for me. But I told him, “I made a commitment to Senator Muskie. I can’t go anywhere until 1965.” “It can’t do you any harm to talk with them,” he assured me, and I agreed.

  The coincidences mounted. Mert called me and we had a pleasant talk. He asked me to send him my résumé. By chance one of the founders of the firm, Ken Baird, was coming to Washington the following week; would I meet with him? When I met Baird he was direct and energetic and offered me the position, and when I explained why I couldn’t accept it, even though it was what I had hoped for and dreamed of for years, he said he understood. He suggested that we keep in touch, without any commitment on either side. I agreed.

  I had a hard time getting over the irony of my situation. After trying and failing for years to get an offer from a Maine law firm, I received one just days after I had committed to serve for the next two and a half years in Washington in another position! In the end it worked out. I maintained my interest, they kept the position open, and in early 1965 Sally and I moved to Portland and I joined the firm. But the young lawyer who began the private practice of law in 1965 was not the same person he had been in 1962. I had changed. I had gotten a taste of politics, and I liked it.

  MUSKIE

  Ed Muskie was a towering figure in person, in Maine history, and in my life. I worked for him, traveled with him, celebrated victory with him, and tasted defeat with him. I admired and loved him. He was my employer, mentor, hero, and friend. His definition of public service became mine. His standard of integrity became mine. His political principles became mine. And finally his Senate seat became mine.

  Muskie changed Maine politics, breaking nearly a century of Republican domination. He changed the lives of all Americans by writing and passing our nation’s landmark environmental laws, the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. He had a brilliant, inquiring mind, a natural talent for legislating, and he could readily deploy patience or impatience, as the situation demanded. His impatience was frequently accompanied and amplified by a severe temper. He was human and had his faults, not the least of which was his inability to control himself when he got mad. Late in his life he told an interviewer that it was tactical, turned on and off as necessary to achieve his objective. It may have been tactical, but it was real. I can testify that those who were on the receiving end of one of his tirades—as I was on occasion—never forgot it. But though he could not control his temper, he could and did control the aftermath. As quickly as it came the storm passed and to a remarkable degree he forgot it and moved on. He disagreed with you, he let you know it, and then it was forgotten. He never carried a grudge.

  His father was a tailor, born and raised in Poland. His mother was raised in this country by Polish immigrants. Muskie was in every sense a self-made man who rose to national prominence on his talent, intelligence, and drive. Growing up in Rumford, Maine, a paper mill town, he was aware from an early age of the effects of uncontrolled pollution on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans. This led directly to his becoming the greatest environmental legislator in our nation’s history. His successes were many: two-term governor, four-term senator, secretary of state, author of the nation’s basic environmental laws and of much other important legislation. His losses were fewer, but they cut deep, most prominently his failure to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1972, a race he entered as a favorite based on his superb performance as his party’s nominee for vice president in the 1968 campaign.

  I have been helped by many people in my life, but none more often or more meaningfully than Ed Muskie. When I left his staff in 1965 I realized what had for years been a strong desire to return to Maine to live and to practice law. But it was with a deeply ambivalent feeling that I left the man I most admired and learned so much from.

  BACK TO MAINE

  Back in Maine I started a new life and a new job. Most important of all, our daughter Andrea was born in Portland on May 14, 1965, just a few months after we arrived. We bought our first home, a small one-story in Falmouth, just outside of Portland. For a time all went well. I worked very hard and did well, becoming a partner in our small firm within a year. But there was a growing problem in our lives: as I became more involved in politics, Sally’s unhappiness with my involvement increased. During my years on Muskie’s staff I had traveled across Maine with him, meeting and working with people at all levels of government and politics, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So in early 1966, when I received calls from several members of the Maine Democratic State Committee urging me to run for the position of chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, their pleas found ready acceptance. I had been back in Maine for less than a year and I was already plunging into the very politics I had had no interest in six years earlier, when Sally had been straightforward about her feelings and I had been sincere in my response. But, as is inevitable in human affairs, I had changed. Without ever having intended or planned it, I found myself involved in, enjoying, and succeeding in politics. I asked for her understanding. She wanted to accommodate me and did her best to do so. But it was obviously very hard for her, especially when my political activities took me away from her and our infant daughter.

  As happens to almost all working parents, there began for me a lifelong struggle to find the right balance between work and family. Self-doubt has been my constant companion. The struggle continues to this day, when, at the age of eighty-one, with two teenage children, I maintain a full schedule of work and travel.

  I served as chairman of the Maine Democratic Party for two years and then for eight years served on the Democratic National Committee. This led to many interesting assignments. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota had accepted nomination as the party’s candidate for president. He chose his friend and fellow senator, Ed Muskie of Maine, as his running mate. As chairman of the Maine Democratic Party I attended the convention as a delegate. There I was chosen to be one of Mai
ne’s two members to the Democratic National Committee. Shortly after he learned of Humphrey’s decision, Muskie asked me to take a leave of absence from my law firm in Portland so that I could serve as his deputy campaign manager. When I agreed he asked me to go immediately to Washington to set up a campaign organization. Because of the late date of the convention, we found ourselves in a campaign before we had an organization. I began immediately and spent a week in a round-the-clock effort to build that organization from scratch.

  As I plowed through the hundreds of messages, telegrams, and letters addressed to Muskie, many of them from volunteers, I stopped when I saw one from Ed Stern. Although he didn’t fit the stereotype, Ed was a successful trial lawyer. He had a high-pitched voice and his presentations included occasional rambles, but they merely disguised his high intelligence and engaging personality. He had a great sense of humor, and the permanent sparkle in his eyes suggested that, no matter how serious the subject, another joke was on the tip of his tongue. Ed’s legal skills were well-known locally. He had gained national attention four years earlier, in the general election of 1964. Bangor, where Ed lived and worked, was then solidly Republican, as was the county in which it is located. For years the struggling local Democratic Party sought candidates to fill the ticket so that no office would go uncontested, although the chances of winning were slim. As a loyal Democrat, and a close friend of Muskie, Ed for years had consented to be nominated for a variety of offices; he never campaigned and, predictably, he never won. Then came Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. As usual Ed had not campaigned. On election night, while the more traditional candidates gathered with the party faithful in a local hotel, Ed was in Los Angeles on a business trip. As the tidal wave rolled across the country, it became clear that many candidates whose prospects were considered nonexistent were in fact going to win. Ed was one of them. When he received the telephone call informing him that he had been elected to the Maine senate, Ed was so surprised that he blurted out in response, “I demand a recount!” That made news around the country and elevated Ed to folk-hero status at home. He ultimately served in the state senate and then as a distinguished trial judge on the Superior Court of Maine.

  His message to Muskie was brief and direct. His son, Marshall, who had taken over Ed’s law practice, wanted to be part of Muskie’s campaign team. I knew that Muskie would not turn Ed down, so I called Marshall and brought him on board, literally. I assigned him to Muskie’s campaign plane, where he worked tirelessly and effectively. We became very close friends.

  Harold Pachios did not seek a position on Muskie’s staff; I sought him out. He had worked at the White House in the Johnson administration under his friend Bill Moyers. He may not have been well known elsewhere, but every political junkie in Maine knew that, in the 1964 campaign, while serving as President Johnson’s advance man, he had organized a crowd of seventy-five thousand people to greet LBJ on a campaign visit to Portland. It was by far the largest crowd ever for a political event in Maine. Harold was from Maine and a top-notch advance man. I wanted him to run Muskie’s advance operations. But there was a problem: he had been advance man for a president, and I was asking him to do the same job for a candidate for vice president. And now he was an assistant secretary of transportation in the U.S. government. As I expected, when I reached him by phone, he turned down my request. His logic was impeccable: I was asking him to take a step backward, to a job he’d done years earlier at a much higher level. But I had prepared carefully for our conversation. “Harold, what do you want to do over the next few years?” I asked him.

  “Just what I’m doing, serving as an assistant secretary of transportation.”

  “That’s a political appointment, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So, if Nixon wins you’re out. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So the only chance you’ve got to stay there is if Humphrey wins, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’m sure you realize that if you say no to Muskie, and Humphrey wins, you’ll be out, the same as if Nixon wins.”

  There was a pause. “Well, yeah, I guess I realize that,” he agreed, but his voice betrayed uncertainty.

  “Will you think about it and call me back?”

  “Yeah, I’ll call you back.” I was confident that reality had sunk in.

  He finally accepted the offer and did an outstanding job for Muskie. But, of course, Nixon won. Harold left the Department of Transportation and returned to Portland to practice law. Back in Portland myself, I helped him find a job with one of the firms that three years earlier had turned me down. He ultimately ascended to managing partner of what became one of Maine’s largest law firms, and we became and remain very close friends.

  After the raucous national convention in Chicago in 1968, the party established a national commission to examine the manner in which delegates to the convention were chosen. I was an active member of the commission, which was chaired by Senator George McGovern. I got to know the senator very well and we became friendly. But when he and Senator Muskie both sought the party’s nomination for president in 1972 my loyalty and effort were with Muskie. I took a lengthy leave of absence from my law practice to work on his campaign, just as I had done in 1968, when he was the nominee for vice president. Late in 1972, after McGovern was defeated by Richard Nixon, I was one of three candidates for chairman of the Democratic National Committee; I came in second to Bob Strauss, an experienced and able Texas lawyer who had previously served as the party’s national treasurer.

  A year later, with the support of several prominent members of the Maine Legislature, I announced my candidacy for governor of Maine. I couldn’t afford to stop working, so for a full year I tried unsuccessfully to balance the three-way demands of family, work, and campaign. In June 1974 I won the nomination after a hard-fought primary election campaign with four other candidates, all of whom were friends. Joe Brennan, the district attorney from Cumberland County, the state’s largest, came in second. A few years earlier I had worked for Joe as an assistant district attorney. I knew him well and admired him. Running against him was difficult for me to begin with, and it got more difficult as the campaign intensified; the more I saw and heard Joe speak, the more I respected him. The candidates appeared together frequently. There were very few differences among us on issues, so organization—identifying and getting out the voters—proved decisive. Sally was not happy with my decision to run for governor, but she loyally supported me and gamely participated in a few events that I knew she would have preferred not to attend.

  In the general election I faced two opponents, both of whom were at the outset better known than I was. Jim Erwin, the Republican nominee, was the attorney general of Maine. He had run and lost in the gubernatorial campaign four years earlier, so he had high name recognition and was a trusted public figure. James Longley, an insurance salesman, was an Independent candidate. He was a precursor to Ross Perot, a charismatic businessman who was proudly “not a career politician.” His campaign was greatly aided by the fact that earlier, at the request of the incumbent Democratic governor, he had chaired a commission to identify waste and fraud in state government. That commission’s report served as the basis for his campaign. Intense, with a strong personality, Longley was an effective campaigner. It was the year of Watergate, so there was then, as now, a deep disgust with politicians, from which he benefited. Political campaigns in Maine then were relatively mild, with few bare-knuckle attack ads on television. The early focus was on the major party candidates. In that contest I was doing well. But, ignored by Erwin and me, Longley steadily gained.

  A few weeks before the election the three of us sat together in a Bangor television studio for a joint interview. Longley astutely got there early and took the middle seat, leaving Erwin and me on either side of him. At one point, as Longley was speaking, Erwin reached behind him and passed me a no
te: “How long are you going to let this guy get away with this stuff?” There were some inconsistencies and unrealistic claims in Longley’s speeches and proposals, but nobody was challenging him. Erwin wanted me to do so, but we were both well aware of the hard reality that if I attacked Longley the beneficiary would be Erwin, and vice versa. After the interview Erwin and I talked about our common dilemma. We had known each other for years and our relationship was very good, considering the circumstances. While I disagreed with him on many issues I liked him as a person. I argued that his campaign was being hurt by Longley more than mine was and that he needed to go on the attack more than I did. He of course took the opposite position. We parted with a friendly handshake and a smile, both heading amiably for defeat. I knew it was coming despite polls that predicted I would win. Although it didn’t do me any good, I had been right about Erwin. His candidacy collapsed in the final days of the campaign as Republicans in large numbers shifted to Longley. In the end Erwin received only 23 percent of the vote, and Longley edged past me by about ten thousand votes, or less than 3 percent. There were two obvious and painful lessons I never forgot: you can’t let untrue statements or inconsistent claims go unchallenged, and if something needs doing, don’t rely on others, do it yourself.

  I was prepared for the defeat and returned to my law office to resume my practice early on the morning after the election. But I was not prepared for the intensity of the postelection commentary in which I was described as too stiff, too lawyerly, lacking in appeal and charisma. I read and listened to so much of this analysis that I eventually accepted it as true. I increasingly focused on a future in law and tried to rationalize away the pain of defeat. I enjoyed politics and public affairs and would continue to participate, but not in elected office; much as I would have enjoyed serving, I doubted my ability to ever win an election.