Edmund Muskie Dies Maine Democrat Had Key Role In Freeing Hostages From Iran

Edmund S. Muskie, for years one of the Senate’s most respected and innovative members and secretary of state in the final months of the Carter administration, died Tuesday after suffering a heart attack. He would have been 82 Thursday.

The Maine Democrat was perhaps best known because of his campaign for an office that he never held: the presidency. While seeking votes in the 1972 New Hampshire primary, he reacted angrily while standing on a flatbed truck in a snowstorm - tears apparently running down his cheeks - to a newspaper story containing insults about his wife.

The incident “changed people’s minds about me, of what kind of guy I was,” Muskie later told author Theodore H. White. “They were looking for a strong, steady man and here I was weak.”

Whether Muskie actually had shed tears was hotly debated. But his campaign took a downward turn and Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota won the nomination.

He tended to be very soft-spoken, reserved and taciturn. “When you have nothing to say, don’t try to improve on silence,” he liked to say.

Yet when aroused by an issue, he could be a passionate speaker.

“He is one of the few men I have seen who could literally pull a bill through the Senate with his arguments,” former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., once said.

Muskie, the first Democrat in Maine’s history to be popularly elected to the Senate, was nearing the end of his fourth six-year term when President Carter asked him to become secretary of state.

The opening occurred on April 28, 1980, when Cyrus R. Vance resigned in protest over Carter’s orders to go ahead with the ill-fated military effort to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. Vance considered it a rash move that could endanger the hostages’ lives.

Leon Billings, Muskie’s chief Senate aide who accompanied him to the State Department, said Muskie changed the policy in dealing with the hostage crisis. He switched it “from constant attention to the hostage issue to more or less putting it on the back burner,” Billings said.

“We took the advice of our Iranian experts who said as long as you keep the issue up front the Iranians won’t settle. They will settle in their own time and that is what happened.”

Graphic: Edmund S. Muskie