Edmund Muskie

March 28, 1914 – March 26, 1996

Edmund Muskie (1914–1996) was an American politician, attorney, and diplomat who served as the 58th U.S. secretary of state from 1980 to 1981 under President Jimmy Carter. A Democrat from Maine, he had been governor of Maine from 1955 to 1959 and a U.S. senator from Maine from 1959 to 1980, and was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1968.

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Biography

Edmund Muskie was born in 1914 in Rumford, Maine, to a Polish immigrant tailor. He graduated from Bates College in 1936 and Cornell Law School in 1939, opened a law practice in Waterville, and served as a naval officer in the Second World War.

Elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 1946, he served there until 1951. In 1954 he won the governorship, the first Democrat to do so in two decades, and held it until 1959, when he entered the U.S. Senate. As a senator he championed environmental legislation, leading the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972, and from 1975 he was the first chairman of the new Senate Budget Committee.

Muskie was Hubert Humphrey's running mate in the narrowly lost 1968 presidential election. He entered 1972 as a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, but his campaign faltered after the forged 'Canuck letter' damaged his standing before the New Hampshire primary.

In May 1980 President Carter appointed him secretary of state after Cyrus Vance resigned; his short tenure ended with the negotiations that freed the American hostages in Iran. Out of office, he served in 1986-87 on the Tower Commission that investigated the Iran-Contra affair. He died in Washington in 1996.