Twenty-nine voters would have been enough to get him the job. It was typical of Muskie that when he found he had only 24 immediate supporters, instead of trying to win more of his colleagues over by a public bid for the job, he quietly accepted defeat.After Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, Muskie joined a Washington law firm, Chadbourne & Parke, where he remained a partner until his death. His somewhat dour approach to politics was well illustrated by his remark when asked for a comment on Nixon’s victory in 1968. “In Maine,” he replied, “we have a saying that you don’t say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.”Shortly after that 1968 defeat, Muskie quietly convassed his colleagues to see if there was support for his becoming a Democratic Whip, a job that would have led to his becoming the Senate majority leader in succession to Senator Mike Mansfield in due course. The deception became known when the Nixon man, a certain Ken Clawson, was foolish enough to boast of his authorship of the “Canuck” letter to an attractive female reporter on the Washington Post.In 1976 Muskie was in the final in the contest to be Jimmy Carter’s Vice- President. Carter himself confided to his diary that it was a close thing between Muskie and Walter F.

“Fritz” Mondale, who eventually became Vice-President.Muskie, who had been Governor of Maine from 1955 to 1959 and then a United States Senator from 1959 until 1980, was rewarded by President Carter in that year by appointment as his Secretary of State, a job Muskie greatly enjoyed and did very creditably, though he once confided that it was one job “that never crossed my mind”.Muskie’s role was not to get involved in the detail of negotiations, for example, over the return of the American hostages in Tehran. In 1968, when he was the vice- presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket with Senator Hubert Humphrey, several polls suggested that, if Muskie had been the candidate, he would have won. As it was, it is often forgotten that Richard Nixon only won by a narrow margin, with the Humphrey-Muskie team gaining on him in the last hours before the polls closed.In 1972 Muskie won the first Democratic primary in New Hampshire, and might well have won the Democratic presidential nomination had it not been for the Union-Leader incident and for a cynical “dirty tricks” campaign by the Nixon campaign.The President’s men circulated a wholly faked letter purporting to show that Muskie had used the word “Canucks”, a contemptuous word for French- Canadians, who are an important part of the Democratic constituency in New Hampshire. “It changed people’s minds about me,” he later told the author Theodore H White. “They were looking for a strong guy, and here I was weak.”That was not the only time when Muskie came close to the highest political peaks. (Some said it was melting snowflakes.) He later admitted that going down to the newspaper’s office was “a mistake, a whopper”.The episode is a classic instance of the power of television to convey a non-verbal message. Perched on a flatbed truck with the news- paper’s offices as a backdrop, Muskie denounced Loeb so emotionally that it looked as if he burst into tears.

The leading local newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader, owned by the extreme right-wing publisher William Loeb, had not only attacked him; it had insulted his wife.
Muskie was so angry that he drove down to the Union-Leader, followed by several television crews. Governor, Senator, cabinet officer, Muskie scaled all but the highest peaks of United States politics on more than one occasion. He was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 1972 until he destroyed his own chances by losing his temper during the New Hampshire primary. The new chairman, Peter Read, has brought in Graham Robson, former chief executive of Dalgety consumer foods, as chief executive The shares fell 0.5p to 2.75p.. Senator Edmund Sixtus Muskie, Democrat of Maine, was a hard-working and well-liked Democratic politican who came close to being the first Polish-American president in history. The company said the full-year result would depend on the progress of the team, which is currently mid-table in the First Division. The loss compared with a pounds 113,000 profit in the previous year.