They talked about a lot of things when Edmund Muskie died earlier this year, but his hole in one was not among them.
It was late 1968 when Muskie got his ace, and at the time, the former governor, sitting senator, and future secretary of state was running for vice president. Late 1968, as any active politician appreciated, was not the best historical moment to be running for any office. The Southeast Asian military offensive was at its most offensive; American cities were experiencing unrest (a term the press considered more polite than on fire); and the Chicago convention had wound up looking like a Shriners convention. And yet one evening in the midst of this, Muskie scheduled a television appearance, and the first thing he was asked about was his hole in one.
Even as a political naïf, I remember being taken aback by this. Here we were, if not on the eve of the apocalypse, then certainly approaching the late brunch, and all the usually inquisitorial media wanted to discuss with the Democratic vice presidential candidate was his triumph on the links. Après le déluge, they seemed to be saying, golf!
And yet the remarkable thing was, no one--not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not Muskie himself--objected. The questioners in this interview wanted to ask about holes in one, the audience wanted to listen, and that appeared to be that. I began to suspect then that there was more to this golf thing than I knew.
