Brennan, McKernan have similar pasts > Gubernatorial candidates took comparable political paths to Blaine House

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series on the gubernatorial race.

For all their differences, which are being loudly amplified during this fall’s gubernatorial campaign, Joseph E. Brennan, the son of a Portland dock worker, and John R. McKernan, the son of an Old Town newspaper publisher, are remarkably similar men.

That’s what makes the “McBrennan” gubernatorial race so frustrating for voters.

Both men are lawyers and seasoned politicians who started their careers in the Maine Legislature. Each has been governor of the state and each has served four years in Congress.

McKernan is seeking his second term as governor and Brennan wants his old job back as a third-term governor.

The result is a collision course for two cautious politicians who have in the past tended to avoid the long-shot races and have enjoyed a string of election successes. Yet, in their minds, this current all-out battle for the Blaine House is worth the risks because the governorship brought each man the power and the prestige that neither found in the Maine Legislature, nor in Congress.

By all accounts, Brennan and McKernan were ordinary, but good boys during their formative years in downtown Portland and uptown Bangor.

Brennan’s neighborhood was the rough and tumble Munjoy Hill, where he loved to play touch football, baseball and basketball, but always did better at games like cards, dice and pool.

“We played whist and he probably thought he was the best whist player in the city,” recalled Jim McLaughlin, one of Brennan’s boyhood buddies during the 1940s and early ’50s. “He was kind of a hustler at pool. We played basketball at the Boys Club, but he wasn’t as good as me.”

Some people think that Brennan’s street smarts helped propel his political career and that, in some ways, he’s played the game of politics with the shrewdness of a pool hustler.

McKernan no doubt honed his competitive edge on basketball and tennis courts. He was an All-State basketball player at Bangor High School, scoring a record 1,000 points during his three-year varsity career. He also was a title winner on the tennis court in high school and at Dartmouth College.

“Jock McKernan didn’t just show up and play. He worked hard,” recalled basketball teammate John “Gabby” Price, who owns and runs Fairmount Market in Bangor. “Some people have a scorched-earth policy. They run over you to do well. He had the talent, so he didn’t have to. He was good, but he worked hard.”

“Jock McKernan didn’t just show up and play. He worked hard,” recalled basketball teammate John “Gabby” Price, who owns and runs Fairmount Market in Bangor. “Some people have a scorched-earth policy. They run over you to do well. He had the talent, so he didn’t have to. He was good, but he worked hard.”

Barbara McKernan says her oldest son doesn’t have the “killer instinct,” even though he is competitive.

“Let me give you an example. When he was playing tennis in college, he would win the first set big, then relax and lose the second. He’d have to fight like hell to win the third,” she said, explaining that her son’s approach to his singles matches nearly drove his coach crazy.

“But in doubles, that would never happen. There was no way he would ever let his partner down,” she said.

Politics apparently was not much on the minds of Brennan or McKernan when they were young.

Brennan told an interviewer in 1987 that politics, in fact, was the furthest thing from his mind when he was a kid on Munjoy Hill.

“Some of these people around — I won’t mention any names — who have run for governor recently, I think they were planning to run for governor when they were in the eighth grade,” Brennan said.

“You didn’t think about that in the neighborhood in which I grew up. Most everybody worked with their hands. … Politics played very little role in our lives, virtually none. I was interested in the sports page, but I didn’t know who was running for the Legislature.”

Likewise, McKernan is remembered as a fairly apolitical youth. His mother says that if she’d been asked to predict 25 years ago which of her two sons might turn to politics, she would have answered without hesitation, “Bobby.” It was the younger McKernan brother who was “fascinated with politics in high school.”

Not Jock. “He was so busy just living,” said Mrs. McKernan with a chuckle.

Yet a few classmates aren’t surprised that McKernan ended up in politics.

Brenda Hess Jordan said McKernan “maybe showed his bent” in a course called Foundations of American Freedom at Bangor High School. “We used to get into some political discussions. He was good.”

“In an era when we were more concerned about breaking in a new high school, getting into college and athletics, Jock always had these political ambitions,” said Bill Cohen (not the U.S. senator from Bangor), a classmate who now works at Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. “We all set our goals to have a date. He set his goal to be governor.”

Hanging around Munjoy Hill

Joseph Edward Brennan was born on Nov. 2, 1934, the fifth of eight children born to John J. and Catherine Mulkerrin Brennan, both of whom emigrated to Maine from Galway, Ireland.

Brennan’s father worked as a union stevedore on the Portland docks for 40 years. He died in 1957. Brennan’s mother died in 1984.

The Brennan family lived in a three-family apartment house on Kellogg Street — “10 people in five rooms,” Brennan recalled years later. Right across the street was a grocery store run by the Cavallaro family. The store was the social center of the neighborhood and a place where young boys loved to hang out.

“All the kids on that hill hung around together,” recalled McLaughlin, who is now a bricklayer. In the summer, the kids would “thumb” to Crystal Lake in Gray to go swimming, or swim in Portland Harbor, he said. They also caddied at the Portland Country Club.

Brennan “was just a regular, good kid,” McLaughlin said. “He didn’t get into trouble. I suppose he got his knuckles rapped, but not as much as I did. I think when he had to do the homework, he did the homework, when a lot of us kids didn’t.”

Weekday mornings, Brennan and McLaughlin could usually be found at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, where they were altar boys at the 6:30 a.m. Masses.

Wearing dress shirts and ties, they attended Cathedral Grammar School, where the nuns ruled with strict discipline, McLaughlin said. Brennan went there through eighth grade.

“He was a very smart boy, but he didn’t like to study,” said Sister Mary Mark Barrett, Brennan’s eighth-grade teacher. “I had to keep after him, because I knew he had the ability. He would rather do anything but study. He was a good pupil, but an ordinary boy.”

Sister Barbara Brennan, one of Brennan’s younger sisters and current principal of Cathedral Grammar School, said her brother finished first in his eighth-grade class in 1948.

She also recalls his dependability in doing errands for their mother.

At various times during his youth, Brennan also worked as a paper boy, hot-dog vendor and a longshoreman.

At Cheverus High School, Brennan was a “good talker and a good, steady student,” but not outstanding, recalled Fr. Joseph Holland. Now a chaplain in Boston, Holland taught English, French and Latin at the Roman Catholic high school when Brennan was there. Brennan was good in English and Latin, Holland said. “He was very nice in class, but he didn’t stand out.”

Brennan certainly wasn’t a standout with the girls, at least not when he and Loring were high school freshmen attending Friday night dances at the Portland YMCA. Loring remembers both of them standing along the wall in the gym, “too scared to ask girls to dance.”

Brennan graduated from Cheverus in 1952.

Ball games on Broadway

John Rettie McKernan Jr. was born May 20, 1948, first of two sons born to John R. and Barbara Guild McKernan. McKernan’s grandfather, the “Jock” he got his nickname from, came to the United States from Scotland to mine Vermont granite.

McKernan’s father was a high school scholar and athlete who attended Dartmouth College on a scholarship, then stepped into a career in journalism. He ended up in Bangor writing and editing sports, then bought the Penobscot Times in Old Town in 1950. He also was a well-known radio sportscaster. He died in 1964.

McKernan’s mother is still a Bangor resident. She has had her own political career, serving on the Bangor City Council from 1976 to 1982. She has worked for Bangor Savings Bank in recent years, having sold the Penobscot Times in 1974.

McKernan seemed to have a fairy-tale childhood, growing up in a big house on the well-to-do end of Broadway across the street from a tree-shaded park. His family also had a summer home in Hancock. He was good at sports, good in school and good-looking.

His carefree childhood was shattered on March 20, 1964, when his father suffered a fatal heart attack while in Boston to broadcast a schoolboy basketball tournament for WLBZ radio.

McKernan, 15 when his father died, was one of two boys whose fathers died while they were in high school, recalled Cohen, his classmate. Cohen said it was hard for other teens, like himself, to fully understand the impact that losing a father must have had.

McKernan’s mother took over the weekly paper and print shop that her husband had owned and operated. She and the boys moved from the big house on Broadway to a smaller place on Kenduskeag Avenue.

Mrs. McKernan says that her husband had a significant impact on Jock and his brother, even though they were young when he died. He used to tell them that they couldn’t take credit for what they could do easily, she said. He wanted them to make good use of their talents.

John McKernan had lived to see Jock play on the Bangor High School basketball team and while understandably proud, he made clear to his son that “just because you are involved in something in the public eye … keep it in perspective,” Mrs. McKernan recalled.

Teammates like Price and Tim Furrow, a Brewer school teacher, say that even though McKernan was often the high scorer on the team, he never acted like a star.

“He always looked eyeball to eyeball with me,” Furrow said. “He always had time for me.

Nevertheless, he clearly showed some leadership qualities. He was captain of the basketball team for two years, selected for Dirigo Boys State, president of the B-Club (an organization for boys who earned athletic letters) and assistant editor of the school newspaper.

“I think you always knew Jock, the governor, was going to be successful,” said Gabby Price.

McKernan graduated from high school in 1966. Army made the man

Brennan joined the U.S. Army after high school, serving in Hawaii from 1953 to 1955. He was discharged as a private first class.

“It’s old hat to say,” Brennan told an interviewer in 1980, “but the Army made a man out of me. I went in when I was 18, a scrawny, know-nothing kid weighing 120 pounds. I came out two years later, weighing 175 and knowing a bit more about the world, books and reading.”

He went to Boston College on the G.I. bill and graduated in 1959 with a degree in economics.

Before going to the University of Maine School of Law, Brennan taught English for a semester at Oxford High School and also spent a year selling cigarettes for the P. Lorillard Co.

Brennan said he had never met a lawyer in his life until he went to law school. It was during law school, or shortly thereafter, that he was bitten by the political bug.

Brennan graduated first in his law school class and passed his bar exams in 1963 when he was 28 years old. He joined the Portland law firm of Casper Tevanian. The following year, he won his first election and went to the Legislature as a Democrat from Portland.

Because he didn’t own a car, Brennan said he had to hitchhike to Augusta to be sworn in. He was a quiet member of the House, but was elected assistant house minority leader during his second term.

“I like Joe,” commented one Democratic lawmaker in 1967, “but let’s be frank about it; he’s not very assertive. It’s going to be a problem for him.”

In 1968, Brennan married Mary K. Gonya of Millinocket, a lawyer and Miss Maine in 1966. The two were partners in a Portland law practice for several years.

They had two children, Joseph (known as J.B.) and Tara, now students at Colby and Bates colleges, respectively. The Brennans were married for eight years, divorcing in 1976.

Law school to lawmaking

McKernan followed his father’s footsteps to Dartmouth College, where he majored in government. He spent most of his summers teaching tennis, but also did some editing and selling of advertising for his mother’s newspaper. After graduating in 1970, he joined the Army National Guard and married his high school sweetheart, Judith Files. Their son, Peter, was born a year later.

In 1971, he entered the University of Maine School of Law and apparently got bitten by the same political bug that had infected Brennan a decade earlier. He ran for the Legislature as a Republican from Bangor while still in law school, and won.

McKernan returned for a second term after graduating from law school in 1974 and was chosen by his Republican colleagues to be assistant floor leader.

His most notable accomplishment while in the Legislature was winning passage of the so-called “bottle bill” which put a nickel deposit on cans and bottles of soda and beer to promote their return. It was anti-litter legislation.

McKernan left Bangor and the Legislature in 1976. He moved to the southern part of the state, where he joined the law firm of Verrill and Dana. He became a lobbyist representing such groups as the Maine Medical Association, Associated Industries of Maine and the Motion Picture Association of America.

In 1978, McKernan and his wife of eight years were divorced.

In 1970, Brennan took a break from the Maine Legislature, but not from politics. He was elected Cumberland County attorney. Two years later, however, he was back in the Legislature, this time in the Senate. He moved right into a leadership post — Senate minority leader. He promptly initiated legislation creating the state’s full-time district attorney system.

In 1974, he went after the governorship. It was the post-Watergate era and Brennan called for reform of the campaign finance laws. He became the first candidate to voluntarily disclose his personal finances.

Brennan lost in the primary to fellow Democrat George J. Mitchell. Mitchell went on to lose to the independent candidate, James B. Longley, in November.

Meanwhile, Brennan was selected by the Democratic majority in the Legislature to become attorney general. He held the state’s top legal post for four years, making a name for himself by stubbornly resisting any state surrender of land or money in the Indian Land Claims case.

In his second bid to be governor in 1978, Brennan was successful. He beat Republican Linwood Palmer and the Rev. Herman C. “Buddy” Frankland.

As governor, Brennan signed the 1980 agreement which settled the Indian Land Claims case without costing the state any money. The federal government made the $80 million payment to the tribes.

In 1980, Brennan had the chance to appoint himself to the U.S. Senate because President Jimmy Carter had named Sen. Edmund S. Muskie as his secretary of state. Instead, he tapped Mitchell, his 1974 primary rival, who has gone on to win re-election twice and now is the Senate’s majority leader.

Brennan easily won re-election as governor in 1982, besting Republican Charles Cragin and in the process becoming the first Democrat since the Civil War to win in every Maine county.

In 1986, unable to serve more than two terms as governor, Brennan ran for the seat in Congress being vacated by McKernan, who was running for governor. The two swapped jobs.

His record of political successes continued in 1988 when he was re-elected to Congress, beating Republican challenger Ted O’Meara.

This year, Brennan is betting his winning streak will continue.

McKernan spent six years as a lobbyist, before jumping back into politics. When David Emery decided to leave Congress in 1982, McKernan filled the gap. Borrowing an idea from Sen. William Cohen’s campaigns, McKernan set out to walk the 1st District to meet voters.

“We’re in a grass-roots era of politics,” he said. “People want to see the candidates, and deserve to.”

McKernan’s opponent was John Kerry, equally young, articulate and personable. It was a choice between liberals. McKernan won.

He won again in 1984, but by 1986 he had tired of the Washington scene. In announcing his bid for the governorship four years ago, he explained that he felt some frustration, as a member of Congress, at not being able to set an agenda and see goals accomplished.

“What directly affects the people of Maine is what happens in Augusta,” he said.

McKernan won a four-way gubernatorial race, beating Democrat James Tierney, and two independents, Sherry Huber and John Menario.

Midway through his gubernatorial term, McKernan married U.S. Rep. Olympia Snowe, finally bringing into the open a romance that the two had been questioned about for nearly a decade.

Now McKernan has all his attention focused on his bid to keep the state’s top job. With just a few weeks left in the campaign, he is again the tennis player trying to rally in the third set.

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