Enactment of landmark legislation earlier this month restructuring the nation’s intelligence agencies put the spotlight once again on a senator from Maine, our own Susan Collins. At the White House signing ceremony a few days ago, no one stood closer to the president’s hand and no one was showered with more praise.

For her ability to build bridges to Democrats while fending off resistance from GOP conservatives, Collins is often compared to her senior colleague, Olympia Snowe, but is also seen as following in the footsteps of her mentor, William Cohen.

There’s another Maine Republican senator whose name you won’t hear Collins and Snowe compared to, even though you should. It’s Lewiston native Frederick G. Payne, whose widow died just last month. Payne’s achievements as governor, including the enactment of one of the most far-reaching tax reform measures in Maine history, were the subject of my last column.

Payne’s move from the Blaine House to the U.S. Senate symbolized a classic battle within the Republican Party, which in Maine is still being waged. It came as the result of his successful 1952 challenge to conservative GOP incumbent Owen Brewster. If Collins and Snowe owe anyone for their claim to Maine Republican leadership, it might well be that the moderate trail they have pursued was one that Payne helped blaze. For it was Payne who successfully took on an incumbent senator in a primary, with a campaign premised on a middle-of-the-road blueprint that Collins and Snowe follow today.

In Payne’s time, this meant that he ran as a leader of the Eisenhower movement. This was a moderate-to-liberal alternative to the dominant conservative leadership of Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, whose cause in Maine was championed by Payne’s opponent, Brewster, our state’s senior senator. Though the “I Like Ike” campaign had broad popular support, it was only narrowly successful within the Republican Party itself, barely eking out a victory over Taft at the national party convention that year.

This result was foreshadowed only a few weeks earlier that summer in a Maine primary that saw Payne unseat Brewster with just 51 percent of the vote. At a time when the GOP primary was tantamount to election, Payne overwhelmed his Democratic opponent, Androscoggin County Commissioner Roger Dube, in the general election.

Brewster, by the way, is a subject of “The Aviator,” a new movie about Howard Hughes. It portrays a confrontation with Hughes over a plane Hughes built for the military. Brewster is played by Alan Alda.

As a new senator, Payne continued to champion the Eisenhower agenda even as some of his colleagues, including fellow freshman Barry Goldwater, refused to do so. He spurned the more right-leaning leadership of Taft, who was, despite Ike’s election, still the Senate GOP leader. Ike cites Payne in his memoirs, for example, as joining Connecticut’s Prescott Bush – grandfather to our present White House occupant – as one of the six most supportive senators for Eisenhower’s moderate program in the 1953-54 Congress. In those days the Bushes were known more as New England progressives than Sunbelt conservatives.

By the next session, Payne was reaching across the aisle to team up with Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy to successfully sponsor the Kennedy-Payne Budget and Accounting Act of 1956, which was followed by the Kennedy-Payne-Byrd Act of 1958. Though Payne’s background as a professional auditor was helpful in prevailing upon his colleagues to streamline government budget and fiscal practices, the collaboration with Kennedy demonstrated a willingness to surmount partisan barriers to achieve reform.

By early 1958, with Maine mired in its worst recession since the Depression, Payne entered into another joint venture with a Democratic senator. This time he teamed up with one of the senate’s most liberal members, Illinois’ Paul Douglas, in sponsoring a $275 million loan program for depressed sectors of the economy. Payne’s leadership on the issue proved crucial in winning passage, but the bill proved too liberal even for Eisenhower and it was rebuked with a rare presidential veto. Even then, a GOP president did not always approve the actions of a Republican Maine senator.

Payne’s Democratic opponent in his re-election bid that year, Gov. Edmund Muskie, found little in Payne’s record with which he felt a Democrat could quarrel. Indeed, Payne himself had given Muskie behind-the-scenes support in Muskie’s historic 1954 upset of Gov. Cross. But Muskie seemed to Mainers of the late 1950s what Payne had meant to them in the 1940s: fresh, personally magnetic and outside the Beltway.

Payne also had trouble sustaining his once populist image because of access – including a private direct phone line into his office – he had once afforded some business interests. Like White House aide Sherman Adams, he had also accepted a vicuna coat from controversial Boston-based textile manufacturer Bernard Goldfine. Payne nevertheless credited Goldfine with bringing thousands of jobs, including mills in Winthrop and Wilton that were among the largest employers in central Maine, to the state’s starving economy.

Though it was never shown that the courtesies extended to Payne by some business leaders had ever led to improper intervention on their behalf, the episodes made it difficult for Payne to shake off the appearance of having become an insider, and he was given early retirement at age 58 by a restive Maine electorate.

Frederick and Ella Payne returned to Waldoboro, Ella’s hometown. Though his achievement as governor in ushering in a modern tax structure would win an occasional mention, he lived in relative obscurity for another 20 years until his death in 1978.

Shortly after that, the federal postal center opposite Portland’s Deering Oaks was named in his honor. Given the recent rivalry between Portland and Lewiston for location of a new postal center, it’s a bit ironic that for many years the largest one in Portland was named for a Lewiston native. It should not, however, be the only way by which the career of Fred Payne should be remembered.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].