U.S. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was never one to back down from a fight.

Rising to national fame after challenging U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy in her 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” speech, the formidable Maine politician never hesitated to speak her mind.

Smith’s harsh criticism of the Soviet Union, for instance, drew the wrath of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who once called her “the devil in disguise of a woman.”

But it’s one thing to stand tall against the likes of McCarthy and Khrushchev.

It’s quite another to oppose Jimmy Stewart.

Yes, that Jimmy Stewart, the lanky, easygoing and sincere movie star still beloved for his roles in classic films like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Smith, who held a Senate seat from 1949 to 1973, didn’t offer any objection to Stewart’s acting.

However, in a little-remembered battle that once held the nation’s stunned attention, Smith took aim at Stewart after the U.S. Air Force tried to promote the Hollywood-based reservist to the rank of brigadier general.

The proposed move would have placed Stewart in the No. 3 leadership position of the Strategic Air Command in the event of war.

She didn’t think he had earned it.

“I personally like Jimmy Stewart,” Smith said, “but popularity should not be the yardstick by which we promote officers.”

“There are others more deserving,” Smith insisted.

For George Todt, a Hollywood columnist, her stance made no sense.

He said that “Senator Margaret” was “a credit to her sex and to the nation as well, but I just can’t understand her picking on our Jimmy. Why him?”

STEWART’S AIR FORCE CAREER

Even before the United States found itself at war with Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Princeton-educated Stewart sought to enlist in the military.

But the U.S. Army rejected him because he was too thin.

Stewart proceeded to chow down on fattening foods until he passed the mandatory weight limit by one ounce.

In March 1941, he gave up his $300-a-week salary as an actor to become a private earning $21 a month, according to a biography posted by the Kennedy Center.

At age 32, officials considered him too old to become a combat pilot, as Stewart hoped to become, but after realizing he already had 400 hours of flying time as a private pilot, officials with the Army Air Corps agreed to send him to flight school.

He got his wings in 1942 and spent another year as an instructor for bombardier cadets before heading to Europe as the commander of a bomber squadron in the Eighth Air Force, flying 20 combat missions in the process.

Air & Space Forces Magazine said Stewart gained a reputation for assigning himself the toughest missions.

“I just can’t sit here and send these fellows to death, without knowing myself what I am sending them into,” he said at the time.

But Stewart came home safely in 1945 as a colonel, with an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross among his commendations. Returning to acting, reporters asked him about his experiences.

“It got pretty rough overseas at times” was about all they could get out of him.

Stewart stayed in the Air Force Reserves, which required occasional stints for training and other duties.

STEWART’S FIRST MOVIE AFTER THE WAR

When Frank Capra called Stewart about starring in an upcoming film titled “It’s a Wonderful Life,” he admitted to the actor that its plot sounded a little dubious.

But Stewart saw its potential.

As George Bailey, a man who wanted to see the world but could never get out of Bedford Falls, Stewart managed to capture the pathos of dreams constantly deferred and the unexpected recognition that maybe it was all for the best.

Actress and comedian Carol Burnett later said that Stewart’s acting was “one of the finest moments of work that anyone has ever done on the screen.”

“He is so in tune with that character that he and George Bailey are one,” Burnett said.

The losses Stewart experienced in war helped Stewart capture the raw pain at the core of the story.

At one point, Bailey considers suicide and looks to heaven for help.

“I’m not a praying man but if you’re up there and you can hear me, show me the way,” Bailey says, in tears as he sits at a bar wondering how to cope. “I’m at the end of my rope. Show me the way, God.”

The actor said later that he “felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing. That was not planned at all.”

Clarence, an angel who needed to earn his wings, emerges to show Bailey on Christmas Eve that despite it all, he’d lived a wonderful life, full of friends, family and love.

“It’s amazing it’s become such a Christmas picture,” Stewart once told Johnny Carson. He said the principles it highlights are “really very basic American values.”

“It’s sophisticated. It’s innocent. It’s mythological,” actor Richard Dreyfuss once said.

SMITH’S MOST FAMOUS MOMENT

As McCarthy began grabbing headlines for his rarely proven accusations that prominent people were secret communists, Smith became fed up with her uncouth colleague from Wisconsin.

She rose on the Senate floor on June 1, 1950, to deliver a short speech that never named McCarthy directly. But nobody listening had any doubt who she had in mind.

Denouncing “the reckless abandon in which unproved charges have been hurled from this side of the aisle,” Smith, also a Republican, said the smears turned the Senate into “a forum of hate and character assassination.”

She defended the right of every American to criticize the government, hold unpopular beliefs, protest and “the right of independent thought.”

“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” Smith said.

“It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques — techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life,” said Smith.

“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear,” the senator from Skowhegan concluded.

Her plea to stand up for American values, remembered fondly, did little to stop the rise of McCarthyism.

The speech earned her wide acclaim — and cost her a seat on the Senate’s investigations committee that was handed instead to Richard Nixon of California, who went on to become vice president under Dwight Eisenhower and later won the presidency.

THE CLASH OVER STEWART’S PROMOTION

In 1957, Smith served as a lieutenant colonel in the Women’s Air Force. She was also among the military’s most strident supporters on Capitol Hill.

Her top aide, William C. Lewis Jr., was a colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

So was Stewart.

There were at the time about 1,900 colonels up for promotion. The Air Force sought to elevate 11 of them to general.

The promotions list included Stewart, who had recently starred in the movie “Strategic Air Command,” a fawning paean to the favored branch of the Air Force.

Something about it clearly bugged Smith.

“Why don’t you make June Allyson a brigadier general for playing the female lead?” she exclaimed.

Smith, who hailed Stewart’s war record and his acting talent, pointed out to her Armed Services Committee colleagues that Stewart had only logged 39 days of reservist duty since World War II. She didn’t see the point of elevating a movie star who hadn’t put in the time.

Air Force propagandists, according to columnist Drew Pearson, told reporters that Smith’s opposition was spurred by Lewis, her aide. They accused him of feeling embittered because he had been passed over for promotion.

Since Smith had a long track record of pushing for more training among reservists, the charge fell flat.

Stewart wasn’t her only target on the Air Force’s promotion list. Smith also argued that a General Electric vice president, also in line to become a general, didn’t have the requisite training either.

Smith accused the Air Force of lying about the record of both Stewart and the corporate leader.

The Lewiston Daily Sun examined the case and concluded that Smith “had the facts straight,” including an assertion that Steward “cannot fly any plane now currently in Air Force use.”

But the head of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Curtis LeMay, countered that Stewart deserved a promotion anyway by virtue of his “normal civilian pursuit.”

Smith’s colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, showing old-school senatorial respect, agreed to pass over both men. Stewart, in short, lost out on the promotion.

“It doesn’t pay to argue with a lady,” Pearson observed.

After the flap, Time magazine found Stewart vacationing in Nevada after putting in two weeks of active duty with a B-52 wing in Limestone, Maine.

“Pilot Stewart landed smoothly,” Time wrote.

He told the magazine, “I was very honored to receive the nomination by President Eisenhower and the Air Force. I intend to continue to do my best to fulfill my duty requirements as a reserve officer in the Strategic Air Command.”

STEWART GETS HIS PROMOTION

Two years later, the Air Force again sought a promotion for Stewart, stating it wanted him for a public relations role rather than a flying one.

During the previous promotion debate, there was a misunderstanding, at best, about Stewart’s potential need to fly missions and be physically involved in combat situations as a brigadier general. Neither was the case, but for this second effort to promote him, Air Force officials made the point clear.

Without a combat possibility attached, Smith said she had no problem with the move and joined the rest of the Senate in approving it.

At the same time, though, the Armed Services panel issued a report examining what transpired in 1957.

It pointed out that a Reserve colonel who worked as an airline pilot, who had 30 times as much participation as Stewart, had been passed over for the post eyed for the actor on the 1957 promotion list.

Smith said Hollywood glamor should not have trumped actual experience – an assertion the Reserve Officers Association endorsed as well.

The Air Force didn’t debate the point.

Stewart, though, wasn’t happy with the outcome.

Asked by reporters how he felt about being assigned “a desk jockey job” instead of a flying one, the movie star answered, “Frankly, I don’t think I’ll be as effective as an information officer as I would be if I were involved in actual combat command.”

“The same thing happened during World War II when they tried to make me a recruiter, an information officer and a morale booster,” Stewart said. “They even wanted me to make movies for the services.”

Fortunately, he added, “I talked them into letting me become a pilot and eventually I few 20 missions over Europe in B-24s.”

But it was one thing to take on the Air Force and quite another to take on Smith.

Pearson quipped that Stewart “has been forced to surrender to the lone lady of the Senate.”

Maybe, but maybe not.

In a 1961 interview, Stewart said, “I’m not sure that the senator fully understood that nobody was expecting me to climb into a modern jet bomber and fly it.”

Like anyone old enough to be a general, Stewart said, “Jets have made the pace too hot for my slowing reflexes.”

In any case, Stewart said, “Even before Senator Smith squared the jaw at me, I was in line for a more suitable assignment: deputy director of the Office of Information.”

Both Stewart and Smith, who each died in the mid-1990s, are remembered as American icons, symbols of patriotism and virtue.

That they ever clashed is long forgotten.

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