Frank Coffin, the former Congressman credited with helping to resurrect the Maine Democratic Party, and later, with using his position as a federal judge to advocate for legal aid, has died at age 90. The Lewiston native died Monday afternoon after complications arose from surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm.

In one of his last interviews, Coffin spoke with MPBN's Susan Sharon last year about the legal community working to ensure that people of all income levels have representation.

"Up to a point it seems to me that a state without what you would call very wealthy resources, physically and materially, they do have wealthy resources in the people who are willing to give their time and talent to this kind of problem, and that gives me -- it's a constant challenge and it gives me optimism," Coffin said.

His colleagues on the bench and in politics say that this optimism and can-do attitude inspired those who met Coffin during his 60 years of public service.

"He was as close to saint as we had walking among us," says Howard Dana, a lawyer at Verill Dana in Portland and a former Maine Superior Court Justice who worked with Coffin on legal aid issues. A Republican, Dana says that Coffin was respected even by those who did not see eye-to-eye with him when he left a career as a trial lawyer in the 1950s to enter politics.

"He was jocular, competent and a model civil servant, and certainly of the kind of politician that all sides of the aisle spoke with and worked with," Dana says.

Christian Potholm, Professor of Government at Bowdoin College, says that Coffin was integral to turning around the fortunes of the Maine Democratic Party in the 1950s. At that point, Maine was dominated by the Republican party. Coffin helped lead Edmund Muskie's successful 1954 bid for governor.

"He did a lot of work that today would kind of come under the heading of polling. He would send out postcards and find out what was on people's minds. So that when Muskie showed up in a little town in Aroostook County, he already four or five things that he knew was going on in the community," Potholm says.

Muskie's success opened the doors for other other Democrats, and Coffin won the Congressional seat for Maine's 2nd District.
Don Nicoll worked as an assistant to Coffin in D.C., and later for Muskie, who had become a U.S. Senator.

"The traditions of Franklin Roosevelt, of Harry Truman, were very strong and Frank believed that you could make a difference and you had an obligation to make a difference," Nicoll says.

After an unsuccessful run for governor in 1960, Coffin was chosen as deputy administrator for the Agency of International Development under the Kennedy Administration. Then he was appointed as a judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in 1965. Shortly afterward, he began to speak out for the need for legal services for the poor.

Nan Heald is director of Pine Tree Legal Assistance. "It was very unusual, and I think it still is unusual on a national level to have a federal judge take such a personal interest in these issues and to speak for them in so many different forums -- he went to the state Legislature, he talked to private attorneys. He talked, I think, everywhere he could find an audience."

During his 40 years as a federal judge he also trained a legion of clerks who went on to become law professors and assistant U.S. attorneys. They include Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton White House.

Colleagues such as Daniel Wathen, former Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, also looked to him for guidance.
"He was someone that I turned to when I faced a problem that I had never faced before and I could always talk with him about it and I always came away with an insight that I needed. I really do feel that I have lost my mentor and senior partner."