Lowell Weicker, Connecticut’s Maverick Republican Senator, Dies at 92

Stephen Miller
·4 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

(Bloomberg) -- Lowell Weicker, the Republican senator who helped lead the Watergate investigation that resulted in President Richard Nixon’s resignation, has died. He was 92.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Weicker died Wednesday at a hospital in Middletown, Connecticut, the New York Times reported, citing a statement from his family. No cause was given.

Weicker was the last surviving member of the special Senate committee that investigated the Watergate scandal in 1973-1974. Serving on that panel thrust him into the national spotlight. Although he had been elected with Nixon’s endorsement, Weicker was one of the president’s chief critics.

Weicker moved further left as the Republican Party marched rightward in the 1970s, briefly seeking the party’s nomination for president in 1980. He voted against President Ronald Reagan’s budget proposals and defense buildup, supported the Equal Rights Amendment for women and backed federal funding for abortion, signal issues of the time.

Weicker was the most liberal Republican senator of his era, according to ratings by Americans for Democratic Action, a group that lobbies for liberal causes. He described himself in a 1988 profile in the New York Times as following in the footsteps of moderate Republicans such as Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller.

After losing his Senate seat in 1988, Weicker dropped his party affiliation and in 1990 was elected governor as an independent. Confronting a record budget deficit exceeding $1 billion, he slashed services and enacted Connecticut’s first income tax on individuals’ wages, which restored the state’s finances.

The tax plan was unpopular. Weicker was spat on and hanged in effigy in a protest at the state capitol in Hartford, the Associated Press reported in 1991. The measure passed narrowly, and Weicker twice vetoed the legislature’s attempts to repeal it.

Weicker retired in 1995, announcing that he might still be available to run for president. By then he had alienated his own party, and even much of the Democratic Party had become more conservative than he was.

Paris Birth

Lowell Palmer Weicker Jr. was born on May 16, 1931, in Paris, where his father worked at E.R. Squibb & Sons, a drug company in which Weicker’s grandfather held a controlling interest. His mother, the former Mary Bickford, was prominent in New York society and a niece of an archbishop of Canterbury.

Weicker’s family moved to the US when he was about 5 years old. He attended the private Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and received a bachelor’s degree in 1953 from Yale University. After serving in the US Army, he graduated in 1958 from the law school at the University of Virginia and went into private practice.

In 1962, he was elected to the Connecticut State House of Representatives. He also served as first selectman, the equivalent of mayor, for Greenwich, Connecticut.

Early in his political career, Weicker was conservative, backing a proposed constitutional amendment to allow prayer in public schools and supporting Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. In 1967, he won the US House seat covering Greenwich and Bridgeport.

Denouncing Haldeman

After one term as a congressman, Weicker was elected to the Senate. He was a reliable Republican vote until serving on the Watergate committee — formally, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. He excoriated Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, whom he accused of playing dirty politics in the 1972 presidential campaign.

“Republicans do not cover up,” Weicker said at a committee hearing in June 1973. “Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts.”

In March 1979, he declared his candidacy for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. He dropped out two months later, judging that he couldn’t win.

A year later, he traveled to Cuba, where he met with ruler Fidel Castro and said that the US should have closer relations with its longtime island foe.

Such controversial actions and Weicker’s opposition to the Reagan revolution further estranged him from Republicans in Washington. In 1988, he noted that he had never been invited to the Reagan White House.

That same year, Weicker failed to win a fourth term in the Senate. William F. Buckley, editor of the conservative National Review magazine and a Connecticut resident who said he had “always voted the straight Republican ticket in the past,” raised funds for Weicker’s victorious opponent, then-Democrat Joseph Lieberman.

“It’s really the Republican Party that has changed more than I have,” Weicker told the Times. “It wasn’t always the way it is today.”

Alphabetical Advantage

Two years later, Weicker successfully ran for governor as an independent on the “A Connecticut Party” line, ensuring that his name appeared first on the alphabetical ballot. He decided not to run for re-election.

During Donald Trump’s first year as president, Weicker compared him to Nixon: “There is ample cause for concern, and I hear disturbing echoes of the past,” Weicker wrote in a Times opinion article.

With his first wife, Mary Louise Godfrey, he had three children: Scot, Gray and Brian. He had two sons, Lowell III and Sonny, with his second wife, Camille Butler. Both marriages ended in divorce. In 1984, he married Claudia Ingram, who had two children from a previous marriage.

(Updates location of Weicker’s death in second paragraph)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.