A former governor and three-term U.S. senator who became one of President Richard Nixon’s most outspoken Republican critics during the Watergate scandal has died.
Lowell P. Weicker Jr. made a name for himself as a prominent Rockefeller Republican in the latter half of the 20th century. In 1988, he lost reelection to then-Democrat Joe Lieberman, who ran to Weicker’s right.
Weicker mounted a Nixonian comeback two years later when he won the Connecticut governor’s race as an independent.
The Washington Post reports:
His family announced the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.
Mr. Weicker, who had family ties to the E.R. Squibb pharmaceutical fortune, was educated at preparatory schools and elite colleges. But in politics, a profession often driven by polls, Mr. Weicker was a self-described “maverick” — the title he also gave his memoir. His caustic tongue and bearlike, 6-foot-6 build lent an imposing aura.
A liberal Republican for much of his career, Mr. Weicker was unable to retain his party’s support during its rightward lurch under Reagan. He was unseated in 1988 by a Democratic challenger, Joseph I. Lieberman, then the Connecticut attorney general. The race marked Mr. Weicker’s sole electoral defeat in a political career spanning more than three decades.
He went on to win Connecticut’s governorship in 1990 by running as an independent. Remarkably, he managed to overcome the traditional allergy of Connecticut to an income tax in an effort to tame the state’s fiscal crisis.
During the Reagan administration, Weicker was one of a shrinking number of liberal Republicans who sought to protect appropriations, especially for medical research, from Reagan’s efforts to slash domestic spending.
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