HARTFORD, Conn — At six foot, six inches, Lowell Palmer Weicker Jr. was a tall man, and he often was moving against the crowd.
He died Wednesday after a short illness at the age of 92, according to his family.
"At home, he was the center of our universe never failing in his love and enthusiasm for family," Weicker's family said in a statement. His 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren have known him as "Pop".
As a Republican, he sat on a Senate committee to investigate a sitting president of the same party and was among the first members of the GOP to call for Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Two years after being defeated at the polls to keep his seat in the U.S. Senate, he ran a successful independent campaign for governor.
He marched into an anti-income tax protest at the Connecticut State Capitol, where most of the people were angry at him personally. He was called a maverick and portrayed as a sleeping bear.
Throughout, he championed the cause of those who most elected officials left behind.
Weicker was born in Paris on May 16, 1931, to his parents, Mary Hastings and Lowell Palmer Weicker. His grandfather Theodore Weicker, co-founded E. R. Squibb. He grew up in Greenwich and attended private school before graduating from Yale in 1953. He went into the Army, achieving the rank of first lieutenant, before going to the University of Virginia School of Law.
Weicker was married three times. He had three sons with his first wife Marie Louise “Bunny” Godfrey: Scott, Gray, and Brian and two sons with his second wife Camille Butler: Sonny and Lowell P. Weicker III, known as Tre. In December 1984 Weicker married his third wife Claudia Testa and had two sons: Mason and Andrew.
Weicker’s political career started when he was elected to a seat in the Connecticut General Assembly in 1962. At the same time, he served as First Selectman in Greenwich. In 1968, Weicker was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for one term.
In 1970, Thomas Dodd, who held the seat as U.S. Senator as a Democrat for two terms, had been buffeted by scandal for several years. The controversies, and rancor over the Vietnam War led to a split among Democrats who endorsed anti-war activist Joseph Duffy. Dodd mounted an independent campaign to retain his seat, and the three-man race resulted in splitting the Democratic vote and Weicker being elected.
In 1973, he was tapped to serve on the Senate Watergate Committee, known officially as the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. The committee was formed to look into the actions of President Richard Nixon and his administration. Nixon, and his chief advisors, had been involved in the break-in of the Democratic Party National Campaign Headquarters and the subsequent cover-up. Weicker was the first Republican U.S. Senator to call for Nixon’s resignation. Nixon hung to power for another year, eventually leaving office in disgrace in August 1974.
Weicker went on to be re-elected in 1976, and 1982. During that time, along with U.S. Representatives Ron Sarasin and Stuart McKinney, he sponsored hundreds of high school seniors for a week-long trip to Washington DC to get a close-up view of the workings of the federal government.
He briefly ran for president in 1980 but dropped out early. In a New York Times article in 1988, he pointed with pride to the fact that he had never been invited to the Reagan White House, despite their shared party affiliation.
From his time in the state legislature, he was a champion for the rights of the disabled. He and his third wife Claudia had a son who was born with Downs Syndrome, but his advocacy dated back to when he was a state legislator.
He was one of the few early voices pushing for funding research into treatments for HIV and AIDS. Weicker recalled meeting with three gay men who were lobbying for funding AZT, which at the time was one of the only successful treatments for HIV.
He told an interviewer from the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in 2009 about one of the key battles. “These three individuals came in and said, “Did you know that there’s a potentially positive development on AIDS medication that is lacking money for clinical trials? It’s called AZT [azidothyymidine], and many feel that this might be the real first step in helping those who have AIDS.”
The treatment had some success but was limited to 1,000 people in clinical trials. The money would allow more people access to the drug.
Weicker said, “I called Tony Fauci—he also arrived early—over at the NIH, and I said, “Tony, I’m told by a group of men here that AZT needs funding. Is this worthwhile?” And he said, “If you’re asking me, it is.” I said, “What’s the cost going to be?” “About $46 million for the clinical trials.”
“At least 10,000 people can live six extra months, and I'm not coming off the floor of the United States Senate until I get the money to see that that happens,” Weicker told the New York Times.
Weicker said he called on U.S. Senator William Proxmire to add the $46 million to the budget by unanimous consent at a time when few senators were in the chamber, thus avoiding a floor fight with the likes of Sen. Jesse Helms, a strong anti-gay voice at the time.
In 2015, a building at the National Institutes of Health was named after Weicker.
Up for election in 1988, Weicker ran against Joe Lieberman, at the time, the Connecticut State Attorney General. Lieberman portrayed Weicker in animated TV ads as a bear sleeping in a cave, detached from the concerns of people in the state.
In that November, Weicker lost to Lieberman.
On the campaign trail, he often told the story of a woman from the Midwest who acquired HIV through a blood transfusion. She testified about the discrimination she faced including seeing the town pool drained after she and her daughter went swimming.
In a column, Hartford Courant political writer Charles F.J. Morse wrote that Weicker told audiences the woman said to the committee, “Senators, America is not a nice place to live - if you are different or if you are sick."
Morse said Weicker would go on to tell the audience at the campaign stop, “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to make this a great country for all who are sick, for all who are different.”
Two years later, after quitting the Republican Party, Weicker ran for governor as an independent. He ran in a three-way race with Republican John G. Rowland and Democrat Bruce Morrison. He won with 40% of the vote, drawing from traditional Democratic strongholds and constituencies. During the campaign, he said he would be able to manage the state’s fiscal problems without resorting to an income tax, but that he wouldn’t rule it out.
Upon entering office, he was forced to reckon with the state’s worsening financial crisis. The state was approaching a deficit of close to $1 billion. Weicker and his team proposed three budget plans, one of which included the income tax. Weicker was convinced that the only fiscally responsible choice was the proposal with the income tax. He put forth a budget that proposed a flat income tax of 6 percent and reduced the sales tax from 8 to 4.25 percent.
The state legislature passed three budgets based on the sales tax and Weicker vetoed them all. After a summer that saw state government shut down for several days in July, and a series of temporary budget authorizations, a budget that included a 4.5% flat income tax rate and a drop in the state sales tax from 8 to 6 % was passed in late August.
To say the budget was not popular was putting it mildly. In October, 40,000 people took part in a protest at the state capitol. One attendee was Lowell Weicker.
“Also entering the crowd, against the advice of his bodyguards, was the Governor, who was spat at and met by obscenities and signs that compared him to Adolf Hitler. Smiling, and elbowing the police officers who tried to rush him, the Governor wedged his way through the crowd. ‘I don't intend to back down to that kind of stuff ever,’” Mr. Weicker said afterward.
He later talked to the Los Angeles Times, “Everybody is . . . (ticked off),” Weicker said. “Not one side or the other, but everybody. Now doesn’t that tell you this plan is fair?”
To take his political philosophy one step further, Weicker added, “Either (tick) ‘em all off or make ‘em all feel good.” It’s like “the old tennis analogy,” he said: “Go to the net or stay on the base line. Never play in the middle.”
Weicker also battled the state unions which had supported his campaign. With no budget in place, that July, an agreement postponing scheduled raises and guaranteeing no layoffs expired. When Weicker asked for the agreement to be put back into place, the unions refused. In November, thousands of state employees were either furloughed or laid off.
In addition to putting the income tax in place, Weicker also implemented spending reforms and consolidated state agencies. He signed bills on school desegregation, stricter gun control, and health care reform.
During his term, Weicker signed legislation making Connecticut the third state in the country to legalize comprehensive protections for lesbians and gay men against discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodation. It would be thirty years before the same protections for transgender people were made legal.
The following year, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation recognized him with the Profiles in Courage Award in 1992.
Weicker decided not to run for governor in 1994. He retired to Old Lyme, serving on the board of directors for a number of companies. He briefly floated the idea of running against U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in 2006, and ended up endorsing Ned Lamont in his ultimately unsuccessful bid.
Not always a fan of the Democratic Party, he did endorse Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. He told Connecticut Magazine:
“The problem today is that politics has become a contentious exercise in re-election. That’s what diminishes any courage. People figure that they’re going to make them popular in the polls, whereas my view of it is that you take your stand and the whole purpose of democracy is that the people back home then say “Yes” or “No” to what it is that you stood for."
He wrote in The Hartford Courant in 2016 if Republicans gave “Donald Trump the nomination to be the party's standard-bearer, they will complete their slow and steady descent into irrelevance.”
In writing about Weicker’s 1988 campaign for re-election, the Hartford Courant’s Charles F.J. Morse wrote, “[Weicker’s] best and noblest contributions in Washington had been as advocate for the disabled; those ill with AIDS; those facing catastrophic handicaps: those different because of the lack of education, those facing injustice, and for everyone threatened by any attack on their country’s Constitution. The different and the sick of this country were Lowell Weicker's special constituency. All too often, he did it alone.”
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