Commentary—

How Weicker Fabricates History

And Gets Away With It

By Chris Powell

What is the legacy of Lowell P. Weicker, Jr?

Does it involve his tenure as U.S. senator, during which he was among the first Republicans to denounce corruption in the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal in 1973 and 1974, an advocate of greater support for the disabled, and a greedy and shameless collector of tens of thousands of dollars of speaking fees – personal income – from the special interests whose legislation he voted on?

Does it involve his tenure as Connecticut’s first  third-party governor, during which he imposed the state income tax only a few months after declaring his opposition to the tax during the campaign, thereby engendering by himself more cynicism about politics in Connecticut than had been engendered by all the politicians in the state combined in the previous hundred years?

More likely Weicker’s legacy will be his rewriting history so that he is remembered however he wants to be.

Weicker was at it again the other day in a millennium essay on the front page of The Norwich Bulletin, availing himself of the opportunity to reflect on the next thousand years of politics. Here’s how he explained a crucial moment of his political career:

“When it was clear that the Republican Party of Connecticut no longer supported the priorities of its senior senator, it manifested its feelings at the polls in 1988 and kicked him out. Then, when the gubernatorial election of 1990 presented itself, experience dictated my decision to run as an independent.”

That Connecticut’s Republican Party “kicked him out” is Weicker’s latest fabrication, if not his biggest. For the party never denied him any nomination he sought.

Yes, Weicker, then US representative in the 4th District, had to win a primary for his first nomination to the Senate in 1970, defeating a conservative state senator from Weston, John Lupton.

And Weicker was challenged for renomination to the Senate at the Republican state convention in 1982 by Prescott Bush, brother of the vice president. But Bush declined to press the issue to a primary and Weicker was nominated and reelected. In 1988 Weicker faced no challenge for renomination at all.

A few prominent Connecticut Republicans, tired of his increasingly liberal positions and perhaps as much of what they saw as his disloyalty to other Connecticut Republicans, endorsed Weicker’s Democratic challenger in 1988, Attorney General Joseph I. Lieberman, and it was suspected that many conservative Republicans voted against Weicker that year. But they did not control the Republican Party in 1988; Weicker himself did, having installed his own people in the party’s top offices. Indeed, the opposition to Weicker within the party had been far more organized in 1970 and 1982 without success.

While the election of 1988 was close, the party didn’t “kick him out”; the people of Connecticut did. And Weicker might not have taken it so hard then or now, for two years later, when he left the Republican Party, they elected him governor.

Presumably Weicker would like to rewrite history here to rationalize his having not only declined to compete for the Republican nomination for governor in 1990 – which he might have lost to then-US Rep. John G. Rowland – but also to explain his alliance with the Democratic Party ever since 1991, when he governed with the help of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly and went on to endorse Bill Clinton for president in 1992 and 1996. The other day Weicker went to New Hampshire to campaign for former Sen. Bill Bradley in the Democratic presidential primary there.

It seems that Connecticut is to think not that Weicker’s politics changed, for whatever reasons, sincere or otherwise, but that he was abused by ignoramuses who could not appreciate his greatness and who were not as entitled to their politics as Weicker was to his.

That Weicker is so bitter about having lost just one election out of many suggests that he pines for the Senate and the national stage and never really enjoyed being governor, except perhaps for the chance it gave him to teach the people a lesson, with the income tax, for having deprived him of the office he wanted most.

Weicker’s bigger rewriting of history coincided with his abandonment of the Republican Party in 1990. That is when he started portraying himself as having been the candidate for the US House in the 4th District in 1968 and the candidate for the Senate in 1970 who was opposed to the Vietnam War, which, by 1990, was thoroughly discredited. He made a great show of this new interpretation of events in October 1993 in a speech to a convention of journalists in Hartford, who received it approvingly.

In fact Weicker supported the Vietnam War in both the 1968 election, when he ran on the Republican ticket with Richard Nixon, and as candidate for the Senate in 1970, when Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, did Weicker the favor of calling Connecticut’s Democratic nominee for the Senate, the anti-war candidate, a communist a few days before the election. In time Weicker would criticize redbaiting, but only long after it had worked for him. In 1970 this “anti-war” candidate was still on the record in support of a school prayer amendment and the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

Weicker is unpopular in Connecticut now; his monumental duplicity on the income tax is thought to have made his name a curse word for generations to come, and so he seems to spend most of his time out of state, looking for a way back onto the national stage. But he gets away with his falsification of history for two reasons: first simply because memories are short, especially with the state’s journalists, few of whom were around 30 years ago; and second because the people who have most reason to remember who Weicker really is, or was – liberal Democrats – are happy to overlook his fabrications now that he has come over to their side.

None of this rewriting of history makes Weicker right or wrong on the issues then or now. But it may be proof of his one consistency, his one enduring trait: his opportunism.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)