Lowell Weicker: Watergate Rebel and Connecticut's Income Tax Governor

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Lowell Weicker was born in Paris in 1931, an heir to the family behind E.R. Squibb, and went through Lawrenceville, Yale and the University of Virginia law school before serving as an Army first lieutenant. He was first selectman of Greenwich and won a U.S. House seat in 1968. In 1970 he took a Connecticut Senate seat with 41.7 percent after Thomas Dodd lost the Democratic primary to Joseph Duffy and ran as an independent. On the Senate Watergate Committee he became the first Republican senator to call for Richard Nixon's resignation, drawing obscene gestures from constituents before his popularity surged and he won easily in 1976.

A Rockefeller Republican, he voted for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, helped override Ronald Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act, opposed Robert Bork and William Rehnquist's elevation, laid groundwork for the Americans with Disabilities Act and funded early AIDS research. He lost in 1988 to Joe Lieberman as conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr., backed the Democrat. In 1990 he won the governorship on his own A Connecticut Party line, faced a $2.4 billion deficit, and reversed his campaign pledge by forcing through a 6 percent income tax after vetoing three budgets. The deficit turned into a surplus, and he declined to seek a second term.

• Buckley's camp circulated bumper stickers asking whether Lowell Weicker made voters sick.
• The 1991 tax package cut the sales tax from 8 to 6 percent and paired with $1.2 billion in spending cuts.
• An estimated 40,000 protesters rallied in Hartford, spitting at him and burning him in effigy.
• He received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and later sat on the WWE board from 1999 to 2011.
• In 2006 he backed Ned Lamont against Lieberman, whose ads depicted him as an old wounded bear.