Weicker Won’t Seek Reelection, Despite Rebound in Popularity

Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. was hanged in effigy, spat upon and chased back into the Capitol in 1991 after pushing through the state’s first income tax.

Ever since, the state’s first independent governor since the Civil War has seen his popularity rebound. But on Thursday, Weicker said he will not seek reelection next year because it is time to “return home” after three decades in politics.

“Left in a vacuum, I would run the races of government and politics until I drop,” the 62-year-old governor said. “But thank God I don’t live in a vacuum. I live in a very real world of family and friends.”

The former three-term Republican senator, who took on former President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, did not say what he planned to do after leaving office.

Weicker made the retirement announcement in Greenwich Town Hall, where in 1988, after being defeated in a bid for a fourth term in the Senate, he vowed there would be “no comebacks.” Two years later, Weicker resurrected his political career by abandoning the GOP, creating his own party--A Connecticut Party--and winning the governorship in a three-way race.

In his first weeks as governor, Weicker proposed a state income tax, even though he had told voters the previous fall that doing so would be like “pouring gasoline on a fire.” He cited a $2-billion state debt.

That October, when payroll deductions began, Weicker was spat upon and jeered when he waded into a crowd of more than 40,000 who had converged on the Capitol lawn to vent their rage. But in the last two years, his popularity had rebounded, and polls suggested that he could win another term.

Weicker leaped to national attention in 1973 when, as a junior member of the Watergate Committee, he presented a report alleging that Nixon and his Republican Administration violated the U.S. Constitution at least 170 times.