My first story of national importance ran in The New Haven Register on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend 1973. It was a profile of Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the junior Republican U.S. senator of Connecticut who had made a national name for himself as an outspoken member of the Watergate Commission criticizing President Richard Nixon.
Picked up by the Associated Press for national distribution, my article quoted Weicker as stating he would not parlay his newfound renown into a run for president in 1976. He kept his word. He waited until 1979 to announce his bid for the White House. It was a short-lived candidacy. Ronald Reagan captured the GOP nomination and then the White House.
Weicker passed away Wednesday. He was 92 (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/us/politics/lowell-weicker-dead.html?smid=em-share).
Within the linked obituary, the following two paragraphs stood out to me:
“Attempts by social conservatives like Mr. (Jesse) Helms to advance their agenda — whether through enacting legislation regarding prayer in public schools or restrictions on abortion rights — particularly enraged Mr. Weicker, who saw the increasing power of the Christian right in his party as a grave threat to its future.
“No greater mischief can be created than to combine the power of religion with the power of government,” he wrote in his autobiography. “History has shown us that time and time again.”
Weicker was 42 when I interviewed him in his home in Greenwich off Round Hill Road the Friday afternoon before the end of summer weekend. I remember few details of the article I wrote later that evening, other than his non-candidacy declaration.
What I do recall are the circumstances before and during the interview. Early that afternoon was particularly hot and humid. A 24-year-old with barely a year of small town reporting on my résumé, I was one of the few reporters in the newsroom on Orange Street in downtown New Haven when Larry French, the suburban editor, called me over to say I had been chosen for a special assignment that could only be done later that afternoon.
Back home in Greenwich, Weicker at the last moment had agreed to an interview, a personality profile. I was to rush down to Greenwich by 3 pm. I raced my un-airconditioned Chevy Vega down the Merritt Parkway to the Round Hill Road exit, made a few turns, and came to the Weicker estate.
An heir to the Squibb pharmaceutical company, Weicker had a stately colonial home which, like my Vega, I soon discovered, lacked air conditioning. No a/c, not even a fan to agitate the dank hot air.
We sat and talked for about an hour in the study. Or maybe it was the living room. I sweat onto the fabric of the couch I sat on. I took pictures of Weicker and his then wife Bunny and one or more of their children walking on the property.
I never again met Weicker, though I almost did in Sal’s pizzeria on Wooster Square in New Haven a few years ago. I noticed him at a table near the back of the restaurant. Gilda and I were sitting near the front door.
No longer a paid journalist, I reasoned I could wait to re-introduce myself. No need to interrupt his dinner with his wife. But when they finished eating, they quietly exited through a back door.
Ah, well. I still had my memories to share.
