Maverick: A Life in Politics

Boston, MA: Little, Brown, c1995. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. 24 cm, 232 pages. Illus., index. Signed by the author. Weicker took very courageous stands during the Nixon Watergate hearings as a Republican Senator and later as Connecticut's (independent) Governor. Lowell Palmer Weicker Jr. (May 16, 1931 - June 28, 2023) was an American politician who served as a U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the 85th Governor of Connecticut. Weicker unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for president in 1980. One of the first Republican members of Congress to express concerns about President Richard Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal, Weicker developed a reputation as a "Rockefeller Republican", eventually leading conservative activists to endorse his opponent Joe Lieberman, a New Democrat, in the 1988 Senate election which he subsequently lost. Weicker later left the Republican Party, and became one of the few third-party candidates to be elected to a state governorship in the United States at the time, doing so on the ticket of A Connecticut Party. Weicker published a memoir entitled Maverick in 1995, co-written with Barry Sussman. The following year, he joined the board of directors for Compuware. In 1999, he became a member of the board of directors for the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE), and held this position until 2011. Derived from a 1995 New York Times review by Jeff Greenfield" WITH "Maverick" Lowell Weicker has found a perfect title for his political memoir...the word now defines a politician who wears no label, who marches to a distinctly different drummer and who generally drives members of his own party to apoplexy. For 18 years in the United States Senate, from 1970 to 1988, the Republican Lowell Weicker gave his fellow Republicans fits. As a member of the Senate Watergate Committee, he was crying "cover-up!" from the beginning. He was also instrumental in exposing Richard Nixon's scheme to evade taxes by wildly inflating the value of his Vice-Presidential papers. During Ronald Reagan's eight years, Mr. Weicker regarded this most popular of all Republicans with ill-concealed contempt. ...By 1988, Mr. Weicker had become so much of a bone in the throat of conservative Republicans that their defection to the moderate Democrat Joseph Lieberman probably cost him a fourth term. ... This background helps explain why Mr. Weicker has always been a larger-than-life public figure. Add to it a taste for blunt, colorful, sometimes profane language, as well as a take-no-prisoners approach to his political opponents, and you have the promise of a compelling blend of recollections and opinions. ...A full fourth of the book is devoted to a retelling of the Watergate drama. This may be fascinating to a reader who did not live through that era, but it is a road that has been traveled many times before. In fact, the most startling part of Mr. Weicker's account is when he recalls meeting with a member of the Republican National Committee from California, who tells him, in Mr. Weicker's words, that "many people in California Republican politics considered Nixon a chronic gutter fighter. If that had reached the East, I didn't know about it." Other chapters, recounting Mr. Weicker's efforts to preserve oceanic research and his battles for the disabled, score high on the earnestness scale.... Where "Maverick" does deliver the goods is when Mr. Weicker tells us exactly what he thinks about our current political state. ...This is the Lowell Weicker who has enlivened our political life for the last quarter-century, the Weicker who can stir it up on "Meet the Press" or "Imus in the Morning." This is the living, breathing political exclamation point who could make 1996 a fascinating year were he to make an independent run for the White House. When this Lowell Weicker takes the stage, "Maverick" becomes an entertaining book.