Lowell Weicker, Senator Whose Star Rose During Watergate, Dies at 92

Attempts by social conservatives like Mr. 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.”

Mr. Weicker’s politics — he usually sided with Democrats on social issues and with Republicans on taxes and spending — always made him an outsider, and in 1990, two years after losing his Senate seat to Joseph I. Lieberman, he walked away from two-party politics completely.

His political comeback, when he ran for governor of Connecticut, would make him into what he said he had always been: an independent. Founding a third party — its official name was A Connecticut Party — he took office in 1991 in the trough of a national recession that had not spared his state. That year, he pushed through the creation of an income tax — long a taboo in Connecticut — even though he lacked the vote of a single member of his party in the state’s General Assembly.

“I sometimes did see myself as a maverick,” he wrote. “Independent, unafraid.”

Lowell Palmer Weicker Jr. was born in Paris on May 16, 1931, the son of the chief executive of the Squibb pharmaceutical company. A grandfather, Theodore Weicker, a German immigrant, had founded the pharmaceutical company Merck & Company with George Merck and later, with a partner, purchased Squibb & Sons.

Lowell Jr. attended the private Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and Yale University, graduating in 1953. After a two-year stint in the Army, he enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School and received his degree in 1958. He served in the Army Reserve until 1964.

Though he grew up in privilege, in his later public life Mr. Weicker often took the side of the underdog. He credited some of his political views to his mother, Mary Hastings (Bickford) Weicker, a Democrat, but just as much to his father, a Republican who he said taught him that having luck and wealth was no excuse to look down on those who had neither. (His parents later divorced, and his mother remarried.)