Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a liberal Republican who earned a nationwide status for pugnacious political independence — first as a younger United States senator in the course of the Watergate hearings and later as a third-party governor of Connecticut — died on Wednesday at a hospital in Middletown, in central Connecticut. He was 92.

His household introduced his loss of life in a press release.

Mr. Weicker was an obscure junior senator from Connecticut and a member of President Richard M. Nixon’s personal occasion in 1973 when he took an project on the Senate choose committee that was investigating the Watergate affair — the break-in on the workplaces of the Democratic opposition by a White House group of burglars and the administration’s makes an attempt to cowl up the crime.

But after the committee’s televised hearings have been over, he was well-known, demonized by some for the harshness of his assaults on Nixon however lionized as a hero by others.

In one memorable second, the White House counsel, John W. Dean, was within the witness chair, having revealed that Nixon had stored an “enemies list.” Mr. Weicker declared, to enthusiastic applause:

“Let me make it clear, because I have got to have my partisan moment: Republicans do not cover up; Republicans do not go ahead and threaten; Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts; and, God knows, Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed.’’

He later wrote in his autobiography, “Maverick: A Life in Politics”: “As a politician, I wasn’t hurt by Watergate. I was made by it.”

To Mr. Weicker’s admirers, the Watergate hearings revealed a person who was keen to buck energy, query authority and comply with his convictions, no matter the fee. To his critics, they remodeled him right into a contrarian with a strong ego who typically went in opposition to the grain for the sake of the combat itself.

Indeed, by way of a 30-year profession in public life both serving in or representing Connecticut — as a state consultant, as the primary selectman of Greenwich (the equal of its mayor), as a one-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, as a three-term U.S. senator and as governor for 4 years — Mr. Weicker, a hulking presence at 6-foot-6, by no means appeared happier than when he was in the midst of a superb toe-to-toe slugfest.

In the Senate, the place he served from 1971 to 1989, his closest good friend and mentor was Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York, one other liberal Republican. His favourite enemy, by way of many a battle within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s, was additionally a Republican, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

Attempts by social conservatives like Mr. Helms to advance their agenda — whether or not by way of enacting laws concerning prayer in public faculties or restrictions on abortion rights — significantly enraged Mr. Weicker, who noticed the growing energy of the Christian proper in his occasion as a grave risk 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 normally sided with Democrats on social points and with Republicans on taxes and spending — all the time 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 utterly.

His political comeback, when he ran for governor of Connecticut, would make him into what he mentioned he had all the time been: an impartial. Founding a 3rd occasion — its official identify was A Connecticut Party — he took workplace in 1991 within the trough of a nationwide recession that had not spared his state. That yr, he pushed by way of the creation of an revenue tax — lengthy a taboo in Connecticut — although he lacked the vote of a single member of his occasion within 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 govt of the Squibb pharmaceutical firm. A grandfather, Theodore Weicker, a German immigrant, had based the pharmaceutical firm Merck & Company with George Merck and later, with a associate, bought Squibb & Sons.

Lowell Jr. attended the personal Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and Yale University, graduating in 1953. After a two-year stint within the Army, he enrolled on the University of Virginia Law School and obtained his diploma in 1958. He served within the Army Reserve till 1964.

Though he grew up in privilege, in his later public life Mr. Weicker typically took the aspect of the underdog. He credited a few of his political opinions to his mom, Mary Hastings (Bickford) Weicker, a Democrat, however simply as a lot to his father, a Republican who he mentioned taught him that having luck and wealth was no excuse to look down on those that had neither. (His dad and mom later divorced, and his mom remarried.)

As an chubby teenager, Mr. Weicker mentioned, he additionally discovered early that standing in place and punching again was in all probability his finest technique in life.

“A man has to learn to do one of two things,” he quoted a college coach as saying: run or combat. “One look at you and I suggest you learn how to fight,” the coach mentioned. The lesson caught.

Along the best way, Mr. Weicker grew to become a loyal operagoer — a lot in order that he accepted walk-on elements with the Connecticut Opera.

He was elected to the Connecticut General Assembly in 1962 and was first selectman of Greenwich earlier than successful seats within the U.S. House in 1968 and within the Senate two years later.

With his nationwide profile raised after the Watergate hearings, Mr. Weicker in March 1979 introduced his candidacy for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. But inside two months the campaign collapsed, after a ballot in his dwelling state had him operating third behind Ronald Reagan and former President Gerald R. Ford.

Mr. Weicker left public life in 1995, after one time period as governor. That similar yr he printed his autobiography, written with Barry Sussman, who as an editor at The Washington Post had helped steer its Watergate protection. Mr. Weicker subsequently served as founding president of the Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit group engaged on illness prevention, from 2001 to 2011.

He is survived by his spouse, Claudia Weicker; his sons, Scot, Gray, Brian, Tre and Sonny; two stepsons, Mason and Andrew Ingram; 12 grandchildren; and 4 great-grandchildren. He lived in Old Lyme, on Connecticut’s coast.

In the 2008 presidential election, Mr. Weicker endorsed Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, rejecting the self-described maverick Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin. He additionally backed President Obama in 2012, arguing that his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, was too keen to regulate his positions to win favor with the far proper.

Similarly, he had no affection for former President Donald J. Trump, who had as soon as called Mr. Weicker a “fat slob who couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in Connecticut.”

“I think the man is a total con artist,” Mr. Weicker told Hearst Connecticut Media in 2015. “Maybe it’s a reflection of the Republican Party more than Donald Trump, if it allows any nut case like Trump to make it as if he was a valid presidential candidate.”

In 2019, he predicted that Mr. Trump would lose his bid for re-election.

In his e book, Mr. Weicker admitted that idiosyncratic politics afforded him few allies. By the time he left the Senate, he wrote, he was near few individuals in both occasion.

To many citizens at dwelling, he had maybe come to look nearly an excessive amount of the loner, combating one-man battles. Mr. Lieberman neatly captured that picture in a collection of tv commercials that helped swing a decent election. They portrayed Mr. Weicker as a fantastic lumbering bear who got here out of his cave solely to roar on the world.

In a 2012 interview with Connecticut journal, Mr. Weicker was requested what was tougher: being a senator, being a governor or being retired.

“I think probably being retired,” he mentioned. “To sit here and watch this world go by — and this world is having a tough time — and I can’t do anything about it.”

Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.