What would Weicker do?
I’m sitting at the desk, tapping on the computer keyboard, with the radio on, a few feet away.
A U.S. Embassy official is relating to Congress an incident in a Ukraine restaurant, during which the president of the United States yelled from Washington about requiring an investigation into his perceived political enemies.
In fact, the president of the United States shouted so loudly that the call recipient — a U.S. ambassador by virtue of contributing a million bucks to the 2016 presidential inauguration — held the phone away from his ear, allowing the embassy employee a better listen.
Isn’t modern communication great?
It brings me back 45 years and more, when a much more popular president, Richard M. Nixon, was brought down because he didn’t realize that the 1972 reelection would be a landslide. So, he condoned a breakin at the headquarters of Democrats. Oh yeah, and the White House audio tapes.
All through this riveting investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives into President Donald Trump, I’ve been wondering about the possibility of a Lowell P. Weicker Jr. rising from the Republican ranks to comment on the stench.
Mitch McConnell? Not so much.
Weicker, you’ll remember, was the U.S. senator from Greenwich who became the first Republican to say Nixon had to go. Weicker turned the tide. Now at 88, his memory isn’t so good. From his home in Old Lyme, he declined a Friday interview on the subject that will be the first paragraph of his obituary.
It’s a privilege to have lived long enough to accumulate the passage of time, history and artifacts both tangible and of the imagination.
It seems it’s only been a few weeks since I was standing on a corner in an Ohio university town, a callow undergrad.
Nearly every Sunday night in 1973 and 1974, I would occupy a phone booth for a few minutes, listening to my mother’s cheery family updates, my father’s dour recap of that week’s Watergate hearings and revelations that piled up around Richard Nixon on his way to that double-fisted V for victory in the open door of the departing helicopter.
I remember the hushed warning from my father that the FBI was listening to millions of phone calls around the country.
Like many in my generation, I knew Nixon was trying to get me killed, me, personally, somewhere in Southeast Asia, in the years before the region became a tourist destination and a principal source of our clothing.
Yeah, time. Fortyfive years ago.
Now, nearly two years after my father died at 92, I finally have the Stamford house my sister and I grew up in ready for sale. It’s taken months of melancholy scrubbing, painting, sheetrocking where the 1897 plaster had cracked.
Finally, the cleaning routine reached the attic of the barn, where generations of cats sought sunshine, safety, and ahem ...
relief. I must have made 30 trips up and down the stairs hauling detritus, old roof shingles, petrified cat poop, old kids’ books, and the rattan porch furniture that came with the house when my parents bought it from Mr. Lee’s daughters in 1962.
Neighborhood lore had it that the barn was once an annex for the original Belltown volunteer fire department. Mr. Lee built the barn first and lived there while hammering together the home on the corner lot under the foundation of old farm fieldstones.
The very last archeological find surfaced in my final sweeping of the barn’s attic. It’s the lead business end of a bellows, the device that Mr. Lee must have used to stoke the fire in the barn’s wood stove.
I’m not really a nostalgic type. Since I spend so much time working on the next newspaper story, everything in the past is kind of old news.
But with the family memories and artifacts I have been rescuing from the old homestead after the dozens of trips on the parkway getting there, I certainly have had time to think.
I even attended a couple of recent Stamford High soccer games, 50 years after I earned a letter as a sophomore, learning from the group of older Jamaicans who led our team in 1969.
That fall there was a national day of moratorium in protest of the Vietnam War, so all the upperclassmen and more knowledgeable members of the team wore black armbands for a game.
I was kind of oblivious, and at 15, not too far removed from playing army in the dwindling woods of Belltown.
Now, I’m still playing soccer and have very few regrets beyond not putting on an armband that day, back when Nixon was trying to kill me, and Lowell Weicker was on a vector to perform a great, historic public service.
All through this riveting investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives into President Donald Trump, I’ve been wondering about the possibility of a Lowell P. Weicker Jr. rising from the Republican ranks to comment on the stench.