Letters to the Editor

July 2005

Dear Editor:
I happened to pick up a copy of the May Waterbury Observer, and read the letter of Professor Morton J. Tenzer of the University of Connecticut political science department. He criticized former Governor John Rowland for doing nothing memorable while in the state legislature and the U.S. Congress except to build up political capital that eventually made him ripe for corruption. Whether young Mr. Rowland was corrupt from the beginning or simply fell into it because he thought he could get away with it, is up for discussion.

Professor Tenzer holds up as an example of honest politics Raymond Baldwin, who held the offices of Governor, U.S. Senator, and Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, and, because of his honesty, was chosen by both parties to be co-chairman of the state Constitutional Convention in 1965. Justice Baldwin was certainly a great man, but both Democrats and the Republicans got together in 1965 and decided that the delegates to the convention would be split evenly between the two parties, even though there were more Democrats than Republicans in Connecticut. The "election" for the delegates was a farce. In 1957 Justice Baldwin rendered an opinion in the case of Bergner v. State of Connecticut in which he indicated that he did not know anything about the constitutional history of this state. If Professor Tenzer wanted to choose an admirable Republican, he could have chosen former State Senator John Lupton of Westport, who should have been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1970 instead of Lowell Weicker. We ended up with a former Republican who couldn't keep his word and a young Republican who threw his career away.

Cordially,
Atty. William T. Barrante
Watertown

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