The Thompson Cipher

I’m still trying to understand the Fred Thompson obsession.

Fortunately, TNR’s Michelle Cottle provides a biography of Fred D. Thompson—I’m sure social conservatives would call it character assassination. But, it’s clear this guy is no Ronald Reagan. Indeed, he’s no one I would even remotely admire.

Young Freddie Thompson never postured himself the future leader of the free world. He wanted to be a high school basketball coach. It was an obvious aim for a big guy from a small town who had the brains for academics but not the enthusiasm. Raised modestly middle-class in the central Tennessee town of Lawrenceburg, the teenage Thompson was regarded as likeable, outgoing, lazy (he had a tendency to doze off during class), and an incorrigible cutup. (As the Nashville Tennessean charmingly reported, Thompson’s high school principal had to create a separate study hall for the mischief- making athlete and one of his close pals, accessible only through the principal’s office.) Most folks assumed Freddie’s future held nothing more exceptional than following his dad into the used-car business. The summer after his junior year, Thompson got his girlfriend, Sarah Lindsey, “in trouble,” as people used to delicately put it. The couple married in September of Thompson’s senior year and moved in with Sarah’s parents while the groom finished high school. Fred Dalton “Tony” Thompson Jr. was born in spring 1960. Three years later, daughter Betsy arrived during her parents’ junior year at Memphis State University. In 1964, Thompson enrolled at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, and, for the next three years, Sarah taught (when not on maternity leave with their third child, Dan) while Fred worked as everything from a shoe salesman to a hotel night clerk to help support the family.

Over the years, Thompson has made repeated reference to the fact that he isn’t the kind of guy driven to achieve. “I have never beaten down a lot of doors in my life,” he told Fox News in March. “Occasionally, doors have opened to me, and I had sense enough to see they were opening and I would walk through them, and they’ve always turned out well for me.” Ironically, getting his high school sweetheart pregnant was the first and arguably most important of these doors. Considerably more goal-oriented than her young beau, Sarah has long been credited with starting Thompson on the road to personal maturity and professional direction. Better still: Her family, active in the local GOP, helped steer Freddie toward a career in law and politics. Sarah’s grandfather, an attorney, is said to have been the inspiration behind Thompson becoming a Republican, and Thompson’s first job out of law school was in the Lawrenceburg practice of Sarah’s uncle, also a big GOP booster. Soon, Thompson began stretching his own political wings: helping organize a Young Republicans group for Lawrence County, managing a (failed) U.S. congressional campaign in 1968, and winning a spot on the county’s Republican Executive Committee. From that post, he could network with state party bigwigs, including the man who would become his political Yoda, Senator Howard Baker.

The godfather of the modern Tennessee GOP, Baker was known for recruiting hot young talent in his quest to revivify the state party. (Lamar Alexander was another fabulous Baker boy.) Thompson swiftly emerged as one of the senator’s most promising prospects. In 1969, Baker helped Thompson land a position as assistant U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, a post that provided the fledgling lawyer with some early media training. “The U.S. attorney whom he worked for didn’t like to try cases. Fred did, and soon he became a hot item in the local media,” recalls William Kirkland, Thompson’s best buddy from law school. “He was interviewed quite a bit–and he didn’t shy away from that publicity.” After working on Baker’s 1972 reelection campaign, Thompson really hit the big time in 1973, when Baker, to the consternation of his Senate colleagues, drafted the unknown Tennessean to serve as minority counsel on the Watergate hearings. While Thompson didn’t distinguish himself as a great legal mind during the proceedings, he did make a national splash when he famously asked White House aide Alexander Butterfield whether he knew of any listening devices in the Oval Office. The moment was pure political theater, as both parties’ legal teams already knew the answer. But being chosen to ask the question in front of the TV cameras (a coup engineered by Baker) gave Thompson a healthy dose of national celebrity. By the hearings’ end, the small-town lawyer with the unforgettable voice had signed with a major-league speakers’ bureau in New York. “I got paid large sums of money for giving speeches in schools that I could never have gotten into,” he later joked to The New York Times.

Post-Watergate, Thompson returned to private practice in Tennessee, where another door swung wide. In 1977, he represented Marie Ragghianti, a former head of the state parole board suing Democratic Governor Ray Blanton for wrongful termination. The case brought to light a cash-for-clemency scheme that ultimately took down the corrupt administration. More importantly, it launched Thompson’s acting career when he was cast to play himself in a movie about the scandal, titled Marie. A string of supporting roles in better-known films and TV shows followed, and, for the bulk of a decade, Thompson performed an impressive two-step, simultaneously forging political ties as a Beltway lobbyist and perfecting his public persona as the face (and voice) of institutional authority in such films as No Way Out (in which he played the director of the CIA), Fat Man and Little Boy (a major general), The Hunt for Red October (a rear admiral), Thunderheart (an FBI honcho), and In the Line of Fire (the White House chief of staff).

In 1994, Baker cracked yet another door for his protégé, approaching Thompson, by then a minor celebrity, with a new proposition: running for the Senate seat left vacant thanks to Al Gore’s ascension to the vice presidency. Thompson, who had previously rejected his party’s urgings to pursue elected office, reluctantly agreed. But his campaign against Democratic Representative Jim Cooper stalled out of the gate, with Thompson trailing by more than 20 points nine months out. As the story goes, over a meal at a local Cracker Barrel, campaign manager Tom Ingram asked a dispirited Thompson how he would run the race if he had his druthers. (“He wasn’t having a good time,” recalls Ingram, now a Senate aide to Lamar Alexander.) Thompson said he’d like to throw on a pair of jeans and drive around the state just chatting folks up. Voilà! A populist phenom was born. In early August, Thompson ditched his suits, rented a red Chevy pickup, and commenced his good-ole-boy charm offensive. Playing to the broad anti-Washington sentiment of the time, Fred cheered the virtues of “citizen legislators” over career pols, decried Washington’s misguided efforts to “tax ourselves into prosperity,” and vowed to “go up there and grab that place by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake.” Three months later, despite Cooper’s attempts to paint him (not inaccurately) as a “Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Pouponspreading millionaire Wash- ington special interest lobbyi
st,” Thompson won the race by 20 points. Two years later, he was reelected by an even fat- ter margin. Though touted as a prospective presidential candidate for 2000, he opted not to run after his Senate investigation into foreign contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign failed to uncover any actionable misdeeds.

In January 2002, Thompson suffered a devastating personal loss when his daughter Betsy died of an accidental prescription-drug overdose. A few weeks later, he announced that he would not seek reelection to the Senate. Heading back into the private sector, Thompson looked to resume both his lobbying and his acting careers. Conveniently, before his term was even up, Thompson was cold-called by “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, who wanted to know if he would be interested in joining the cast of the spectacularly popular franchise. Since then, literally millions of Americans have come to know Thompson as the dashing, curmudgeonly, and comfortingly conservative District Attorney Arthur Branch.

Thompson also kept a toe in the world of public policy. In addition to his lobbying and acting, he serves as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and chairman of the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board. He has also been pinch-hitting for the venerable radio commentator Paul Harvey on the ABC radio network. By all accounts, Thompson is successful beyond his wildest childhood dreams. But, late last year, after fellow Tennessean and former Senate Majority Leader Bill First announced that he would not run for president, those closest to Thompson once again began whispering in his ear about bigger, better things. Perhaps the most influential of these whisperers has been Thompson’s second wife, Jeri Kehn Thompson.

If Thompson’s first wife put him on the path to law school, it’s widely acknowledged that his second wife is the one driving his presidential run. Blonde, bodacious, and 24 years younger than her husband, Jeri is often sniffily referred to as Thompson’s “trophy wife,” but she is clearly more than that. A one-time Senate staffer and spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, Jeri is regarded around Washington as politically shrewd and fiercely ambitious on behalf of her spouse. In the wake of First’s announcement, Jeri promptly contacted Republican p.r. veteran Mark Corallo about serving as her husband’s spokesman and raising his profile inside the Beltway. More recently, after lefty filmmaker Michael Moore took a public poke at Thompson, challenging him to a health care debate and criticizing his penchant for embargoed Cuban cigars, Jeri brought the issue to her hubby’s attention and urged him to call up a friend with a video camera and record his now-famous 30-second Web response. (In it, a cigar-chomping Thompson says he’s too busy to meet with Moore, but wryly warns him to watch his step lest his “buddy Castro” decide to toss him in a mental institution as he has other documentarians. “A mental institution, Michael. That’d be something you oughta think about,” intones Thompson with a meaningful arch of his brow.) Last month, at a reception for party bigwigs and top donors that preceded the GOP gala in Richmond, Jeri diligently stood in line to meet and greet every person in attendance. “She’s been one of the key players,” confirms Tom Ingram.

But, while Jeri is clearly providing some of the fire-in-the-belly that Thompson otherwise lacks, there is much chatter about whether the brassy former operative realizes just how tough it is to be the wife of a candidate, much less of a president. The most oft-cited question mark is Jeri’s very public pursuit of Thompson. (In romance, as in politics, Thompson has as often been the hunted as the hunter.) Divorced from Sarah in 1985, Thompson was an infamous ladies’ man during his Senate days. (Former girlfriends include country singer Lorrie Morgan and GOP fund-raiser Georgette Mosbacher.) Falling under Thompson’s spell at a Fourth of July picnic in 1996, Jeri’s subsequent campaign to elbow out her competitors for his affection repeatedly made the gossip columns in Washington and New York, most memorably in April 2000, when she groused to the New York Post‘s Page Six about “all these women” trying to move in on her man. “They just won’t leave him alone,” she fussed. “I can’t get up to get a cocktail at a party without coming back and finding some girl sitting in my chair.” Veteran journalist Margaret Carlson caught the worst flak. “She just won’t get the hint that he has a girlfriend,” Jeri charged, adding, “She calls his apartment all the time. I mean, what is the deal with these women? Don’t they have any pride? It’s the joke all over Washington that Margaret has this huge crush on him. And Fred is clearly not interested.” The situation got nasty enough that the senator himself was forced to step in, issuing a public denial of Jeri’s swipes at Carlson. Seven years later, the episode still prompts much tittering around the Beltway. But Jeri may have the last laugh: She wed her reformed Lothario in June 2002 and is today the proud mommy of a four-year-old daughter and a nine-month-old son. And with a little luck (Fred’s specialty) and a lot of hard work (her department), she just might wind up First Lady.

Looking back over the sweep of Thompson’s life, you get the picture of a nice, decent guy fortunate enough to have had a string of helping hands propel him along the road to success. “Fred’s charmed,” says Ingram. “I mean, from Lawrence County, which was [back then] a Democratic stronghold, to his relationship with Howard Baker, to representing Marie, to finding himself playing himself in her movie, to asking the pivotal Watergate question about the tapes …” Here, Ingram pauses and backtracks a bit to assure me: “He’s very serious. He’s very thorough. But he’s also been at the right place at the right time with charmed results.” Far from undercutting his presidential prospects, this laid-back reputation fuels the seductive story line of Thompson as a Natural Born Leader–a man who excels because of his intrinsic worthiness, not any grinding ambition. “It’s part of his appeal,” says Tennessee Representative John Duncan, co-chair of the “Draft Fred” committee. “I don’t think people like people totally obsessed with politics.” “He gives the impression of a man who has things in perspective,” agrees Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s lobbying shop. “It’s been my impression that workaholics don’t work out in the White House.” In this way, the candidate is a lot like the man he is auditioning to replace: George W. Bush, who, perhaps more than any president in recent history, tapped the U.S. electorate’s distaste for politicians who look like they’re trying too hard. “You worry about some guys–Mondale, Gore, Kerry, and in some ways Bush Senior—who spent their entire life wanting to be president,” says conservative activist Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. By contrast, he notes, “With Thompson, there’s a sense of self-assuredness that Nixon didn’t have and that Reagan did.”

I expect my politicians to be ambitious—lethally driven. I don’t mind mistakes, just let them be successes or don’t get caught. After all, the president is only one man, and there’s 9 SCOTUS justices and 535 other gladiators to serve me. Ronald Reagan, according to Lou Cannon’s biography, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, was optimistic, charming, hard-working, and a born storyteller. He took chances to excel his entire life, such as moving to Kansas City to be a radio announcer, for which he had to train himself, or moving to Hollywood to become an actor. There’s none of this in Thompson, but that doesn’t stop conservatives from cutting him slack.

Have social conservatives become so desperate, that they are willing to accept

faded images—in this case an actor—who cannot project even his own best qualities but only wears voters’ hopes?

Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Conservative Republicans

it’s hard to recall such a litany of political opportunism and hypocrisy (via Blogometer) as GOP conservatives treated The Politico‘s Jonathan Martin on the “non-issue” of Fred Thompson’s supposed flip-flop on abortion. It’s not quite at Watergate levels, and I’m almost certain my father wouldn’t cry so much if the Republicans lost in 2008 as he did when President Nixon resigned.

First, it’s not the job, but the Senate record that matters:

“I think it’s a nonissue for two reasons,” said Gary Bauer of the allegation that, in 1991, Thompson represented the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association in its effort to ease the rule barring federal funding for clinics that offered abortion counseling.

“First, the facts are in question,” said Bauer, a social conservative leader, “and second, this took place before he was in the United States Senate.”

And then, the utilitarian argument:

“If you add up everything Thompson has done in the past, I don’t know that this is sufficient to hurt him,” said Oran Smith, head of South Carolina’s Palmetto Family Council and an influential social conservative in the state.

And then, both ad hominem and the appeal to popularity:

“This is becoming so old,” Perkins scoffed. “They find somebody who has staked out a pro-life position, and the first thing they say is that he’s supported a pro-abortion group.”

What’s more, Perkins said, there has been no “indication that it’s getting traction.

And then, sympathy for the most loathsome species on the planet:

“Lawyers represent clients, and sometimes they do so for ideological support—but most of them do it to earn a living.”

And then, the appeal to youthful mistakes and the Senate again:

Since Thompson’s advocacy (if it occurred at all) happened 16 years ago; since it arose in the course of a minor legal representation rather than sua sponte; and since Thompson’s subsequent Senate voting record was solidly pro-life, all of the relevant distinctions cut in his favor.

And, finally, another bout of ad hominem:

NARAL listed him as a dangerous opponent, while National Right To Life gave him consistently high marks.

Forgiving is such a nice Judeo-Christian touch, but GOP conservatives want to give Thompson the best chance in his career to backslide into sin. It also means more when you forgive those who don’t pay it back so transparently. Perhaps, like Dr. Gregory House, Thompson is still taking the vicodin. But, it doesn’t matter. There’s another hurdle on July 31 to jump, but that won’t probably matter either, but we will know if he’s running then, not September.

Reagan was made of Teflon, so now all Christian candidates have to be, too. I sure know I’m not voting for a GOP conservative for any office. After almost 16 years of Bush and Clinton, the only worse event could be a gang of hypocrites begging to anoint a savior.