Fred Thompson has died at age 73. He is known to the political world as a Watergate Committee counsel, a U.S. senator for eight years, a Republican presidential candidate in the 2008 cycle; and he is known by the public also as a movie and television actor. Unlike many political figures today, he came from a humble background, raised in a small county seat in Middle Tennessee just north of the Alabama border. He has described himself as having no particular ambitions until in high school he read the autobiography of the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow; he was the first member of his family to go to college and did well enough to get a scholarship at Vanderbilt Law School from which he graduated in 1967.
My own acquaintance was Fred (his legal name; he changed it from Freddie) came soon after. He was one of several young talented young men spotted by freshman Republican Sen. Howard Baker and, presumably on Baker’s recommendation, he was appointed an assistant U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee in Nashville in 1969. I encountered Fred when, as a law clerk to Judge Wade H. McCree, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit from 1969 to 1971, I saw him argue moonshine cases for the government. As I told him later, I thought he wasn’t very good, but he didn’t need to be; the only issue usually was whether the search was legally valid, and it usually was in these cases. When the revenuers encounter a Chevy pickup truck rolling down a mountain road at 90 miles an hour at night with the lights out and a bunch of bottles in back, there’s not much doubt about what was going on.
But within a few years, it was clear that Fred’s talents had not been fully revealed in his oral arguments in moonshine cases. In 1972 he managed Baker’s re-election campaign in 1972, which Baker won with 62 percent of the vote, carrying 60 of 95 counties, a record for a Tennessee Republican. And when Baker became ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee, he appointed the 30-year-old Thompson as his chief counsel. I remember encountering him at a dinner party at Lesley Stahl’s Watergate apartment, together with Chairman Sam Ervin’s chief counsel Rufus Edmisten and Bob Woodward. It was Thompson who asked the question that got Alexander Butterfield, the subject of Woodward’s latest book, to reveal the existence of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes. Fred was a model of integrity in investigating a president of his own party — a model that is not being followed today.
In 1978 Lamar Alexander, another protege of Howard Baker’s, was elected governor of Tennessee at the age of 38. Before he could take office it became clear that the Democratic incumbent, who had beaten Alexander four years before, was selling pardons. The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that Alexander could be sworn in early, at which point he appointed Fred Thompson special counsel to investigate Blanton. That work resulted in the book and the 1985 movie Marie, in which Fred played himself, to critical acclaim — the first of many acting role.
In 1994, Fred ran for the unexpired portion of Al Gore’s Senate term. He faced a strong opponent, Congressmen Jim Cooper. It was a heavily Republican year, a breakthrough year for the party in Tennessee, and Fred campaigned and appeared in an ad in a huge red pickup truck. I spent an afternoon riding around with him on the campaign trail, at a point when it was plain that things were going his way. He had, I thought, paraphrasing Mark Twain, the calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces. He won that election with 61 percent of the vote, carrying 83 of 95 counties. He was re-elected to a full six-year term in 1996, again with 61 percent, this time carrying 78 counties, even as the Clinton-Gore ticket carried Tennessee.
In this term Fred chaired a committee investigating the Clinton administration. He encountered harsh and, I think in his view and certainly in mine, unprincipled opposition from Democrats who sought to protect their party’s president at any cost. I think — although I never heard Fred say so — that he was disgusted by their conduct, so different from the way he and Howard Baker fulfilled their duties on the Watergate committee. He decided early on not to run for re-election in 2002, when he obviously would have won easily; I think he was disgusted by the Senate.
As political junkies know, Fred ran for president in the 2008 cycle, though he spent more time officially mulling his candidacy than he did as a declared candidate. My own view is that Fred didn’t particularly want to be president, but he saw that there was an opening, and like many other candidates running when in their middle or late 60s calculated that it was now or never. He would probably not be president if he ran; he certainly would never be president if he didn’t.
Fred Thompson was a smart and decent man, with a wicked sense of humor and a stronger sense of duty; a man who from very modest beginnings rose because of his talents, his hard work (well, not on the moonshine cases) and (as I’m sure he would agree) a certain amount of luck. May he rest in peace.
