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Thompson's Life Awash In Opportunities, Seized With An Actor's Sense Of Timing

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By Nancy Benac / The Associated Press

Published: December 29, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) - It's the kind of story you could write a book about: A 35-year-old single mother of three is fired from her state job after refusing to go along with a scheme to pardon criminals who bribe aides to the governor.

The plot cries out for a good lawyer to save the day. All the better if he has charm and a commanding presence. Enter Fred Thompson, 6-foot-5 inches of cigar-chomping Southern gentleman. He saves the day; the woman is vindicated.

Best of all, for a man with a presidential campaign in his future, it is a true story, and someone did write a book about it.

Many a life follows a serendipitous path. One event leads unexpectedly to another. An offhand remark alters the course of a lifetime. One person's influence sends someone's career in a new direction.

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson's life has a Forrest Gump quality to it. The lawyer-lobbyist-senator-actor often seems to have been in the right place at the right time.

As a young lawyer in the 1970s, Thompson took up Marie Ragghianti's lawsuit against Tennessee's governor and won her reinstatement to her job and back pay. The story became a book; the book became a movie; the movie launched Thompson's acting career; the actor's profile helped Thompson win a seat in the U.S. Senate.

"One thing led to another," Thompson once said of his acting career. "It's one of those things like — totally accidental."

In earlier years, Thompson was the class cutup whom no one pegged to go far. But his in-laws helped shape him up after he married at 17, and Thompson embraced not just his wife's extended family but their Republican politics.

GOP connections led Thompson to Sen. Howard Baker, mentor to a generation of Republican upstarts in Tennessee, and Baker in turn led Thompson to Watergate. Six years out of law school, at age 30, Thompson was chosen by Baker to became minority counsel on the Senate's special committee established to investigate the famous break-in.

Barely aware of Watergate when he was offered the job, Thompson wound up being the one who publicly asked Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield whether there were any listening devices in the White House.

His prominence in the Watergate hearings is what caught the attention of Ragghianti when she was looking for a Republican lawyer to stand up to the Democratic governor back home.

You can't make this stuff up. Nor can you attribute it all to serendipity.

"He's good at recognizing an opportunity and seizing it," said Thompson's son Dan. "He makes it look easy, but I'm sure it's not."

Now Thompson, 65, has decided he wants to be president. And he's out to do it his own low-key way, entering the race long after other candidates left the starting gate, trotting along while others gallop, and stumbling at times.

"I don't do frenetic very well," he says.

"I've done pretty well being me, and me is all they're going to get."

———

Becoming a Man.

Getting his girlfriend pregnant when he was 16 may be one of the best things that ever happened to Freddie Thompson.

Up till then, it didn't look like Thompson would go much further than his father, Fletch, a used-car salesman with an eighth-grade education. His grandparents, Ma and Pa Thompson, ran a diner just off the town square in his hometown of Lawrenceburg, not far from the Alabama border.

A fairly good athlete, Thompson was known around Lawrence County High School as a likable kid without much use for books. The caption that yearbook editors put on his senior photo reads: "The lazier a man is the more he plans to do tomorrow."

Beth Barnes, a year ahead of Thompson in school, still laughs about sometimes letting Freddie copy her papers in French class.

"All the girls had a crush on him," she recalls. "He liked everybody, and everybody liked him."

It wasn't altogether surprising then that Thompson managed to win the heart of beautiful and smart Sarah Lindsey, a year ahead of him in school. The summer after Thompson's junior year, Sarah became pregnant, and Freddie proposed. They married on Sept. 12, 1959, a few weeks after he turned 17.

Thompson was a husband before homecoming and a father before graduation.

"There were not a lot of hosannas in her household at the time," Thompson later said of his marriage.

But what might have been a dead end for a teenage dad turned out to be the onramp to a broader world.

The Lindseys, a politically connected family of lawyers, business people and local officials, clapped Thompson on the shoulder and gave him a firm shove in the right direction — college, then law school.

"I don't know that he'd have ever gone to college if he hadn't married into the family," says Bobby Alford, who coached Thompson in Babe Ruth baseball. "He probably would've become a car salesman like his daddy."

As Thompson remembers it now, "Life got my attention as I got out of high school. I had to go from being a boy to being a man in short order, and I did."

———

Fred, Not Freddie.

Thompson embraced the challenge, but still kept his laid-back manner. The late Howard Liebengood, a friend and classmate at Vanderbilt Law School, once said that he and Thompson were "probably the two guys least likely to succeed in our class."

Big changes were afoot, though. By the time he graduated from Vanderbilt in 1967, Thompson was a father of three. He was a Republican. He was Fred, not Freddie.

Raised in a Democratic family, Thompson said he became a Republican because the party "stood for integrity of the individual and the decentralization of power, not the absorption of power in the hands of a few." It was an early reflection of Thompson's ongoing commitment to limited government.

Thompson settled into a two-man "rough and tumble" law practice with Sarah's uncle back in Lawrenceburg.

"Planned on being a country lawyer," Thompson recalled recently, employing his trademark habit of dropping the subject from sentences. "Almost was."

But he had done enough dabbling in Republican politics by then to fit the right profile when the Nixon-appointed U.S. attorney in Nashville went looking for a prosecutor in 1969.

"I was one of a handful of Republican lawyers, at the time," Thompson recalled.

The certificate of appointment that hung on his office wall bore the name of Attorney General John Mitchell.

Watergate was just around the corner.

After a three-year stint in the U.S. attorney's office, Thompson in 1972 signed on to help manage the re-election campaign of Baker, the standard-bearer for a rising generation of Republicans in Tennessee, a state that had long been dominated by Democrats.

"We had a one-party system, and what really pulled us together was Senator Baker," says Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, another Tennessean who got his start in that era. "We were upsetting the apple cart, and when you're in your early 30s, that's what you want to do."

It was Alexander who had recommended Thompson to Baker. And it was Alexander who recommended him again in 1973 when Baker became vice chairman of the Watergate committee and needed someone to serve as Republican counsel.

Baker had first offered the job to Alexander.

"I said, 'Oh, I don't want to do that. I'm not trained to be a criminal investigator,'" Alexander recalled. "I said, 'Why don't you ask Fred?'"

———

"That Kid."

Watergate didn't ring much of a bell with Thompson.

When Baker first tossed out the job offer, Thompson later acknowledged, "my mind raced for facts that I felt I should have known."

"My only reaction to the case had been a vague feeling that every political campaign has a few crackpots who cause embarrassment," he said in his 1975 book about the investigation.

By then back in private practice in Nashville, Thompson accepted the Watergate counsel's job thinking it would be a career detour of a few months. Sarah, a school teacher, would stay in Nashville with the children while he rented a room in D.C.

"Sometimes these so-called political scandals have a way of playing themselves out after a few days," he assured her.

The late Sam Dash, the Democratic counsel to the committee, in his book about Watergate sized up Thompson as "easy to like immediately," but also naive about how long the investigation might take and where it might end.

President Nixon, for his part, couldn't have been more underwhelmed by Thompson.

"That kid," Nixon called him. "Dumb as hell."

"Well, we're stuck with him," H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, harrumphed.

Neither thought he'd be tough enough to stand up to Dash and Democratic Sen. Sam Ervin, the chairman of the committee.

Baker tried to reassure Nixon, telling him, "He's tough. He's 6 feet 5 inches, a big mean fella."

As the investigation stretched out over the next 18 months, Thompson, a self-described administration loyalist, found himself trying to "walk a fine line between a good-faith pursuit of the investigation and a good-faith attempt to ensure balance and fairness." Only gradually did it occur to him that Nixon might actually be lying.

In his book, Thompson paints himself as a dogged investigator, willing to follow the investigation wherever it led. He describes the gift that Baker's staff gave to him that Christmas: "two brass spherical objects mounted on a rectangular platform with the inscription, 'You've got 'em, kid, you've got 'em.'"

But Watergate historian Stanley Kutler says Thompson should be regarded principally as "Baker's man," taking his cues from the senator and going no further. "What I'm saying to you diminishes severely Fred Thompson's role as some sort of intrepid independent investigator," Kutler said. "He is neither intrepid nor independent nor much of an investigator."

Whatever else, Thompson is remembered as the man to whom Butterfield made public the bombshell revelation of a secret White House taping system. But Butterfield already had revealed the tapes to the committee staff during a private interview a few days earlier.

———

"Remarkable."

Thompson's role in the Watergate drama turned him into a minor celebrity.

Onlookers outside the Senate Caucus Room, where the hearings took place, would beg for autographs; maitre d's around town always had an open table; fellow diners would break into applause.

Marie Ragghianti, looking for a prominent Republican to take on her case against Tennessee's Democratic power structure, had watched the televised hearings from a hospital bed while recovering from a lung biopsy and had been impressed by Thompson. The clincher was when she checked in with a friend who had once worked as Thompson's secretary.

"She talked about how dedicated and committed he was to his clients and researching the issues," Ragghianti told AP recently. "She complained that he worked her to death, and she couldn't take it and left."

Thompson got the case, and pressed it to victory.

"I can still remember when the verdict was announced, turning and looking at him, and what I saw was his profile, just staring at the jury and the judge and looking extremely satisfied," Ragghianti recalls.

"Remarkable," was all Thompson said.

That was how the story struck writer Peter Maas, too. The author of the best-selling book "Serpico," Maas turned Ragghianti's experience into the 1983 book "Marie: A True Story." And when director Roger Donaldson turned the book into the movie "Marie," Sissy Spacek played the lead and Fred Thompson played Fred Thompson.

Thompson, in a 1985 interview with People magazine, joked that he was considering taking a more marquee-worthy name.

"No one is named Fred," he said, "except uncles and dogs."

Fred remained Fred, though, and still the scripts came rolling in.

Thompson became the go-to guy when Hollywood needed a tall, imposing authority figure.

He was the CIA director in "No Way Out," a rear admiral in "The Hunt for Red October," the White House chief of staff in "In the Line of Fire," and by 2007 had been promoted to president — Ulysses S. Grant — in the TV movie "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." (Thompson would rather you not mention "Racing Stripes," an animated film from 2005 in which he supplied the voice of a horse.)

"Fred is the living definition of command presence," says producer Dick Wolf, who sought out Thompson to play District Attorney Arthur Branch on TV's "Law & Order."

Thompson's son Dan sees echoes of the father who played the heavy when it came to parental discipline decades earlier.

"I don't think he plays all those tough, stern characters necessarily because he's such a great actor," Dan Thompson said. "He's got that in him. It's kind of organic."

———

"An Unconquerable Soul."

For all his success as an actor, Thompson never completely went Hollywood.

He worked primarily as a lawyer and lobbyist in the 1980s and early 1990s, building his Republican connections both in Tennessee and Washington, where he served stints as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee.

As for the movies, he said, "When they needed some middle-aged guy who'd work cheap, they'd call me for a little part and I'd go out there two or three weeks and knock one out."

By 1993, Thompson had decided it was time for life to imitate art. The actor whose casting credits include politicians and government officials decided to run for the Senate, seeking the last two years of Vice President Al Gore's unfinished term.

"After Watergate, the last thing in the world I wanted was to spend the rest of my life in politics," Thompson said then, "but you get a little older and you look at things a little differently."

Thompson's prop for the new role was a leased red pickup truck that he drove as he campaigned across Tennessee, trying to counter his opponent's efforts to label him a "Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon-spreading millionaire Washington special-interest lobbyist."

Thompson's timing couldn't have been better. He was swept into office in the Republican revolution of 1994, when the GOP took back both houses of Congress in a stinging rebuke to President Clinton. With Thompson's celebrity cachet, there was talk of his moving on to the White House before he had even moved into his office on Capitol Hill.

Thompson batted the talk away, saying, "When people come to town, somewhere along the line, if they do anything at all, if they're shown to be able to put one foot in front of the other, they're mentioned for the national ticket."

The senator, who was divorced from Sarah in 1985, also got ink for his romantic links to a number of prominent women, country music's Lorrie Morgan and GOP socialite businesswoman Georgette Mosbacher among them.

In a 1998 letter to Mosbacher, Thompson wrote that senators take an unspoken vow that "I shall have no money, and I shall have no fun. I, of course, regarding myself as an unconquerable soul, am still determined to break the second part of that vow."

To hear Mosbacher tell it, Thompson's idea of fun included going to football and basketball games (he's a die-hard Tennessee Titans fan) but also discussing trade, job creation and public service over dinner.

"It really dominated his conversation and just about everything he did," she said in an interview.

———

"Biggest Dud."

Eight years and out. One hallmark of Thompson's Senate years is that he pushed for term limits and actually left by choice.

Thompson points to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and his support for campaign finance change as his biggest accomplishments, but he never acquired a reputation as a Senate workhorse. As chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, he led the investigation into fundraising abuses during the Clinton re-election campaign, concluding that 1996 was "the most corrupt political campaign in modern history." But he came away frustrated that the inquiry didn't accomplish more, and blamed a lack of cooperation by the Clinton-Gore White House and Democrats on the committee.

As his term ended, Thompson said senators should leave "when there comes a point where the frustration level or the aggravation level or the baloney level gets to the point where you just find yourself grumbling all the time."

He considered running for a second full term. But his daughter Betsy, who suffered from a bipolar disorder, died of an accidental drug overdose in 2002 at age 38, and he decided his heart wasn't in it.

———

His heart wasn't into running for president, either.

Five years ago, he said that "the George Washington example of serving eight years and riding out of town on a horse and never returning has great appeal."

Now, Thompson wants to saddle up for the White House. He attributes his new outlook to his new family. In 1996, Thompson met and fell in love with Jeri Kehn, a political consultant 24 years his junior. The two married and now have a daughter Hayden, 4, and a 1-year-old son, Samuel.

With young children, he says, "you look at things differently."

But Thompson's sauntering entrance into the presidential race in September, and his low-key campaign since then have created lingering doubts about whether his heart truly is in it even now.

A week after Thompson announced, former Bush counselor Dan Bartlett labeled him the "biggest dud" in the race.

His friends dispute that.

"He's a big, ambling guy. His speech is southern Tennessee," says Rich Galen, a senior adviser to Thompson. "People like me who are from Long Island think that if you talk that slow and walk that slow you must be lazy. ... It's just not true."

Thompson says he doesn't have to prove himself to anybody.

"Some experts, I think, probably expected me to be slicker and better scripted than I am," he said. "I'm not slick, and, ironically, I don't follow scripts very well."

Associated Press writer Ann Sanner contributed to this report. Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.

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