This is long, so I'm not going to post the whole thing. It also seems to be a reprint of a much earlier profile of Fred, but there are probably many in Iowa who hadn't seen it before:
Countdown to caucus: Thompson’s life awash in opportunities, seized with an actor’s sense of timing
EDITOR’S?NOTE — This is the final installment of an in-depth series look by the Associated Press at the presidential frontrunners heading into Iowa’s Jan. 3 caucuses.
Please note that not every candidate running was featured in the series.
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.’’
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