Posted on 02/01/2008 7:44:42 AM PST by TheThirdRuffian
Editor's Note: Fred Thompson will appear as the second candidate on Connecticut's Republican primary ballot, even though he has withdrawn from the campaign.
WASHINGTON — Fatherhood and ambition. In Fred Thompson's life, they rise and fall together, a recurring couplet in the nostalgic story of a Tennessee fella who's guided more by life's surprises and others' expectations than he is by any master plan.
Consider:
The small-town jock called "Freddie" and "Moose," who, at 17, upon getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, married her, heeded her politically connected family and made something of himself.
The divorced U.S. senator, lawyer, lobbyist and actor who dropped out of politics when one of his three grown children died from a prescription drug overdose.
The unlikely 65-year-old comeback kid, now remarried with a 4-year-old girl and a 1-old boy, who's running for the Republican nomination for president.
On the campaign trail, Thompson treats criticism that he doesn't have enough fire in the belly with a father-knows-best attitude.
"I've had the worst thing that can happen to a father, and the best thing that can happen to a father," Thompson told retirees this fall in South Carolina, in the drawl that's central to his persona. "I think you come out from the other end of that with a sense of what's important and not important."
Two of Thompson's most important experiences played out in the public eye: the Watergate hearings and his 1985 movie debut, "Marie." But with voters, he talks about parenting as much as he does about politics and acting.
Seeing daughter Hayden's sonogram — the first time he'd glimpsed any of his children in the womb — strengthened his anti-abortion views, he says. Wanting a stable world for his second family helped nudge him to audition for a part that would be less fun than TV shoots, but more consequential.
His wife, Jeri, a former Republican consultant, said that one night while they were still mulling whether to make the race, they sat at their kitchen table in Northern Virginia and saw their little girl perched at the top of the staircase.
"He had this very strange look on his face," she recalled of her husband. "I said, 'What are you thinking?' and he said, 'A lot goes through my mind from the time she's at the top step to the time she's at the bottom.' It's when he decided, I think. In his mind, there was a decision made."
Thompson has children older than his wife, 41, and younger than his grandchildren.
His progeny span two generations, bookends like the Vietnam and Iraq wars to the major societal, economic and global changes that have rocked America in his lifetime.
Thompson was born in Alabama and raised in Tennessee by parents whose formal education ended with junior high school. He graduated from Memphis State University and the Vanderbilt University law school while working and raising children.
He read Barry Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative," started a Young Republicans group and worked on a congressional campaign, as a federal prosecutor and for the re-election of Tennessee Republican Sen. Howard Baker Jr.
Baker became a powerful mentor. He gave the young Thompson, whom Richard Nixon once called "dumb as hell," a job as chief Republican counsel on the committee investigating Watergate.
Thompson wasn't the staffer who discovered Nixon's secret audio taping system, and he later admitted that he warned the White House that it would be revealed. He didn't initially understand the administration's culpability. But Baker arranged for Thompson to ask about the tapes in televised hearings, and that helped bring down the president.
Thompson got national exposure; a book deal and an anti-corruption reputation that drew clients, including state parole official Marie Ragghianti, to his new law practice.
Ragghianti exposed a cash-for-clemency scheme under Tennessee Gov. Ray Blanton, lost her job and hired Thompson to clear her name.
"He's personable and straightforward, and he was just what I needed at a very dark hour in my life," Ragghianti said in an interview.
There was a book about the case, then a movie with Sissy Spacek — "Marie" — in which Thompson played himself. That launched his career as an actor even as he kept a hand in on Capitol Hill.
Celebrity eased Thompson's election to an open Senate seat; he replaced Tennessee's Al Gore, who became Bill Clinton's vice president.
Serving from 1994 through 2002, Thompson got mixed reviews. He was a reliable Republican vote, but critics said he lacked the appetite for the long hours and tedium and didn't leave much of a legacy.
In 1997, he was chosen to lead a Senate inquiry into alleged campaign finance abuses by the Clinton afministration. Expanding that to look at Republican wrongdoing won him points with Democrats and independents, but angered many in his party.
They also he let the Clinton probe fizzle.
"He was rolled by Senate opponents and the Clinton machine," said Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
"He did not act with the aggressiveness and energy appropriate, given the allegations."
The final year of Thompson's Senate career, his daughter Betsy, who had bipolar disorder, died from what was deemed an accidental overdose of painkillers.
"That basically took all the proverbial wind out of his sail," said Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., who attended the funeral in 2002 and began pushing last year for Thompson to run for president.
"It took his heart right out of his body."
Thompson went back to acting, and making money, as fictional District Attorney Arthur Branch on TV's "Law & Order." He also gave up the single life, marrying Jeri, whom he'd met years earlier while grocery shopping. Then they had children.
His wife said they neither planned it nor ruled it out. "We do both believe in God having his hand in things," she said. "We went with that."
"I saw him completely get a second lease on life with Jeri and the kids," Wamp said.
About this time, Thompson was diagnosed with a non-fatal lymphoma, which required chemotherapy.
But he had a new appetite for GOP politics. He helped manage Chief Justice John Roberts' confirmation to the Supreme Court in 2005, was chairman of the State Department's International Security Advisory Board and championed President Bush's commutation of White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence in the CIA leak case — all while taping the crime series and working for ABC Radio.
When retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee said last year that he wouldn't seek the presidency, Wamp pressed Thompson to get in.
Thompson wasn't interested, Wamp said. But Baker intervened, and Jeri encouraged him.
No other Republican had an easy lock on the nomination.
Wamp thinks that Thompson's image and message are selling points, and so is his personal experience of "raising a second family in a different generation than the first."
"I remember when Bush 41 didn't know the price of a gallon of milk," Wamp said, referring to a much-hyped 1992 campaign incident when the first President Bush was reportedly surprised by grocery store scanners, and his critics seized on that to charge that he was out of touch with ordinary Americans.
Thompson, on the other hand, has a campaign bus with a diaper-changing table.
Go Fred!!
If you were a Fred supporter, you should vote for him. if you were a Rudy supporter, you should vote for him. If you were a Hunter supporter, you should vote ofr him. If you’re a supporter of Ron Paul or Alan Keyes, vote for him. Don’t let the Amrica-hating left-wing media tell you for whom you may or may not vote.
bump! bump! bump!
*
Ping.
bumpski!
yeah, and totally waste your God given vote...Fred and Hunter are gone and Ron Paul is a foreign policy looney tunes. At this point, Romney is a good hope for fiscal and moral conservatism. Please don’t waste your vote.
I writing in Fred where I live.
I just might vote for Fred on Tuesday anyway. The other choices are uncommitted, or try to close ranks and vote for Romney, even though I am not thrilled with him.
But hey, at least you he a chance to "win"!
Why is voting for the person you want to hold an office a wasted vote?
Because your vote would not be for the person he/she wants elected, silly.
*bangs head on desk”... siily me! :0)
well, commonsense shows that Romney is basically conservative and although my first vote was for Fred, he is not in it anymore. So what kind of nonsense is that to vote for him? Did you know that Romney vetoed the mandatory and penalty part of his healthcare bill but the liberal legistlature overrode it? Alot of the liberalism of the legistlature made it hard for him to do alot which will be different as president...he will have the full backing of all the nations conservatives which he didn’t have as governor.
Right. Voting for someone who isn’t running makes sense?
That will get us McCain and I hope all of you are happy with that! He’s counting on you!
Sorry, Romney “became” a conservative about 2 weeks before running for office.
I understand the desire to vote for the lesser-of-evils/tactical voting, etc., but don’t try to tell us he’s a conservative -— we all know better.
Your tagline conflicts with your post.
I very well might write in Fred next Tuesday
I have to concur. I'm in Texas, and if it is effectively over by then I will vote for Fred (who should be on our ballot). However, if it is still a horse race, I will vote to stop McCain. McCain is no conservative, almost left the Republican Party shortly after Jumpin' Jim Jeffords, and is a vengeful, ill-tempered individual. Yeah, he's a war hero (and I give him tremendous respect for that), but we're not electing a war hero, we're electing a President. McCain will also lose to Hillary or Obama - the NY Slimes is holding onto a bunch of dirt on him until he gets the nomination.
I will vote for whoever the Republican nominee is, even if it is McCain or Huckabee (gag me, in both cases) - on the theory that at least they get some issues right, and neither Shrillary nor Obama get anything right.
Please, don't waste your vote. It IS your vote, but you should carefully consider whether voting for someone other than Romney makes any sense to you - look at the big picture.
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