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Note: Fred Thompson will appear as the second candidate on Connecticut's Republican primary ballot, even though he has withdrawn from the campaign.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.
Doesn’t matter. If you are on the ballot and have not withdrawn by the cutoff date you will be on the ballot in the election.
Here in Texas Fred is on the ballot. And there will be some HARD lessons learned when the votes are counted. I will vote for Fred. If the "republicans" have become so damn socialist that they could not pick such an OBVIOUS choice as Thompson-Hunter then they are too stupid and it is time for them to go.
It is never a waste of a vote to stand up for what you believe is right.
The other candidates offer nothing positive.
Vietnam Veterans Against McCain
Here's more:
Missing, Presumed Dead: The Search For America's POWs Award Winning Documentary Shows Allegations Of McCain's Efforts To Block POW Investigations, Reports KST Communications
For Immediate Release
OROVILLE, Calif./EWORLDWIRE/Jan. 18, 2008 --- The award-winning documentary film, "Missing, Presumed Dead: The Search For America's POWs" narrated by Ed Asner backs up allegations that John McCain repeatedly thwarted attempts by U.S. Senate investigators to examine the abandonment of American POWs in Southeast Asia and North Korea.
"Missing Presumed Dead," which won two film festival "Best Documentary" awards, explores McCain's successful attempt to pass a stealth bill in the Senate which effectively keeps his POW records sealed in perpituity and provides insight into why he does not want these records ever to be made public - including the revelation of the many propaganda radio broadcasts he delivered for the North Vietnamese. The film also explains why McCain's refusal of early release from a North Vietnamese POW camp had a less than honorable motive.
The charges against McCain are revealed in the documentary by such political luminaries as former New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith; Jesse Helms' chief of staff, Dr. James Lusier; former Congressman Bob Dornan; U.S. Senate lead investigator, Tracy Usery; and author, Dr. Joseph Douglass, Jr. ("Betrayed").
This documentary goes in depth to answer some of these persistant questions:
Why were these POWs abandoned?According to Jerry Kiley, a group leader of Vietnam Vets against McCain, Kiley says, "John McCain has created this myth that he is a hero, and he is not."Are some of these POWs still alive in North Korea and Vietnam?
Is John McCain really the president we want guiding our future generations?
Kiley's group cites as evidence a May, 1973, U.S. News & World Report article by McCain in which McCain said he realized, on his third or fourth day of captivity after his plane was shot down in 1967, that his knee was so swollen the blood might pool in it and kill him, so he offered to give military information to his captors in exchange for medical treatment.
Consequently several military missions were compromised. "Missing, Presumed Dead" was supported by several POW/MIA organizations who cite John McCain as one of the biggest obstacles in resolving the abandonment of America's POW/MIAs. Go to http://www.missingpresumeddead.com to learn more.
http://www.youtube.com/veteransagainstmccain clip coming soon.
HTML: http://www.eworldwire.com/pressreleases/18074
MOBILE: http://e4mobile.com/view_release.php?id=18074
PDF: http://www.eworldwire.com/pdf/18074.pdf
ONLINE NEWSROOM: http://www.eworldwire.com/newsroom/311969.htm
NEWSROOM RSS FEED: http://newsroom.eworldwire.com/xml/newsrooms/311969.xml
LOGO: http://www.eworldwire.com/newsroom/311969.htmCONTACT:
Kara Topolsky
KST Communications
P.O. Box 1556
Oroville, CA 95965
PHONE. (530) 315-9078
BTTT
It doesn’t matter if you are “on the ballot”. If you withdraw from the nomination, you become no different from a McDonald’s waitress. Her name can be written in. She is as much a candidate as he is. His name happens to appear. Her name needs to be jotted in. There is no legal difference.
He withdrew. He did so in writing. How can he make it more clear? He has no desire to be involved and he does not want to affect outcomes. He Said So.
Leave the guy alone.
Huckabee caused a problem for Fred. He bled off the Conservative vote because Huck says he’s an Evangelical/Christian/whatever. Huckabee has been the fly in the “Decent President Ointment” from the get-go. People just believed him and didn’t bother to check out what he said.
I liked Hunter and Tancredo,too. Why do candidates drop out so darn early? Is money the issue?
“well, commonsense shows that Romney is basically conservative”
Then he doesn’t get my vote. I don’t someone who is “basically” conservative. I want a true Conservative and not one who has just recently discovered it either. What Mitt said in Michigan is “basically” big government and nowhere near Conservative.
If Romney is the candidate, I can’t, in good conscience, vote for him.
I’m torn between voting for Mitt or writing in Fred. I still have time to decide in the general. Primary, I will pull for Mitt, unless of course Fred’s name is still there!
Thank you for posting the link to that video, it was great.
If people would just stand up for what they believe is right all this garbage would eventually be ironed out. Sooner would be better than later.
It does no good to just say, I’m voting for whats his face when whats his face isn’t going to do the right thing.
I resent mightily some who try to tell others who to vote for. It is my vote, to give to whomever I believe will do the right thing. That’s what I miss most about Fred, he stood up for what was right. Unlike Owen who stands for whichever way the wind is blowing today.
I hope he’s still on the ballot here in NY!
“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.”
I was a Fred supporter, but voted for Mitt Romney. The media told me to vote for McCain, but I voted for Romney. Notice they are still telling us to vote for McCain? If we don’t vote for McCAin, they want us to vote for anyone else EXCEPT Ronmey! So Mark,Sean,Laura,Michael Reagan,Glen Beck,Ann Coulter,plus others along with Senator Rick Santorum and my favorite comedian,Jacky Mason, have endorsed Mitt Romney. Reason: A vote for anyone else gives us McCain and later Hillary!
Look, people. Think.
You either honor the effort last year to stop McCain’s Amnesty or you do not.
That’s it. Full stop. You either honor that victory or you declare it moot and petulant.
You vote to award McCain the nomination, or you vote in the only way to prevent it.
This is not rocket science and you all know it. If you don’t care about amnesty, McCain is your guy. If you do care, there is only one way to stop him. And you all know it.
Now you can wriggle around and talk about nuanced principles. Or you can look reality in the face and recognize the principle that trumps it all is victory against amnesty. Honor that victory, or spit on it. Choose.
Had Fred stayed in, it would have split conservatives even more.
His silence speaks loudly to me.
His NONendorsement of McCain speaks volumes.
With every fiber of my ink stained pointy finger, I want to vote FRED,
but will instead be using, not losing, my vote.
I will always love America, and Fred.
Carter's election in 1976 led to the first conservative administration in over 50 years, the cutting of the top income tax bracket from 75% to 28%, and the end of the Cold War. If Ford had won the 1976 election, none of this would have happened. Thank God the American people didn't listen to Reagan and support Ford in 1976. This is what you should take from that election.
Vote for Mitt and get Hillary with good hair.
Those were good videos. I listened to all of them. They had Bob Dornan [ex congressman] and senator Bob Smith on there saying some hard truths about McCain.
BUMP
It was for Fred. "Conservatives" were supposed to send in $5 million in the first 30 days and they sent in 3.5 and even less as the months went by until Fred was reduced to all but walking.
You should have seen Iowa TV in the run up to the caucases! Hillary, Obama, Hillary, Obama, Mitt, Huck, Hillary, Obama, Hillary, Obama, Mitt, Hillary, Obama, Hillary, Obama, Mitt -- thus the tv ads went at suppertime every night. And this is for western Iowa. THey not only flooded the IOwa market but the Nebraska market as well on the chance they could reach people in western Iowa.
But Fred, Hunter or Tancredo??? NOT A ONE!
CONSERVATIVES DESERVE MCCAIN!
I also take that we lost the Panama Canal and got the Mullahs in Iran because of that election - neither of which Reagan fixed (or could have fixed short of war). Further, I take that we had an unbelievably disasterous foreign policy and a rampaging Soviet Union, resulting in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions (since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan under Carter, everything that followed, including 9/11, is because of his policies, none of which would have been in effect if he had been told by the American public to go back to peanut farming).
It isn't always as cut and dry as you think it is. There's also NO guarantee that the American public will wake up in 2010 (as we did in '94), or in 2012 (as we did in 1980) - or even that we'll even be a cohesive nation at that point (who knows what the terrorists will do, or our "friends" the Russians and Chinese). In short, there is nothing certain, and sitting on one's hands and allowing the likes of Hillary or Obama to take the reins of power for some elusive and hoped-for benefit in the future is...unwise.
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