Posted on 12/02/2007 3:24:22 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
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 daughter and a 1-year-old son, 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."
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.
Setting the stage
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 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.
Recovery, renewal
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 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.
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.
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."
Wamp said he remembers when the first President Bush "didn't know the price of a gallon of milk," referring to a much-hyped 1992 campaign incident when 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.
“I’m hoping that FRed will pick Duncan Hunter as his VP. What a combo!”
BUMP
What you see is what you get.
Damn refreshing.
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