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The Actor

Thompson as District Attorney Arthur Branch on Law & Order.

(Photo: Daily News)

So far, the Thompson bubble has floated skyward on several favorable updrafts. He’s the newest man in the race—and one with celebrity name recognition. He’s a Southerner and arguably the most conservative candidate in a field devoid of hard-liners. Despite his eight years in the Senate, people seem to buy the idea, for the time being anyway, that he’s a Washington outsider. And all of his opponents have significant liabilities. But then again, so does Thompson. Among them are his work ethic and authenticity.

Thompson is often compared to Ronald Reagan, not just because they are both actors, but also because of each man’s almost preternatural affability. But Reagan was an unalloyed ideologue when America was looking for one, with eight years as the chief executive of what amounts to one of the world’s largest countries. He wasn’t elected until his third campaign, when he defeated a weak Democratic incumbent. Fred Thompson is in a different place. If he’s going to be elected the leader of the Free World, he may have to do it on the strength of his not inconsiderable personal charm.

You can’t get to Fred Thompson’s hometown from here. Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, is located 28 miles from the nearest interstate. Its rolling hills are picturesquely dotted with pigs and cattle, but it remains one of the state’s poorest areas. “This town hasn’t been the same since the Yankees came in and opened the Murray bike factory,” says Tommy Beuerlein, who owns a downtown pharmacy and was a classmate of Thompson’s. The bike factory arrived in 1955. “Nixon was right about there being a silent majority in America,” Beuerlein proudly says. “It’s right here.”

On a recent summer day, eighteen people attended a city-council meeting dealing with the local problem of illegal dumping of couches. A few steps away, 71 residents, some of them as young as 9, attended a shotgun-safety class. “You have to respect your zone of fire,” insisted the instructor. “Vice-President Cheney didn’t respect his zone of fire, and look what happened.”

Much of Thompson’s down-home affability can be attributed to his roots in Lawrenceburg, where as a child he pretended to be Western star Lash LaRue and courted his high-school sweetheart underneath the town’s Davy Crockett statue (true story). But while Thompson may be a country boy, he’s a certain type of country boy: the one who plays possum while you mock his cornpone ways. Next thing you know he’s got your girl and holds the deed to your farm.

Thompson’s father, Fletch, ran a used-car lot in the center of town, and would talk Republican politics at the Blue Ribbon Café. Neither of Thompson’s parents attended high school (his father eventually earned a GED), and Fred, the first of two sons, proved to be an indifferent but popular student. Even as a kid, Fred had a flair for showmanship. One of the building blocks of the Thompson legend is the story of his concerned football coach’s running onto the field to check on an injured Thompson. When coach Garner Ezell reached his player, Thompson smiled at his fellow Church of Christ parishioner and quipped, “How’s the crowd takin’ it?”

“Fred said it,” says Ezell. “But he wasn’t ever hurt. He was just tired and wanted a rest.”

Even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut, and Thompson has always seemed to have a way of stumbling into success. By all accounts, Thompson’s work ethic kicked in at 17, when he got his sweetheart Sarah Lindsey pregnant and immediately proposed. “I barely got out of high school,” Thompson told the Washington Post in 1985. “I was interested in two things—and sports was one of them.”

Because of his marriage, Thompson didn’t play sports his senior year, and he put in long shifts at the bike factory to support his new family. The following fall, the newlyweds headed to nearby Florence State, now the University of North Alabama, before transferring to Memphis State, from which they both graduated. Sarah’s grandfather was an influential Lawrenceburg lawyer, and her family urged Thompson to apply to Vanderbilt Law School. After graduating, the couple moved back to Lawrenceburg, and Thompson practiced law with Sarah’s uncle and began dabbling in local GOP politics, eventually joining the county’s Republican Executive Committee. It was through that group that Thompson caught the eye of another accidental benefactor, Tennessee senator Howard Baker. Thompson worked on Baker’s 1972 reelection, sometimes driving the senator around Tennessee, and the two men struck up a friendship.

By the next year, Watergate was everywhere. And while Yale and Harvard up-and-comers like Hillary Clinton and Bill Weld clawed for minor legal positions, Baker offered Thompson a coveted slot as minority counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee.