Thompson's image giving him a lift

Former senator’s ‘commanding presence’ on, off screen is what voters see

BY EMILY NUNN - Chicago Tribune

INDIANAPOLIS — Back when the part-time actor, lawyer, lobbyist, former senator and presidential hopeful Fred Thompson was still merely “testing the waters,” he held one of his first official news conferences, in a windowless room of the Indianapolis Convention Center.

“We can talk about whatever you wanna talk about,” said the 6-foot-5 Thompson, whose half-glowering/half-grinning face and deep-voiced Tennessee drawl seem designed for saying “howdy” with authority.

Thompson (known to many as the Southern folkloric district attorney Arthur Branch on “Law & Order”) is running for president in an era in which image (photographic or otherwise) can completely replace the traditional idea of communication and beliefs often blur the line between fantasy and reality.

It’s an era that serves him quite well.

“When Fred, as Arthur Branch, walks into a room, people feel like they should stand up and salute,” says Dick Wolf, the producer of “Law and Order” who hired Thompson at the end of his second Senate term, in 2003. “He is the living definition of command presence.”

THE MYTH IS HIM

Thompson’s first job as a character actor was playing the character of Fred Thompson, the down-home, straight-talking Tennessee lawyer who saves the day, in the 1985 movie “Marie,” starring Sissy Spacek as a whistle-blower he represented in 1977 in a famous cash-for-clemency scandal involving the Tennessee Parole Board.

Since then, his image as an actor has become so focused on figures of all-American authority — the director of the CIA (“No Way Out”), a rear admiral (“Hunt for the Red October”), White House chief of staff (“In the Line of Fire) and, more than once, president of the United States (including Ulysses S. Grant in “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”) — that it almost seems rude to point out that Thompson’s experience as an elected official includes only eight years as a senator (1994-2003). Or that he’s never served in the military.

Or that his off-camera presence is less commanding than it is slightly uncomfortable.

Or that his steadiest occupation since the mid-1970s has been the pariah perfecta of lawyer (mostly in private practice) and Washington lobbyist (for Westinghouse, the British firm Equitas Ltd., the deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, and the Tennessee Savings and Loan, to name a few), with a break during his Senate years.

But if voters continue to confuse Thompson with the heroic characters he plays, nobody on Team Fred seems worried about correcting them.

An early phone call requesting a one-on-one interview (that never materialized) and inquiring about “the man behind the myth” drew this response from a former communications director: “That’s him — the myth is him.”

TRANSFORMING HIMSELF

Thompson is a comeback kid, who ended up winning his initially disastrous Senate campaign — in 1994, to fill Al Gore’s vacated seat — by 20 percentage points. “When Thompson decided he really wanted to win, he moved into a different gear,” says Ornstein. “I’m sure he can do that again.”

In fact, the politician-turned-actor-turned-politician has always transformed himself at crucial points throughout his life.

He was a happy-go-lucky country boy from Lawrenceburg (population 10,800), the son of a used car salesman and the first college graduate in his family, who married his high-school sweetheart at 17, worked his way through college (Memphis State) and law school (Vanderbilt), practiced law for two years with his wife’s uncle, in Lawrenceburg, then become a federal prosecutor in Nashville at 28, chief minority counsel on the Watergate committee at 30, a state senator and, of course, a hero on film and television.

But at 16, Thompson had gotten his beautiful, brainy, well-to-do girlfriend, Sarah Lindsey, pregnant. (Her father owned a company that manufactured church pews; her uncle was a prominent lawyer and former judge.)

“He stepped up to the plate — just transformed himself overnight,” says second cousin Anne Morrow, director of the Crockett Arts Center in Lawrenceburg.

His football coach at Lawrence County High School, Garner Ezell, 75, says: “You have to realize, then he was just a kid having a big time. He woke up one day, and he was married. ... That can change a person.”

And so can connections: the great used-car salesman friends thought Thompson would grow up to be? He instead became a lawyer.

Thompson soon met and was anointed by U.S. Sen. Howard Baker, the king of Republican politics in Tennessee then.

“Howard Baker — that’s one of the best things about Fred,” says Jim Squires, the former editor of the Chicago Tribune, who covered Watergate for that paper. “Howard Baker raised him as a political person. (Baker) was the person that everyone trusted.”

Thompson helped manage Baker’s senatorial re-election campaign in 1972. A year later, Baker drafted Thompson for the Watergate job.

Which catapulted him, at age 30, from a local to a world political stage. And transformed him yet again.

“He came to Washington and had his illusions smashed when he found out that Nixon was guilty,” says Squires. “Fred changed from a country bumpkin lawyer ... to something dramatically different through that experience.”

Thompson did the right thing (at least once it became clear that the Nixon administration was crumbling), but he went into the situation to protect a Republican White House and is known to have leaked and plotted like a pro.

And he may have learned the tactical value of not communicating, especially with the press, and the power of one’s image.

According to Ron McMahan, who was Baker’s press secretary during the Watergate years, Thompson kept a lid on “the only major news story that developed from Watergate that was not a leak,” meaning the existence of the tapes. “Every other story out of Watergate was a leak, but not that one.”

Which allowed Thompson, with the whole nation watching on television, to ask Nixon’s deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield the famous question he and other insiders already knew the answer to: “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?”

And so Watergate turned Fred Thompson’s image — the studied, scowling mug and mutton-chop sideburns — into a familiar presence in American living rooms.