In the hours following the sad news of Fred Thompson’s death Sunday night, those who covered the former Tennessee senator and 2008 Republican presidential hopeful had much to reminisce about.
The 2008 run for president by Thompson, who died at age 73 from lymphoma, fizzled quickly.
But political pundits who knew him usually agreed that had he run a decade earlier — when he was unarguably one of his party’s superstars after the Republican sweep in 1994 mid-term elections — the Tennessean might easily have been on a national ticket.
Thompson first appeared on the national scene in 1973 as the pipe-smoking minority counsel on the nationally televised Senate Watergate Committee.
His mentor and then-boss, Sen. Howard Baker, R.-Tenn., asked the Vanderbilt University Law School graduate to take the job after another Baker protégé named Lamar Alexander declined.
Three years after the Watergate hearings concluded, private attorney Thompson got an unexpected bonus. He represented Tennessee Parole Board Chairman Marie Ragghianti in the case that prison felons were pardoned after they had bribed aides to Democratic Governor Ray Blanton.
In the subsequent hit movie “Marie,” Ragghianti was played by Sissy Spacek and Fred Thompson was played by, well, Fred Thompson. Following universally favorable reviews of the lawyer’s performance on screen, Thompson went on to act in such major films as “No Way Out” (where he played a CIA director) and as an admiral in “Hunt for Red October” — although, he later admitted, “I never got to meet [star] Sean Connery.”
One who liked Thompson in “Marie” was veteran Hollywood casting director Lisa Beach, whose credits include “Walk the Line” and “American Wedding.”
“A number of years later, I had the opportunity to audition him for a role in a film I was casting,” she told me, “and it was one of the more memorable auditions of my career. Apart from being one of the most intelligent men I have ever met, he was among the most talented and innovative actors I have ever had the pleasure to work with.”
Voters in Tennessee agreed. In 1994, Republican Thompson rolled up 61 percent of the vote to win a special election for the remaining two years of Vice President Al Gore’s Senate term.
No sooner was the new senator escorted to the aisle of the Senate by proud mentor Baker and sworn in by Gore than his party turned to him for a thankless task: to deliver their nationally televised response to President Clinton’s State of the Union address.
Making the case of the opposition party against the president who commands the best-known stage in the U.S. by addressing a joint session of Congress historically results in widespread panning of the designated speaker. Not so was Sen. Thompson.
Sitting on the edge of a desk in an empty office, joking he “just got there” and didn’t have “time to unpack,” Thompson then delivered a well-versed reply to Clinton’s address and a stirring summation of the vision of the Republicans who had just won control of both Houses of Congress.
Not since Ronald Reagan’s stirring “Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964 had a televised political address evoked so many favorable calls and mail and so much encouragement of the speaker to run for president.
Thompson brushed away talk that he run in 1996 and instead campaigned hard for friend and fellow Tennessean Alexander (who lost the nomination to Bob Dole).
In 1997, Thompson became chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee with the fewest years of seniority in the Senate since Joe McCarthy, R.-Wis., assumed its gavel after winning a second term in 1952. It was at this point that the Tennessean began drawing the first critical notices of his career.
Charged with investigating the possible flow of illegal money from China into the Clinton-Gore campaign, Thompson, critics charged, seemed more interested in conducting a hearing on campaign finance reform than a true probe of Chinese influence in the U.S.
The Tennessee senator had an overall conservative voting record and told me how Barry Goldwater was his first political hero (“Barry was my man”) and how Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” was a major influence on his philosophy.
“I hope I can serve in the Senate in a way in which your husband would have been proud,” Thompson told the scholar’s widow Annette Kirk when he met her in 1995.
But Thompson also disappointed fans on the right by becoming the most vigorous GOP ally of Sen. John McCain, R.-Ariz., in pursuit of campaign finance legislation that limited money coming to federal campaigns and parties.
The restrictive McCain-Feingold Act, which was signed into law in 2001, created numerous difficulties for party organizations and candidates and is still being challenged in court.
Thompson was again ballyhooed for president in 2000. Again, he said no and became one of four fellow GOP senators to back McCain over George W. Bush.
After McCain swept the New Hampshire primary and was seriously eyed as a nominee, talk of the Arizonan turned to his close friend and national campaign co-chairman Thompson as a running mate began.
By 2002, clearly bored with the Senate and shaken by the drug-related death of his daughter, Thompson announced he was retiring. He returned to his other “love,” acting, and had several years as “District Attorney Arthur Branch” on TV’s long-running “Law and Order.”
When he did finally make a bid for the presidency, Thompson had been out of politics for six years.
Recalling a much-anticipated speech Thompson gave at a Republican conference at Mackinac Island, Michigan in September of ’07, BBC correspondent James Coomarasamy told me “I suppose I shared the impression of most people at the conference — I was perplexed. What had all the fuss been about? Although undoubtedly charming, he seemed to be lacking passion, energy and a clear message about why he should be president.”
Referring to then-Michigan Rep. and Thompson supporter Thaddeus McCotter, Coomarasamy said: “When I asked him to explain Fred Thompson's rather uninspiring first night performance, he said: ‘Fred is an artist. His campaign is a work of performance art.’”
After badly trailing in the South Carolina primary (in which McCain edged out Mike Huckabee), Thompson abandoned the race. He later returned to TV commercials and films and settled in Nashville with second wife Jeri and their two young children.
Fred Thompson will no doubt be remembered less for anything he did in office than for his ability to communicate and motivate people.
As Lisa Beach put it, “A true gentleman and a consummate actor, he was a real man's man who commanded the room with his unique ability to hold captive an audience, whether it was a on a Hollywood set or the floor of the Senate. I hope his family is consoled by the knowledge that Fred was one in a billion.”
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax.