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| Against the grain: Thompson has often defied his party and colleagues to do what he sees as right. Charlie Neibergall/AP |
Fred Thompson: a maverick conservative who loves the law
The GOP presidential hopeful has often defied his party and colleagues to chart his own course.
from the December 13, 2007 edition
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"If you'd have lined up everybody in the high school and said one of these will be a presidential candidate one of these days, he'd have been the last one picked," recalls Bobby Alford, president of the Lawrence County Historical Society, who coached Thompson at summer youth baseball.
As a boy Thompson prayed twice a week at the First Street Church of Christ and went to a Wednesday Bible class, recalls Jan Clifton, a friend since childhood. He was baptized there in his early teens.
Churches of Christ have their origin in a principle that would become a signpost for Thompson's secular beliefs: a suspicion of central authority. Rooted in the 19th-century Restoration Movement and concentrated in the South, the churches are nondenominational, have no headquarters, and teach the Bible as the only source of faith.
"They were trying to restore what they perceived as first-century Christianity," says Kevin Lewis, a theologian at Biola University, a Christian college in La Mirada, Calif.
Musical instruments and candles are banned from services, because, a church-affiliated website says, "there is no authority for engaging in acts of worship not found in the New Testament."
"They didn't put up with a lot," Mr. Alford says.
Thompson's faith remains a prickly subject, and to the dismay of some conservatives he has declined to discuss it during the campaign. He has said that he attends church when he visits his mother in Tennessee but does not go regularly at home in McLean, Va.
"I have no apologies to make about my religion or my relationship to Jesus Christ or God," he said with characteristic frankness in a CNN interview earlier this month. "I'm OK with the Lord and the Lord's OK with me, as far as I can tell."
Moving up
Thompson happened into a great deal of his success.
He was about 17 years old when his girlfriend, Sarah Lindsey, a schoolmate from one of the town's prominent Republican families, told him she was pregnant. Thompson asked her to marry him, and, despite some doubts, the Lindseys arranged a ceremony.
"It definitely changed him," Ms. Clifton recalls. "He stepped up and took on a lot of responsibility."
Two more children came quickly. To pay for college, he worked odd hours sorting mail, assembling bicycles, and selling shoes. (He divorced Lindsey in 1985 and was remarried in 2002 to Jeri Kehn, with whom he has two children.)
His association with the Lindseys moved him into a higher social circle, and hearing his wife's uncle and grandfather talk about their law careers raised his aspirations. "A lot of people along the way oftentimes saw more in me than I saw in myself," Thompson told a hometown crowd in Lawrenceburg in September, soon after announcing his bid for the GOP presidential nomination.
He graduated from Memphis State University with good enough grades for a scholarship to Vanderbilt Law School.
Thompson was a Republican in the Democratic South, and being in the minority paid almost immediate dividends. Richard Nixon was elected to the White House a year after Thompson's graduation from Vanderbilt. The administration quickly hired Thompson as an assistant US attorney in Nashville.
When Howard Baker Jr. – Tennessee's first popularly elected GOP senator – was searching for a manager for his 1972 reelection bid, Lamar Alexander, then a Baker aide, recommended Thompson. "The first thing was, he was a Republican, and there weren't many Republicans in Middle Tennessee at the time," Mr. Alexander, now Tennessee's senior senator, said in a phone interview, describing what he saw as Thompson's chief asset.
watergate performance
Baker won reelection and invited Thompson, just 30, to serve as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate committee. Investigating a GOP president – the man who effectively gave him his first government job – Thompson was in a position few Republicans would envy.
But Thompson turned it to his advantage. At a hearing, he asked the question that exposed Nixon's secret taping system to the public. He emerged as a minor celebrity, the levelheaded lawyer willing to follow facts wherever they led.
It was another turning point. It deepened his distrust of federal authority, proved both parties were vulnerable to corruption, and hardened his belief in the value of principles.
"In [Nixon], as with so many others, I could find no underlying philosophy by which all things could be measured," Thompson wrote in his 1975 book on Watergate. "In the end, I think that this, more than any other factor, caused his undoing. There was no anchor there; no roots."
election to senate
After a career as a lobbyist and actor, Thompson was swept into the Senate in 1994 with the so-called Republican revolution, filling the seat Al Gore vacated when he became vice president. For the first time in 40 years the GOP controlled both houses of Congress, and it was a heady time for ideologues. Yet just a year into office, Thompson was going out of his way to highlight differences with his party.
"Attached is a [paper] noting your independence from 'the party line,' " a senior aide wrote in a January 1996 memo titled "Breaking from the Republican Pack." The memo catalogued a long list of votes against the GOP majority on campaign finance reform, consumer protection, and states' rights.
Before making policy choices, associates say, he'd often pore over the Constitution, the law, and the writings of the Founding Fathers. "He's a lawyer's lawyer," said Powell Moore, a former Senate chief of staff. "He's risen to the top of three professions: politics and law and movies. But the one he reveres, and is most dedicated to, is the law."
Before leaving the Senate in 2002, Thompson pushed for term limits, a Congressional pay freeze, and a raft of measures to make government leaner and more efficient. But in the end, he was better at standing firm than getting results. He compiled a slim record of legislative achievements, beyond his advocacy for the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform, a report on government waste, and an annual cost-benefit analysis of new regulations.
His oversight of hearings into the role of Asian money in the 1996 campaigns of Bill Clinton and Mr. Gore put him in a national spotlight and fueled talk of a presidential candidacy.
But the independence that had served him well as a prosecutor and investigator ruffled feathers in the clubby confines of the Senate. He vexed his GOP colleagues by trying to widen the probe to Republican campaign abuses, and failed to convince Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the alleged Democratic misconduct.
In 1999, he broke with all but a few Republican senators by voting to acquit President Clinton on one of the two articles of impeachment. "The president's perjurious statements concerned matters that the Founding Fathers would not have considered to be impeachable 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' " he wrote in a draft statement.
"A lot of Republicans were upset about" his vote, Mr. Ansell, his former aide, recalled. "He had over 100 calls from people who were very irate."
Ansell said that Thompson consoled himself by quoting Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Irish statesman who defied crown policy by defending the American Revolution: "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
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Heading into Election 2008, the Monitor profiles the candidates through the lens of their core convictions – through their values, worldviews, and, when applicable, religious faiths. |
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