Fred Thompson has a gift for knowing just what to say to anyone, in any situation. In 1998, when Thompson was a Republican senator and a single man about town, New York socialite Georgette Mosbacher invited him to accompany her on an overseas trip. Thompson couldn't go, and summoned the full measure of his Tennessee charm in letting her down. "I am sitting here with a long face and broken heart as I contemplate sunsets on the Mediterranean, which I will not see," he wrote to Mosbacher on his official Senate stationery. "We must remember the unspoken vow that all United States senators take upon entering the Senate: I shall have no money, and I shall have no fun. I, of course regarding myself as an unconquerable soul, am still determined to break the second part of that vow."
The Monica Lewinsky scandal was dominating Washington that year and Thompson, like every other Republican, was critical of Bill Clinton in public. But away from the cameras, he quietly reached out to the president in a letter sent through Clinton's chief of staff. "If the President is going to have any good cigars left over," he relayed to Clinton, who had once sent him a stogie, "in the spirit of bipartisanship I might be willing to help him out."
Intimate correspondence like this usually doesn't see light until long after a politician is dead and gone, or at least done with politics for good. Thompson apparently believed he had forever traded Washington for Hollywood when he agreed to put his eight years of Senate records, including personal correspondence, in a public archive at the University of Tennessee. The papers, which have gone largely unnoticed, offer an unusual glimpse at his life as a Washington fixture, and clues about how he might lead as a president—hints that might not please conservative voters who are intrigued by him but who know little about him.
Charismatic and down to earth, a baritone with an LBJ-like command of his large frame, Thompson was a natural leader in the Senate. Now some Republicans, underwhelmed with the current lineup of 2008 contenders, have latched onto him as something of a political messiah, a latter-day Ronald Reagan who can lead their party out of the wilderness. In the latest Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, Thompson, who isn't officially running yet, came in a close second behind the current leader, Rudy Giuliani—and beat everyone, including Giuliani, among self-described "religious right" voters. "Fred Thompson is a Southern-fried Reagan," says the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land. "He has the same appeal."
Continue reading
Loading Menu