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."

Fred Thompson once joked with reporters that he's an "open book," and he wasn't kidding. Unlike many prominent former senators--Al Gore, John Edwards, Bill Frist--Thompson put his eight years of Senate records up for public review two years ago. The collection, on file at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, includes more than 400 boxes of personal letters, campaign memos, photographs and internal-strategy files on everything from his investigation into Bill Clinton's 1996 fund-raising to dealings with reporters. As NEWSWEEK reported this week, there are plenty of documents about politics and policy, some that GOP voters might not like.

And then there's the interesting stuff.