Despite a recurrence of lymphoma, former Senator Fred Thompson kept
working up until nearly the end of his life, which ended today at age
73. His last film, released just after Labor Day this year, was
ironically called “90 Minutes in Heaven.” Fred will keep everyone
beyond St. Peter’s gate educated and entertained for far longer than
that.
Fred Thompson had a humble background as the grandson of a sharecropper
and son of a used-car salesman in Tennessee but succeeded in four
different careers: law, politics, lobbying, and acting. He was a sports
star but an indifferent student until age 17 when he read the
autobiography of Clarence Darrow, the great attorney from the Scopes
“Monkey” trial that took place in his native Tennessee.
“I just knew it. I was 17 and I wanted be a lawyer. It’s the only thing I
considered for five minutes,” Thompson told the Boston Globe in 2007.
“Until I was 17, it never occurred to me I had to be anything, but at 17
I knew I wanted to be a lawyer.”
He soon became not only a good one, but a famous one. At age 30, he was
Republican counsel in the Watergate hearings, and he began building a
reputation as a straight-shooter. It was he who asked the question that
forced a White House deputy to admit that Richard Nixon had secretly
recorded his Oval Office conversations.
Later in the 1970s he played a key role in exposing a Tennessee
cash-for-pardons scandal; his acting career began when he won the part
of playing himself in the 1985 movie version of the story. He eventually
starred in over 20 movies, replaced radio legend Paul Harvey, and
played the district attorney on Law and Order for years.
In 1994, he left a comfortable lobbying career to run for the U.S.
Senate, proving himself to be a popular down-home campaigner who won
twice by over 20 points in a state that Bill Clinton carried twice. In
1997, he chaired the investigation of both Clinton-Gore and GOP campaign
fundraising abuses: He was largely stymied when key witnesses declined
to testify or fled the country, though evidence eventually surfaced of a
Chinese plan to influence U.S. politics.
In 2002, he lost his daughter after she failed to come out of a
drug-overdose induced coma. Already frustrated with the Senate’s endless
maneuvering over minutiae, he decided to retire at age 60 only two
months later and change his life. In June of that year, he married his
second wife, Jeri (his first marriage at age 17 ended amicably in
divorce in 1985). In 2003, they had their first child (a second was born
in 2006).
“I had the deepest lows and the greatest highs in the space of 18
months,” Thompson told me back then. “I count my blessings, and I have a
real focused sense of purpose now.”
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