Teaching the Pig to Dance

by Fred Thompson

  About the Author

  From inauspicious beginnings in a small town in Tennessee, Fred Thompson has had one of the most unusual and interesting careers on the American scene today. It has encompassed the law, politics, radio, television, and motion pictures.

  Thompson served eight years as a Senator from Tennessee, and in 2008 sought the Republican nomination for President of the United States. First elected to the United States Senate in 1994, he was returned to office by the people of Tennessee two years later with more votes than any candidate for any office in the state’s history at that time. He served as Chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and as a member of the Finance Committee as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence. In 2002, Senator Thompson walked away from an easy reelection victory to seek new challenges.

  Prior to his election, Thompson maintained law offices in Nashville and Washington. Earlier in his career, he served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Tennessee. In 1973, he was appointed by Senator Howard Baker to serve as Minority Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, where Thompson first gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audiotaping system in the White House Oval Office. He detailed his Watergate experience in his Watergate memoir, At That Point in Time.

  Senator Thompson first appeared on-screen in the film Marie in 1985, portraying himself in the fact-based story of a high-profile public corruption case he handled in Tennessee. Since then, he has appeared in numerous movies, including No Way Out, In the Line of Fire, Die Hard II, Days of Thunder, and The Hunt for Red October, and will appear in Disney’s Secretariat, set for release in October, 2010. Recently, he became known for his portrayal of New York District Attorney Arthur Branch on the Emmy Award–winning NBC television drama Law & Order.

  In 2005, Senator Thompson was named by President Bush as an advisor to Supreme Court Chief Justice nominee John Roberts, helping to move his nomination through the Senate confirmation process. Thompson continued his public service as Chairman of the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board.

  He currently hosts The Fred Thompson Show, a nationally syndicated radio talk show. He resides in McLean, Virginia, with his wife, Jeri, daughter, Hayden, and son, Sammy.

  Also by Fred Thompson

  At That Point in Time:

  The Inside Story of the Senate Watergate Committee

  In memory of my daughter, Betsy

  Contents

  My Hometown

  The Tree the Acorn Fell From

  Fletch

  Eager Little Minds … and Me

  Gimme That Ole-Time Religion

  Pooch

  The Movie Star Club

  “How I Got into the Movies”

  Rebel Motors

  Rebel Without a Clue

  “Play Ball!” … but Not Forever

  Swapping Old Dreams for New Ones

  Welcome to the Real World

  Just What the World Needs …

  Mitch

  Finally, a Country Lawyer

  A Good Man

  On Being Lucky

  Acknowledgments

  IN THE PART of the country where I come from, most people are proud of their hometown. Folks in Linden, Tennessee, are a good example of that. Situated in rural country in Middle Tennessee, about fifty-seven miles from where I grew up, Linden had about a thousand residents. One day during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the coffee drinkers at the drugstore on the town square noticed out the window that one of the local good old boys had his pickup truck loaded with what appeared to be his worldly possessions. As he walked into the drugstore to buy supplies, one of the coffee-drinking busybodies said to him:

  “Lem, looks like you’re moving out. What’s up?”

  “Ain’t you boys heard about the missile crisis?” Lem replied.

  The fellow answered, “Yeah, but what makes you think they’re gonna bomb Linden?”

  Lem said, “It’s the county seat, ain’t it?”

  • • •

  Well, Lawrenceburg is a county seat, too. This meant that Lawrenceburg had a courthouse with a square. Every courthouse in the state was located to be not more than a half day’s horse ride from any part of the county. It also meant that Lawrenceburg was the location of the county fair. As the center of county culture, it had a movie theater. And it had an organized Little League. In short, growing up in the county seat was pretty much a privileged situation.

  Like thousands of little towns across America, it was populated mostly by folks who had grown up on the farm and come to town to enjoy the fruits of a better life. Usually having little in the way of a formal education, a man’s reputation for hard work and keeping his word were his most valuable assets. That’s the way it was with my people and just about everybody they knew. It’s not that our town didn’t have its share of scalawags. As one old-timer put it, “We weren’t big enough to have a town drunk, so a few of us had to take turns.”

  What we did have for sure was more than our share of characters, used-car lots, and churches, all of which were an important part of my years growing up.

  Some time ago I decided to write my story—a story that began in Lawrenceburg. You know, the obligatory autobiography, written by anyone with the necessary fifteen minutes of fame or success. It would be about how I left Lawrenceburg and, over the years, had some very interesting adventures. There were the early days when I was a federal prosecutor. Then there would be a part about my role as counsel for the Watergate committee, and my part in revealing the taping system in the Nixon White House. Then, of course, I would relate some of my experiences in the movie business as well as on the TV show Law & Order. And there would be the eight years I spent in the U.S. Senate (which made me long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood). Naturally, I would also talk about my presidential campaign (described by one of my comedian friends as probably the most stressful three weeks of my life).

  Finally, there would be the concluding chapter that we are all too familiar with, wherein I would give my instructions to a waiting America as to what must be done to meet the “challenges of our time.” It’s amazing how brilliant and insightful a fellow becomes when he leaves elective office and can’t do a thing about all those problems.

  I even had a title for that book picked out: Why I’ve Had Such a Hard Time Keeping a Job.

  In all seriousness, that book I had in mind was going to be more than just old, warmed-over “war stories.” I was going to write about opportunities presenting themselves and why I took some and not others. There’s a lot to be said for seizing the moment, and I thought a book about the remarkable interconnectedness of the experiences I’ve had—how a decision I made has so often seemed to lead inexorably to consequences and opportunities that I never foresaw—might be somewhat instructive.

  Well, this is not that book. As I got into the process, I discovered that what I was writing about was what happened before I left Lawrenceburg, not after I left. The thought of those times didn’t necessarily make me nostalgic, but they did make me feel good. I was revisiting and laughing with some of the most interesting characters and funniest people you’d ever hope to meet, not the least of whom was my own dad.

  The fact is that the people I knew and the experiences I had in that little town formed the prism through which I have viewed the world, and they shaped the way I have dealt with events throughout my life. Those growing-up years in Lawrenceburg left me with a particular take on life. A saying I often heard sort of typifies it. Usually said with a smile, it is “Ain’t nobody gonna get out of this old world alive anyway, son,” often said to put things into perspective when times were getting rough.

  And, perhaps not surprisingl
y, I heard sayings like that more than a couple of times from more than a few people. From the girl I married as a teenager and her family, to the teachers, coaches, preachers, and most of all my mom and dad, they encouraged and tolerated this young ne’er-do-well kid with no apparent prospects. They cajoled me, inspired me, and shepherded me from childhood to manhood. It was not an easy trip for any of us, but by the time I left Lawrenceburg, I had learned some valuable lessons and had the confidence to take on the world. (Of course, the world had the confidence to take on me, too, but that’s another story.)

  There’s another old saying that comes to mind: “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” I can add to that. Where I come from, tragedy and comedy were often served at the same table. But the lessons that grew out of those experiences were grounded in the kind of commonsense view of life and living that today is, unfortunately, all too uncommon.

  So I decided to write about what I wanted to write about. Stories about growing up—in every sense of the word. Stories about Lawrenceburg. It’s about time Lawrenceburg had the recognition. After all, it is the county seat.

  I SUPPOSE everyone remembers where they were when they realized they were not going to be the leader of the free world. I know I do. It was on January 19, 2008, in the back of a bus rolling down a road just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, when early exit-poll results started coming in from the South Carolina presidential primary. I had edged out McCain in Iowa and come in ahead of Romney and Giuliani in South Carolina. The bad news is I came in third in both places. Not good enough. In presidential primary politics, many are called but few are chosen. I wasn’t, and it was time to hang it up.

  I had walked through many doors of opportunity in my life and was used to finding something good on the other side. In fact, for me the 2008 primary season was officially the first time in my life I had proven (in a most public way) that I couldn’t accomplish something I had set out to do. It was a rather humbling experience. It occurred to me that, to paraphrase one of Churchill’s comments, perhaps I had more to be humble about than I had realized. It also occurred to me that this was a pretty doggone expensive way to achieve a little humility. Maybe I needed to be reminded of what an old-timer told me years ago after I’d had some success: “Just remember, son, the turnout at your funeral is still going to depend a hell of a lot on the weather.”

  Yeah, yeah, I accepted all that, but for some reason the immortal words of Dick Tuck seemed more appropriate. Tuck was a Democratic operative famous before and during Watergate as a political prankster. When President Nixon adopted the campaign slogan “Nixon’s the One,” Tuck had several women boisterously show up at a Nixon rally in pregnancy costumes, waving signs saying “Nixon’s the One.”

  Tuck finally ran for office himself—for the state senate in California. On Election Night, when it became obvious he was receiving a drubbing, he went before his supporters and the media and said, “The people have spoken … the bastards.”

  By the morning of January 20, I had other things to be thinking about. By then, I was at the bedside of my mother at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. At eighty-seven, she was enduring her latest and most severe bout of pneumonia, compounded by several other ailments. She did not look good at all. In fact, the doctor and the head nurse privately talked to me in very somber tones, uttering “We’ve done all that we can do”–type comments. Of course, they didn’t take into account the fact that “Mrs. Ruth” was tough as a pine knot. She hated hospitals with an extraordinary passion and was totally exhausted from the constant visits by hospital personnel. For the next twenty-four hours, I camped outside her room in a chair and made the medical staff justify their admission before I would let them in. She got some rest and soon was improving, just as she had many times before. She and I have concluded that most people who die in hospitals flatline from aggravation and lack of sleep.

  Literally, almost overnight, I had gone from the most public, intrusive, self-centered existence known to man to the exact opposite—the quiet of my mother’s room late at night. It was a quick journey from manufactured reality to reality. I smiled as I remembered her telling me when I was a kid: “Freddie, you can be anything you want to be, but please just don’t be a lawyer or a politician.” Over the years I think she changed her mind about my becoming a lawyer, but I don’t think she ever quite fully bought into the politician part. I knew that she’d laugh when I told her, “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t turn out to be much of a politician after all.”

  My career choices were not entirely my fault. The atmosphere I grew up in in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, was dense with politics and debates, the exploits of public figures and larger-than-life characters engaged in bare-knuckled political theater. I merely inhaled.

  I am willing to bet that the town square in Lawrenceburg has never been compared to Times Square in New York. But they say that if you stand in Times Square long enough, everybody you know will pass by. By the same token, when I think about the square in Lawrenceburg, it occurs to me that every major development in my life can be traced back to there.

  In the 1950s, Lawrenceburg was a little town of six or seven thousand. It is seventy-two miles south of Nashville and just north of the Alabama state line. My folks grew up on farms in Lawrence County and came to town to start their new life together, as so many of the country kids did. By the time I came along, the town square, just like the people, had shed some of its rougher edges, although an ample number of pool halls still served as the town’s designated dens of iniquity.

  The courthouse had a yard around it often populated by a good number of tobacco-chewing checker players. Between games they swapped knives and lies and talked politics. The square had mostly old two- and three-story buildings housing dry goods, hardware, and drugstores as well as “the bank.” The square was the center of commerce for the county, and the center of the universe, as far as I was concerned. A fellow could cash his check, shoot a game of pool, buy his tags, grab a burger, and pick up a new shirt for Saturday night without ever having to get in his car.

  Today, I can stand in that square and in my mind’s eye envision the sight of the old Princess Theater, where I saw my first movie. The “new” Crockett Theater, built when I was in grade school, was where I spent as much time as possible as a boy. It also was the town’s main date destination. I can also see the locations of two different little cafés my grandparents owned and ran. Farther around the square are the hall where I shot my first pool and the spot where I sold my first newspaper. I also see the site of my first law office and where I made my announcement speech when I first ran for the Senate. I’m not sure how many folks were there for that, but there were thousands the night we had a rally during my presidential campaign. The courthouse was where I heard numerous political speeches, tried my first lawsuit, and saw my first election returns.

  On election night, they would set up a big blackboard in the yard outside the courthouse and keep a running tally as the precinct boxes came in—if they came in. Boxes being stolen and thrown into the river or hidden in the woods was not unheard of on election night, and neither was gunplay—even in the courthouse. For a time, it was easier to steal an election than it was to buy a beer in Lawrence County.

  The old courthouse was built in 1905, a Gothic—or perhaps pre-Gothic—structure, and when I started practicing law, cases were still being tried in the large second-floor courtroom where lawyers had to plead their cases while dodging the tobacco cans strategically placed around the room to catch the water when it rained.

  This whole tableau was presided over by Davy Crockett. Actually, it was Davy Crockett’s full-length statue on the south side of the square. Davy had “laid out” the town of Lawrenceburg as a surveyor, lived there, and run a mill for a period of time. But Davy was a traveling man and therefore was claimed by a lot of different folks around the state and elsewhere. However, we were the only one with a Davy Crockett statue, which, in our eyes, legitimized
our claim. He was, of course, a hunter, a trapper, a congressman, and a hero at the Alamo. He was also cantankerous, even bucking Andrew Jackson. And when he was defeated for Congress, he called a delegation together and told his constituents, “You all can go to hell, I am going to Texas.” As it turned out, he stayed in Texas a lot longer than he intended to.

  It just seemed appropriate to have old Davy permanently standing in the middle of Lawrenceburg. We liked his grit and we liked his style. Actually, we didn’t pay that much attention to him until the miracle of television intervened and changed the way we perceived Davy’s importance forever. I refer, of course, to the Walt Disney television series starring Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, which had half the little boys in America (and all them in the town of Lawrenceburg) wearing coonskin caps. Lawrenceburg and our statue got their share of notoriety and attention, and before the dust was settled we had Crockett Theater, a Crockett School, a Crockett Service Station, a Crockett Beauty Salon, a Crockett State Park, as well as many other namings. As it turned out, we were among the first people in the world to realize that nothing is important or noteworthy until it appears on television.

  Most of us have learned that the significance of the people and places in your life is not so obvious until you are looking at them in your rearview mirror. Actually, the transitions my parents saw and made surpass any that I have experienced. And they, like millions of others, did it anonymously and without fanfare. I never heard a lot of stories about the Great Depression, but it was obvious that in many ways it defined my parents’ childhood. They were farmers and sharecroppers in rural Lawrence County, but they had plenty to eat, which is all their neighbors had. On the Thompson side, that hardscrabble life produced a couple of six-foot-five-inch brothers who were well “filled out”—my grandfather, Edgar, and his brother. I never knew which of the stories I heard about Pa Thompson were true, but one of the more persistent had to do with the time a young mule kicked at him and he grabbed the mule’s hind legs and ran him around the barnyard. He was a giant by the standards of the day. Ma Thompson was an Allen—rough-hewn folks like the Thompsons, except a little more entrepreneurial. Many years after most of that generation had passed away, “Uncle Percy” Allen, who was in his nineties, was asked by some of the grandchildren about the Thompsons and the Allens. Pressed, he finally said with a wry smile, “Well, the Allens made a whole lot of whiskey. And the Thompsons drank most of it.” Uncle Percy may have been exhibiting the sense of humor that both clans were known for; then again, maybe not.