I remember being pleasantly surprised by the professor’s reaction. Earlier that year, we were required to do a book report. I chose The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek, a conservative classic that demonstrated the folly of centralized economic planning and the loss of freedom that comes from it. Dr. Buell approved the selection, but only if I would incorporate the work of a Hayek critic, Herman Finer’s The Road to Reaction. I was quite certain that no other student was being asked to provide “balance” in his book report. These two incidents demonstrated to me that the professor was basically a fair-minded man but when it came to ideology he simply couldn’t let the conservative viewpoint go unchallenged.
Sarah’s folks had given us a little portable TV for Christmas, and we watched in anguish along with the rest of the nation as President Kennedy’s little boy, not much older than Tony, saluted as the horse-drawn carriage carrying his daddy’s coffin rolled by. I had no strong feelings one way or the other about Kennedy as a president, but the human tragedy of those few days focused me intensely on the fragility of life and the threat of harm out there in the real world. I watched President Johnson’s touching speech after his swearing-in. I took note of his Texas accent and his seeming sincerity. “Maybe this fellow will keep me in the Democratic Party,” I thought.
Youth and deadlines allowed me to refocus quickly. Not to mention a constant strain of life’s inevitable trials, such as everyone in the family coming down with intestinal flu at the same time, or having the car stolen at work one night with our Christmas packages in the trunk (thoughtfully, I left the key in the ignition, so the thieves could have a merrier holiday) and walking home miles in the snow. I developed my sales and diplomatic skills, as I was able to fit quite a few women with size 9 feet into size 7½ shoes, at their insistence. There is a whole generation of ladies out there with crippled feet, and I did my part. “Looks good to me, ma’am.”
The grades kept improving—pretty much all A’s and B’s. Although I could have gone to several law schools after three years of college, I wanted to take a shot at getting into Vanderbilt, which required a college degree. Sarah had already graduated, and we decided that we would stay at Memphis straight through the summer of 1964 to make up for the semester that I had lost and get my degree. One day I received a call from Dr. Buell. He told me that Tulane Law School gave a full-tuition scholarship to a Memphis State political science student, and he had selected me to be the recipient. I was ecstatic. But I still wanted to go to Vanderbilt. Not only was it in Tennessee, but Vanderbilt had long represented achievement that I, until recently, considered to be way beyond my reach—both scholastically and financially.
I applied to Vanderbilt with a generous letter of recommendation from an unlikely source—Mrs. Buckner, the teacher who led the effort to stop my “Most Athletic” designation as a high school junior. A Vanderbilt graduate, she’d kept up with my efforts since that time (easy to do in a small town) and was more than happy to help me with regard to Vanderbilt Law School. She was a significant reminder of a simple but powerful lesson: When you don’t do well, bad things tend to happen to you. And when you try to do your best, you often get lucky. Soon we received the word we had been waiting for. I had been accepted into Vanderbilt Law School with a half-tuition scholarship. That was it. We would make up the difference in loans and work.
There was just one final hurdle to overcome during my final semester: a liberal professor. Many conservative students across the country know what I am talking about.
By my senior year, I had increasingly grown enamored of conservative thinking, and when it became apparent that Barry Goldwater was going to be the Republican nominee for president, I read his little book, The Conscience of a Conservative, and it had a powerful impact on me. It carried a message of individualism and freedom. It laid out the ways in which government was growing too big and stifling individual initiative. His words rang true to me. They placed into focus and provided a landing place for my many scattered political thoughts. Also, they were being presented by what appeared to be a somewhat cantankerous straight shooter with an accent that could just as well come from the hills of Tennessee as the desert in Arizona. Goldwater was not your average politician. He and his thinking inspired me. I even liked the fact that the experts said he couldn’t win the presidency. It all appealed to my youthful idealism.
Although my friends and family had conservative viewpoints, the Republican Party had little standing in the South; everyone still seemed to be trying to reconcile their values with the policies of the Democratic Party. But it’s a reconciliation that I could not make. So although my state, my country, and my dad, along with most of the Lindseys, were Democratic, I decided I was going to be a Republican. Pap is the only Republican I had really known, and by this time he had passed away. So in the beginning it was just Barry and me. Besides, I wasn’t smoking pot or demonstrating in the street, and this allowed me to be a rebel too, in my own way.
So with the confidence of a general with no army behind him, I would sit in my liberal professor’s history course and take it all in. He would periodically stop reading his lecture notes long enough to launch into an anti-U.S. diatribe. By this time, I was reading anything I could get my hands on that was political, and I discovered that he was getting a lot of his material from The New Republic, the main liberal magazine of the day. I, on the other hand, was getting rebuttal material from William F. Buckley’s National Review. It made for a combustible combination. I would raise my hand and beg to disagree with him on his assertions, rebutting his talking points with my own.
One day the subject was the downtrodden condition of some little country and how their plight was the fault of the good old U.S. of A. You might say I hit a nerve that day, because in the middle of our little back-and-forth he picked up his papers and marched out of the class, stopping at the door to say, “Be careful, Mr. Thompson, you are going to wake up with your head missing some morning.” From the hand of some peasant, I presumed. Being quick on the uptake, I immediately concluded that he was not happy with me—on a personal basis. Actually, my thought was more along the lines of “Holy ——.” I could imagine an F on my final transcript and a reevaluation by Vanderbilt. After a restless night, I went to the dean of students and told him what had happened and that I didn’t deserve this impending doom. He was noncommittal. But when the grades came out, I received a B in the class. And I still had my head … and a future in Nashville as a law student.
Our two and a half years in Memphis was a special time in our lives. Betsy had been born. We had proven to ourselves that in fact we could do the things we had set out to do. But it was also bittersweet in some ways. The fact is that I cannot remember the name of one person I graduated with. We simply did not spend any time at all on campus except when we were having class. Even though the trade-offs made it more than worth it, we clearly missed out on some relationships that could have lasted a lifetime. I had started keeping a journal while in Memphis. With rare exceptions I would set out the day’s happenings and my observations on them and the world at night before I went to bed. I kept this up for seven or eight years until I lost the journals, apparently in one of our many moves. But many times I have thought about the first entry I made in that journal one night at home in Memphis. I remember starting out with a statement that was somewhat defensive because I had never considered the keeping of a “diary” to be a very manly thing to do. Therefore, I noted that I was going to call it a journal instead of a diary and that I was keeping this journal because after I had become a United States senator, perhaps future generations of Thompsons would be interested in my early years. It was totally tongue in cheek—meant to be humorous.
It was obvious from the beginning at Vanderbilt Law School that we were not in Lawrenceburg anymore. My fellow students were mostly from the best schools in the country and at the top of their class. However, not for the last time, I applied a surefire recipe for success. I had put myself in a position where I had no choice b
ut to succeed. The alternative was too grave to consider (including having to get a real job).
Before long, our family had settled into a routine that would see us through law school—one that we were familiar with, including Sarah becoming pregnant again. In 1965, we had a handsome baby boy to the delight of us all, although I can imagine our families were wondering just how large our household was going to become before I started drawing a paycheck. We named our baby Daniel after Sarah’s uncle A.D., and while he was basically healthy and strong, he provided us with the first real terror of our parenthood. He started having seizures, and under doctor’s orders we would lay him on the floor and sponge him with water until he revived. It seemed like forever as he lay there with his eyes rolled back. Soon these episodes subsided without lasting effects. (He, like Tony, is a good, successful guy and lives with his wonderful family in Nashville.) But I do believe these experiences had lasting effects on Sarah and me. We had never truly recognized how lucky we had been until then.
People decide to go to law school for a lot of different reasons. Some want to use their legal knowledge to save the world (not that many, really, but some), some want to go to Wall Street and get filthy rich, and some consider it to be a convenient landing pad while they decide what they want to do when they grow up, usually with Daddy’s help. Me, I still wanted to walk into a courtroom and show them who was boss. I felt that the curriculum did not serve my purpose terribly well. With the exception of one class on courtroom procedure, there was nothing very practical about it. We followed the case law method, immersing ourselves in various arcane appellate court decisions, not to learn the law but to learn how to dissect and analyze the legal opinion in the case under consideration. A phrase was heard often: “We’re not here to teach you the law. We’re here to teach you how to think.” Of course, anyone as smart as we thought we were was of the firm opinion that they already knew how to think. We “thought” that this might be a waste of time. That was until we received our first round of grades, at which point many shattered egos were heard to say that they “thought” they needed a beer.
It also occurred to me that a fellow like myself who had majored in philosophy shouldn’t squawk too much about not being taught enough that was practical. Grade shock, classroom humiliation, and onerous assignments were, of course, part of an old law-school tradition to break us down. Sometimes I felt the plan was definitely working. I knew that I was—at school, at home, and as a night clerk at a local motel. But I knew that Sarah was working as hard and doing as much or more. She was teaching high school English. In the morning, the babysitter would arrive and Sarah would leave to teach. Tony and I would get picked up by my law school buddy, Howard Liebengood, then we’d drop Tony off at school and go to class. When Sarah got out of school, she would pick me up and I would take her home and leave for my job at the motel. When I would get home, she would be in bed. Many days the only chance we had to talk was when she was taking me to work.
Howard and I had hit it off immediately. He was a funny, outgoing guy with a ready smile whom everybody liked. He was a conservative and a Hoosier, from Plymouth, Indiana, and married to a sweet, smart girl, Deana, who also taught school. We became friends for life.
Meanwhile, I was still learning life’s little lessons. Much like in college, my grades steadily improved as I settled into my various tasks. But unlike a lot of my classmates, I had to work hard for everything I achieved. I had a setback my first semester, when my grade point average dropped below the B I had to retain for my partial scholarship. The school withdrew it. I was a little upset and of the opinion that the school was hasty in their decision. Therefore, I punished them by obstinately refusing to reapply for my scholarship money when my grades qualified me again. During my second year, we learned that there was a new scholarship available for someone in our class, and it was based totally upon need. You can guess who I thought would be a worthy recipient. Several of my classmates told me that they expected me to get it. They gave it instead to a judge’s son. The chip on my shoulder wasn’t getting any smaller. I was getting a little tired of God’s apparent attempt to motivate me through the dumb actions of human intermediaries. But I guess it was still working. I won Best Oral Argument in the moot court competition and was selected for the three-person national moot court team the next year. But it didn’t pay any money.
After my second year of law school, we moved back to Lawrenceburg for the summer. A.D. had given me the opportunity to clerk in his office. He practiced solo, in the same office where he and Pap had lawyered for many years. It was upstairs in an old building on the square. After climbing the stairs, the first thing one noticed was that the hallway was lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling—sort of a Psycho effect, but with Southern charm. It led to a two-room office filled with the aroma of old books and tobacco. After many years of bachelorhood, A.D. remarried, and “Miss Helen” did the secretarial work in the front room, where I hung out, along with a fairly steady stream of local politicians and A.D.’s friends and cronies, and shot the breeze. In the unlikely event that an actual paying client would come by, he would be taken to the back room for a modicum of privacy.
Although the space was a little cramped, it was the place of many happy hours for me, spent smoking my pipe and searching for obscure precedents that would deal a devastating blow to our local legal opponents in the case at hand: a property dispute, a divorce, or the never-ending quest to determine who got to the intersection first.
The level of regular legal traffic in A.D.’s office probably would not have justified my clerkship. But this summer was different. In 1966, Lawrenceburg was in the middle of labor turmoil the likes of which we had never seen before. The Teamsters Union had decided to make an all-out effort to unionize the Murray Bicycle Plant, my former employer, as well as some smaller firms, including the Lindsey’s furniture plant.
Employee elections had been conducted and the union was voted down, but that was just the beginning of the fight. The Teamsters filed unfair-labor-practice charges against the companies, accusing them of intimidation and a raft of other offenses. For a little company like Lindsey’s the fines and penalties, not to mention the effects of losing a new election, would have been disastrous. Ed and Oscar had started in the business as teenagers and worked day and night to build it up. They provided jobs to mostly country folks, and paid wages that would seem small to most outside observers but were not bad by local standards. They especially didn’t like being told that they couldn’t talk to their own employees about what they thought was in the best interest of them and the plant. A lot was at stake. Although the factory had provided Ed’s and Oscar’s families with pretty good livings, the profit margins were small. Fortunately for them, they had access to the most high-powered legal team in those parts—A.D. and me. There was just one problem. A.D. knew nothing about labor law … and I knew even less. What we did know was that the hearing examiner for the National Labor Relations Board had taken testimony and found against Lindsey’s and the case was on appeal to the NLRB. Fortunately, the appeal was pretty much a fact-based exercise. A.D. and I spent hour after hour going through transcripts of the hearing, preparing our brief to the NLRB.
I had never seen A.D. work before. He was brilliant. During World War II, he had worked in New York as a military investigator of some sort. He never talked much about it, but occasionally he would reminisce about his days in New York as he wistfully recalled them. He was a big fan of Thomas Wolfe and was one of the most well-read guys in the area. He simply got tired of all of it and came home to the little town to practice law with Pap. He knew the trade-offs and he loved what he was doing, but his experiences had left him a bit more cosmopolitan than he was willing to acknowledge. The NLRB also challenged him as the local legal fare never had before.
There were union fights, skirmishes, and lawsuits filed almost every other day that summer, and many Murray hearings were held at the courthouse. Observing the large team of Murray lawyers
in from Atlanta, it occurred to me at the time that they were indeed specialists but they were no smarter than A.D. He was doing the same kind of work and was a heck of a lot cheaper. My guess is that he never received a dime. The Lindseys just did things for one another.
While these battles were being fought out in the courts and before the NLRB, an uglier side of the conflict was being played out in the streets and at the factory gates. The Teamsters’ main goal was to get new elections for union recognition at the factories. While the legal efforts were pending, they sent “business agents” from Nashville to organize and rabble-rouse. Teamster sympathizers left their jobs and started congregating at the factory gate at Murray to hassle nonstriking workers and stop them from going to work. Hell broke loose. Trying to interfere with a man’s livelihood, especially when done by outsiders, was not something to be tolerated by the average Lawrence Countian. Fights broke out in twos and threes, and then in larger numbers. The local chief of police was hospitalized. Gunshots were heard in the distance. At Lindsey’s they threw bricks through the front-office window and injured Sarah’s mother. However, the main action was at Murray, and it was getting worse. The police department called for volunteers. I borrowed a pistol from a friend of mine and showed up at the police station, where several of us were “deputized.” The city fathers established a system whereby the fire station siren would be activated when the thugs showed up, usually at the Murray gate during the change in shifts. Often it was brother against brother and father against son. Each side was armed, untrained, without leadership, and mad as hell—all of the ingredients for a major disaster. One night the siren went off and we headed for Murray. Strikers were pelting cars with rocks as they were going through the factory gate. After a lot of shoving, cussing, and threatening, things finally calmed down. This scene was repeated a few times until it was obvious to the union organizers that we outnumbered them and would not back off. I have no idea what I or any of the rest of the crowd would have done if real violence had broken out. Miraculously, no one was killed.
Teaching the Pig to Dance Page 12