Teaching the Pig to Dance

by Fred Thompson

  My uncertainty was cut short when I received a letter from A.D. offering me a job with him. He was prepared to double the size of his office—from one to two. The firm would be called Lindsey and Thompson, and I would start out at $50 per week until I could develop my own clients. Sarah and I looked at each other and smiled. We knew we were going home. I would be a small fish in a small pond, with every confidence I could grow faster than the pond.

  So the table had been set for me. I was going back to my hometown to do the only thing I ever wanted to do—be a country lawyer.

  It turned out that practicing law in Lawrenceburg in the 1960s was a lot like it was in To Kill a Mockingbird, but without anyone who looked like Atticus Finch. The pace of the practice was pretty well demonstrated by a young lawyer who excitedly told some of the older heads having coffee one day, “I had a great week last week. I got a $100 case and a couple of small ones.”

  However, when you’ve been chomping at the bit to practice law, as I had been for several years, nothing is too small to stir a young barrister’s juices. I couldn’t wait—so I didn’t.

  A.D. had bought a little one-story frame house about a block and a half from the courthouse and turned it into our offices. We had “Lindsey and Thompson” painted on the door in gold leaf. And at the factory, Oscar and Ed had made a desk for me and a library table with legs on it from an old piano. I called them the best-looking legs in town. After screwing in a light fixture one day, I had left a screwdriver sitting on our new table. Uncle Robert walked in, took a look at it, and said, “Ah-ha, a tool of the trade.”

  I started sitting in on meetings with A.D. and his clients, helping out where I could and even voicing an opinion or two. Actually, I became quite involved in some of the cases in the office. The only problem was … I wasn’t a lawyer. As I recall, it took a couple of months from the time we took our bar examination until we heard the results. It seemed like the wait was a lifetime. I had studied for the bar in a cold sweat—day and night. The thought of not passing the bar with the responsibilities I had and all that awaited me was terrifying. With me sitting behind my new desk with my name on the door and Sarah, my family, and her family close by, it seemed like Western civilization was waiting to see my bar results. My thoughts kept drifting back to “What if I don’t pass?” My smart-aleck comments during my college days about the philosophy shop on the square didn’t seem so funny now. Finally, the word was circulating that the bar results would appear in the next Sunday’s edition of the Nashville Tennessean. The papers would come on early Sunday morning and be delivered to a little shack there in Lawrenceburg for distribution by the paperboys. On the following Sunday at about 3 a.m., I was waiting when the papers arrived. We cut a batch open, and sure enough my name was on the list. I had passed. I sat down on another stack of papers and read the list over and over again. Each time my name was still on the list. The exhilaration swelled up inside me. This little column in the newspaper represented the first time that I had truly achieved something important, against odds, and by sustained effort. I felt that now I was beginning to earn the respect of my friends and family that I so badly wanted. I wondered what Mrs. Buckner would think.

  The next morning when I walked into the office, A.D. and Helen had taped the column of those passing the bar on the door. Move over, Clarence Darrow.

  Sarah and I had made the acquaintance of a young couple who had moved to town from out of state, and the husband turned out to be my first client. It had to do with his will. It didn’t quite rise to the level of importance of drafting a new will. He wanted me to review one that he already had. I inquired as to his present circumstances and his plans. I reviewed the documents, even absenting myself to sneak a look at a statute in the Tennessee Code. I then pronounced the document adequate and not in need of revision. I was very pleased with myself. It seemed to me a classic example of American jurisprudence being played out. The wise counselor—learned in the law and a trustworthy recipient of his client’s most personal information—providing his sound judgment with regard to most important matters. Oh, the majesty of it all. I charged him $5.00.

  Eager to get into court, I took a case that probably didn’t pass the main test for a lawyer to take a contingency fee case to court—the probability of success. If I didn’t win, I wouldn’t get paid. My client—a young man whose last name was Wisdom—pulled his car onto Highway 43 running out of Lawrenceburg from a dirt road into the path of an oncoming large truck. I had noticed that in everyday parlance, people would often use the term “run over” when someone would get hit by a car. In my boy Wisdom’s case, saying he was run over was not hyperbole. He was run over. He had tire marks across his stomach. I was flabbergasted by the fact that the boy was not dead. But as folks around town would say, “Them Wisdoms are tough.” That seemed to explain it.

  The unfavorable facts of the case served as no deterrent to Wisdom, who needed a payday, or to me, who needed a case. I scrounged around in the law books, and we sued the trucking company on the theory of “last clear chance,” a legal doctrine that basically says that even if the plaintiff (Wisdom) is negligent, if the defendant had an opportunity to avoid the accident or had the last clear chance to do so, then the defendant can be held liable, unless the plaintiff had engaged in willful or wanton misconduct. So I argued to the jury that even if Wisdom had been negligent in pulling out in front of the truck, he was not guilty of willful or wanton conduct and the truck had time to avoid Wisdom’s automobile easily.

  On the other side, representing the trucking company’s insurer, was a young lawyer from Columbia, Tennessee, named Charles Trost, who was not a lot older than I was. Charlie now practices law in Nashville and has remained a good friend over the years. Anyway, Charlie and I went round for round arguing our case. The facts of the case were clear (unfortunately). Therefore, it seemed that my oratorical skills were going to have to carry the day—so when I was arguing to the jury, long after it had become time for me to sit down, I felt this tug on my coat as I walked by counsel’s table. A.D. was trying to suggest surreptitiously to me that when you are in a hole it is best to stop digging. Still, I kept pounding. My client was not guilty of wanton actions.

  The case went to the jury, and hours later it became obvious that they were deadlocked, unable to reach a verdict. Finally, Judge Ingram declared that we had a hung jury. It meant that we would have to try it again.

  The jury was dismissed, and as I was gathering my papers at counsel’s table, one of the old fellows who was on the jury walked over to me and said, “Fred, I just want you to know I stuck with you. I think you were absolutely right. The boy was not ‘wantin’’ to get hurt.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The old guy was in the right church but in the wrong pew. I thought about this fellow many times over the years. Whether in law or politics, it’s not so much what you are saying that’s important. What’s important is what is being heard. Also, the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that this old farmer’s thinking was not that far off from what the writers of that statute meant.

  Sarah and I settled into the pleasant predictabilities of small-town Southern life where we had both been raised, where three generations of our family now lived. It was also where every street, park, or building brought back memories (and sometimes cringes) of games, jobs, fistfights, dates, and the first time for almost everything. We lived in a little house on the edge of town about ten minutes from the office, church, and the Little League baseball field. For the little guys, we had a minor league in which Tony played and I coached.

  Sarah taught high school in Summertown, a sixteen-mile commute. It was even a smaller and a more country town than Lawrenceburg, and Sarah would come home with tales of kids talking about Sunday dinner of possum and chocolate gravy.

  Law practice was the standard small-town fare of wills and estates (if you use the word estates loosely), property-line disputes, divorces, drunk-driving charges, and an occasional serious crime.
Every morning, the lawyers would congregate in a little room in the upstairs corner of the courthouse that served as the general sessions courtroom, where we argued over misdemeanors, small claims, and who got to the intersection first, and to see what the Highway Patrol catch had been the night before.

  Monday morning was what we called the “couple of beers docket.” The Highway Patrol would parade the DWI offenders in one at a time and, whether the plea was guilty or not guilty or whether they were knee-walking drunk, most of them had had the proverbial “couple of beers.” The idea, of course, was that the defendant would be more credible if he acknowledged lack of perfection in his defense of the outrageous claim that he was drunk as a skunk.

  After court, four or five of the regulars would congregate at Beckham’s Drug Store to drink coffee, laugh about one another’s clients, talk politics, and negotiate cases.

  Not too long after we tried the Wisdom case, Charlie called me up and we settled, avoiding another trial. He had talked his insurance company into offering a modest but satisfactory amount, as I recall. I never was sure whether Charlie pushed to settle the case because he didn’t want to go through another one of my final arguments or because he didn’t want to risk the uncertainties presented by a Lawrence County jury.

  The best thing that came out of the Wisdom case was a little conversation that the circuit judge who tried the case, Judge Ingram, had with my dad. Judge Ingram had been on the bench since Moses was in rushes. He still rode the circuit like they did in the old days on a horse. His circuit covered four or five counties, and he went from county to county trying up the backlog of cases. It was an elective office, and the judge had to be a pretty good politician, at least to get elected the first time. He knew my dad, who had attended every day of my first trial with great pride and to point out any mistakes I might make. Judge Ingram called Fletch over after the trial and told him, “He did better than any young lawyer I have ever seen.” Of course, Dad and I took what this old politician was telling him at total face value.

  When I started practicing, I developed a solid friendship with Jim Weatherford, who was the youngest member of the leading firm in town, which did most of the personal-injury work. That, of course, is the area of the law where the money is. Insurance companies can pay more than farmers. Jim later became a circuit judge himself.

  Jim was a few years older than I was, with a dry but reliable sense of humor. He was a slow-talking, slow-moving country lawyer with a sharp intellect. He sort of took me under his wing as I tried to learn the practicalities of making a living as a country lawyer. Jim provided me with one of my most creative opportunities during my first couple of years of law practice. One that had nothing to do with legal talent.

  One day I received in the mail a copy of a letter that Jim had obviously written to his client—a fellow by the name of F. D. Thompson. Even though the address didn’t match, these were my initials and the letter had been delivered to me. Jim had written to an insurance company on behalf of his client, Mr. Thompson, making certain claims about his client’s virtues and saying that the insurance company should pay him a certain amount because of the egregious wrongs that they had visited upon him. Jim, of course, had thought he’d sent a copy of this letter to his client; instead, it was accidentally sent to me.

  I thought for a minute and felt a broad smile cross my face. Across the bottom of the copy I wrote, “This is the lousiest excuse for a letter I have ever read. You’re fired.” And I signed it F. D. Thompson. I mailed it back to Jim in an unmarked envelope. Well, needless to say, this led to ramifications. I learned later that Jim demanded that his client come into the office, and when he did he presented the fellow with the copy of the letter that Jim thought the client had sent. Jim asked, “I just want to know what is wrong with this letter.” Of course, the startled and baffled Mr. Thompson knew nothing about the letter or the copy or the handwriting on the bottom of the copy. After he had protested his innocence enough to calm Jim down, Jim demanded, “Well, who would have done something like this?” Mr. Thompson replied, “Must have been them fellows who started this whole thing in the first place.”

  A few days later, I called Jim to tell him what I had done, and he brought me up to date with regard to what had transpired, what he had thought, his conversation with his client, Mr. Thompson, and what he thought about me as I practically rolled on the ground with laughter. From then on, when I called Jim I would tell his secretary it was Mr. F. D. Thompson calling. And he would pick up the phone and cuss me again. Our friendship never skipped a beat, but I watched my back for a while. If a lawyer did something like that today, he would probably be called up before fourteen different bar committees and be sued by the other lawyer’s client.

  We continued to share the lighter moments of the country practice. I represented the man and Jim represented the woman in a divorce proceeding. The man came in and said to me, “The Mrs. and I have already worked out a settlement. We are going to sell the farm and divide it up. I am going to get the pigs, Johnny, Suzie, and the fruit jars, and wife is going to get the furniture, the goats, Mary, and Tommy.” In other words, they were dividing the kids up right along with the furniture and the livestock.

  Every good lawyer learns when to cut his losses—when his hard work, skills, and eloquence are clearly overmatched. The community of Loretto lies south of Lawrenceburg and close to the Alabama line. Loretto is known for a few different things, in addition to being the home of David Weathers, longtime major-league baseball pitcher who is relieving currently for the Milwaukee Brewers. One is casket manufacturing. For some reason, it has become the home of several such plants over the years.

  The owner of one of those plants came to me with a story that has to be every casket manufacturer’s nightmare. You guessed it. As the dearly and recently departed was being carried down the church center aisle, the bottom fell out of you know what. The lawsuits were being filed almost as soon as the body hit the floor. The casket was purchased at a funeral home, and the books were in such bad shape that it was not certain who manufactured the casket. Although my client, the casket manufacturer, was being sued, he didn’t really think that it was his casket. It had to do with the number of screws placed in the bottom of the casket. As a matter of practice, my client placed more screws in the bottom than the casket in question contained.

  The funeral home bought caskets from my client as well as other manufacturers. It seemed to me that this was a pretty defendable case. The burden of proof was on the plaintiff, who would have to prove that our factory produced the offending casket. Unfortunately, my battle plan failed to survive its first encounter with the enemy. As I watched the plaintiff’s counsel give his opening statement and describe what had happened in the church that day, the thud of the floor, the reaction of the mourners, and the dress (or undress) of the corpse, it seemed to me that at least two or three of the female jurors were on the verge of fainting. I got the distinct impression that the jurors who were not overcome with revulsion were at least thinking about their own loved ones. When I got up to explain my missing screw theory, half of them were looking at the ceiling and the other half were peering at me through squinted eyes. It reminded me that we were trying the case in the hometown of the deceased. Being a young man of great sensitivity and acute perception, I decided that this was not a good situation (something I should have decided about six months earlier). I asked for a continuance. We settled the case, and I got out of town as quickly as possible. Maybe I should have told them we weren’t “wantin’” to hurt nobody.

  Soon after we moved back to Lawrenceburg, I informed my folks and the Lindseys that I had thrown in with the Republicans, and I received no pushback. I had the feeling that if they had been my age, they would have done the same thing.

  The more I watched the national scene and what I felt to be the liberal drift of the Democratic Party, and the more I immersed myself into conservative thought—I grabbed whatever it was William F. Buckley was writing at the time�
�the more I realized that the Republican Party was going to be the place for me. If I had had personal political ambition, I might have thought longer about it, because Tennessee was definitely a Democratic state, from the local, Lawrence County level up to the statehouse and the governor’s mansion. The Democrats held both United States Senate seats and five of the seven congressional seats. In 1964, home from college, I briefly shook the hand of a young lawyer from East Tennessee by the name of Howard Baker, Jr. He was trying to become the first popularly elected Republican for the Senate since the Civil War. However, he was running in a year that would not be good for Republicans nationally. In addition to the general political trend that year, Senator Barry Goldwater’s coming to Tennessee and suggesting that the TVA be sold did not prove to be extremely beneficial to Baker’s chances. He lost that election, but he came back two years later, in 1966, and won. The chance meeting we had at the courthouse in Lawrenceburg, as he was campaigning, was the beginning of a political and personal friendship that would have a great influence on my life. In 1973 he brought me to Washington to be the Watergate Committee’s Republican counsel. More than forty years after our first meeting, we would be standing almost on the same spot on the square as he introduced me at a rally during my run for the Republican presidential nomination.

  Although I had no desire and I was in no position to run for political office, I was recruited to run for the state legislature by the Republican leader in the Tennessee state house, Hal Carter. He was the brother of Dixie Carter, of Designing Women fame. From Hal Carter’s visits I learned that what they say is true about what happens when a couple of people suggest that you run for office: You tend to consider that a groundswell of public support. I was indeed tempted, though my heavily Democratic district dissuaded me.