Profile
JOSE FUENTES
Fred Thompson: Lawyer, Actor, U.S. Senator
AP/Wide World Photos
ONE OF THE most recognized faces in our nation,
Fred Thompson boasts a résumé that has
spanned a wide range of pursuits — from driving
a truck to occupying a coveted seat in the highly
respected deliberative body, the U.S. Senate.
His greatest notoriety, however, originated not in
the halls of Congress, but in the studio lots of Hollywood, where he has enjoyed a successful and prolific acting career. Late last year, 60-year-old Thompson
retired from a distinguished Senate career, which had
been sparked initially by an interest in law and continued with enduring
devotion to his Tennessee constituents.
Born in Sheffield,
Ala., in 1942, Fred
Thompson spent his
formative years attending
public
schools in Lawrenceburg, Tenn. The son
of a used car salesman,
Thompson
worked his way
through postsecondary school as a
shoe salesman, a
truck driver, and a
bike factory worker.
Thompson received
an undergraduate degree in philosophy
and political science
from Memphis State
University in 1964 and a law degree from Vanderbilt
University in 1967. That same year, he was admitted
to the Tennessee bar and began to practice law. Subsequent and more challenging legal pursuits culminated in Thompson’s 1994 election to the U.S. Senate.
The Lawyer
From 1969 to 1972, Thompson served as an assistant U.S. attorney. While practicing in Nashville in
1972, Thompson volunteered to work on the re-election campaign of Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee
Republican. A year later, at the age of 30, Baker ap10 | The Federal Lawyer | February 2003
pointed Thompson Republican counsel to the Senate
Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities
— better known as the Watergate Committee.
Thompson’s historic interrogation of White House
aide Alexander Butterfield (“Mr. Butterfield, are you
aware of the installation of any listening devices in
the Oval Office of the President?”) led to public disclosure of the infamous Watergate tapes. Thompson
chronicled his Watergate investigation experiences in
his memoir At That Point in Time.
After President Nixon’s resignation, Thompson left
Washington and returned to life as a Tennessee
lawyer. In 1977, Tennessee Parole Board Chair Marie
Ragghianti was fired after exposing a pardon-selling
scheme, and Thompson agreed to take on her case.
Thompson’s work on the case proved that Tennessee
Gov. Ray Blanton had used his influence to release
powerful criminals in a cash-for-clemency scheme.
The case resulted in the governor’s removal from office and Ragghianti’s reinstatement.
The Actor
The Blanton scandal became the subject of a bestselling novel and later became the movie Marie: A
True Story, starring Sissy Spacek. Thompson was initially hired as a consultant, but his forceful presence
convinced producers that he should portray himself
in the film. Thus began an 18-year film career, during
which Thompson starred in such movies as No Way
Out, In the Line of Fire, Die Hard II, The Hunt for Red
October, Class Action, Days of Thunder, Cape Fear,
Curly Sue, and Aces: Iron Eagle III.
Thompson has also starred in six television
movies, including Unholy Matrimony and Barbarians
at the Gate, four television series (“China Beach,”
“Roseanne,” “Matlock,” and “Wiseguy”), and the radio special “Seven Days in May” with Ed Asner. With
his retirement from the Senate, Thompson has joined
the long-running NBC television hit “Law and Order”
to play the role of District Attorney Arthur Branch, a
right-leaning character voted into office in a
post–9/11 fervor.
The U.S. Senator
Throughout his film career, Thompson maintained
law offices in Nashville and Washington, spending
most of his time practicing law and lobbying. In the
early 1980s, he served as special counsel to Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander and to both the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations. He was later appointed a member of the Tennessee Appellate Court
Nominating Commission.
In 1994, Thompson was elected by the people of
Tennessee to serve out the remaining two years of
Vice President Al Gore’s term in the U.S. Senate.
When re-elected for a full term in 1996, he received
more votes than any other candidate for public office
in Tennessee history. Thompson won both the 1994
and 1996 elections by a margin of more than 20 percentage points. Thompson’s accomplishments reveal
that he has not let his voters down.
Under the banner, “Thompson Fights for Tennesseans,” Thompson worked tirelessly for his constituents on issues such as Tennessee preservation,
agriculture, job creation, and tax reduction. Twice,
Thompson convinced the Senate to continue funding
the Tennessee Valley Authority, clearing the way for
the agency to carry out its land and water stewardship mission. His support for the national security
work performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
resulted in Senate funding for initial construction of
the Spallation Neutron Source — an acceleratorbased neutron source that the U.S. Department of
Energy is building to provide the most intense
pulsed neutron beams in the world for scientific research and industrial development. The development
of this facility provided 2,300 temporary construction-related jobs and 1,500 permanent positions at
the laboratory. When the U.S. Postal Service was
considering relocating its Southeastern Regional
Headquarters to Atlanta, Thompson also intervened
to save 87 jobs in Memphis.
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Thompson pushed for legislation to extend the term
of copyrights in order to protect songwriters; he secured funding for construction of a new Federal District Courthouse; and he helped expedite Senate confirmation of qualified Tennesseans for the federal
bench — including the appointment of Bernice Donald as the first African-American woman ever to sit
on the federal bench in Tennessee.
Seeking to protect embattled Tennessee farmers,
Thompson supported emergency funding for agriculture and voted against tobacco restrictions and tax
increases. In fighting to protect Tennessee landowner
rights, he established federal legislation requiring adequate notification when private companies seek to
acquire land interests through eminent domain, a
procedure now mirrored by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Throughout his service in the Senate, Thompson
recognized the need to protect Tennessee history,
tourism, travel, and resources. He worked to ensure
that Tennessee received its fair share of federal highway funds for road and bridge construction and
maintenance. In 1998, Thompson obtained funding
for a new “world runway” at Memphis International
Airport, now credited with luring new business to
the area. To raise the profile within Congress of the
Great Smoky Mountains — America’s most visited
national park — Thompson founded the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park Congressional Caucus. Through this organization, he led efforts to enact legislation that allowed the park to retain 100
percent of the fees it collected and secured resources
for trail maintenance and air quality studies in the
park. To preserve Tennessee’s natural resources,
Thompson also sponsored legislation to fight erosion
in the Shiloh National Military Park and to authorize
the purchase of federal land for the Chickamauga–
Chattanooga National Military Park.
On the National Front
A staunch protector of American national security
and a firm believer in accountable government,
Thompson’s Senate campaigns promised to make
good on these beliefs. During his time in the Senate,
Thompson voted to restrict rules on personal bankruptcy, to maintain permanent normal trade relations
with China, to prohibit flag burning, to deploy a national missile defense system, to increase penalties
for drug offenders, to strengthen the trade embargo
against Cuba, to enact campaign finance reform,
maintain the ban on military base abortions, and to
repeal President Clinton’s ergonomic rules on repetitive stress. Thompson has also voted in favor of
school vouchers, a Social Security “lockbox,” tax
cuts, and requirements for a super majority to raise
taxes. Thompson opposed loosening restrictions on
cell phone wiretapping, expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation, banning affirmative action
hiring with federal funds, adopting the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, checking on backgrounds at gun shows, and eliminating block grants
for food stamps.
Thompson also was one of the Senate’s loudest
voices for strengthening the compensation system of
the federal judiciary. In 2001 he cosponsored the
Federal Judicial Fairness Act, which would have provided for automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments
to judicial salaries and would have delinked judicial
COLAs from the mechanism governing salary adjustments to Congress. In addition, the legislation would
have provided a cumulative upward adjustment to
judicial salaries to offset the loss judges suffered
when they were denied four COLAs in the 1990s due
to congressional inaction.
Thompson began his rise to political stardom in
Washington in 1994, when Sen. Bob Dole asked him
to respond on national television to President Clinton’s speech requesting a tax cut. A member of the
THOMPSON continued on page 12
February 2003 | The Federal Lawyer | 11
THOMPSON continued from page 11
powerful Senate Committee on Finance, Thompson
served on the Health Care, International Trade and
Taxation, and IRS Oversight Subcommittees. He was
also a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate National Security Working
Group, and the Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus. Thompson focused on reducing taxes by reforming the tax code and pushed for
an export control policy that protects the country’s
national security with minimal bureaucratic red tape.
He regularly promoted a smaller, more efficient, and
more accountable government and was widely credited for keeping a watchful eye over Washington’s
fiscal matters.
Since 1997, Thompson served as the senior Republican on the Senate Committee on Governmental
Affairs, acting as chair until June 2001, when Senate
leadership switched to Democratic hands, after
which he served as the committee’s ranking member.
He was among the most junior senators in history to
serve as chair of a major Senate committee. In this
leadership position, Thompson was charged with
overseeing management of the federal government.
He held hearings on topics such as improving the
federal regulatory process, exploring ways to eliminate fraud and abuse, reforming the IRS, and dealing
with a number of national security issues, including
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He has
worked to enact solutions to information management problems, such as computer security. Overall,
Thompson was always concerned with the government’s management style: “We create a lot of expensive agencies and programs, and then we pretty
much turn our backs on them while they run for
years and years.”
In 1997, the Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee was tapped to conduct an investigation into
alleged illegal activities associated with the 1996 federal election campaigns. Thompson’s Watergate experience proved invaluable to this effort. The committee exposed a campaign system rife with abuse
and foreign influence peddling, including Chinese involvement in U.S. presidential and congressional
campaigns. The committee produced a 9,600-page
report, leading to indictments and several ongoing
criminal investigations.
Thompson is a strong supporter of a robust, multitiered national missile defense and he believes that
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction threatens national security. As a result, during the 106th
Congress, Thompson introduced the China Nonproliferation Act, which confronted the transfer of
weapons of mass destruction by “key supplier” countries like China and Russia to rogue states like Iran,
Iraq, North Korea, and Libya. The bill required an
annual review of these countries’ proliferation activities by establishing clear standards, reasonable
12 | The Federal Lawyer | February 2003
penalties, adequate presidential waivers, and congressional oversight. Thompson successfully brought
the legislation to the Senate floor during the debate
on permanent normal trade status for China. In 1998,
the Senate leadership also chose Thompson to serve
on a special Senate task force to examine whether
the Chinese government improperly obtained American satellite and missile technology. The task force’s
findings resulted in returning satellite export control
authority to the State Department.
He was among the first group of senators to visit
Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he
spent much of his remaining time in the Senate investigating the government’s intelligence failures before Sept. 11. He supported increased military funding and believes that military personnel deserve
higher pay, expedited benefits, and improved health
care. Thompson emphasized expanding the force
structure to deal with threats while building new
weapons and providing better training. He is also
very aware of the nation’s vulnerability to computer
attacks from terrorists, crime rings, and hackers. In
response to this threat, he authored the Government
Information Security Act, which provided a new
framework for protecting the government’s computers from outside attack by hackers. “Effective computer security starts with effective management and
this legislation will help federal agencies get a handle on preventing hackers from wreaking havoc with
citizens’ sensitive information,” Thompson said.
In 1999, Thompson joined the Senate Finance
Committee, where he worked to cut taxes and to reform America’s Social Security and Medicare programs. He joined with a bipartisan group of senators
to endorse a plan to reform Social Security by cutting
payroll taxes and allowing workers to invest in personal savings accounts. Thompson also pushed for a
biennial budget to end the yearly appropriations
struggle in Congress and for revised procedures limiting congressional sessions to half the year. This
process would help Washington lawmakers focus on
current funded programs and would allow them to
spend more time in their home communities.
Having discovered that federal programs lost $20
billion dollars in 1999 ($4 billion in uncollected debts
and $16 billion in overpayments to contractors),
Thompson worked with the U.S. General Accounting
Office to unveil the first ever audit of the federal
government. “The government failed miserably,”
Thompson said. “The government’s deteriorating accounting systems put Congress at a severe disadvantage because we lack reliable information to assess
program performance, control costs, and stop widespread waste, fraud, and abuse. We must do better.”
Thompson was also responsible for holding a
THOMPSON continued on page 20
THOMPSON continued from page 12
number of hearings and providing reports unveiling
wasted taxpayer dollars. In 2000, he proposed legislation that would require federal agencies to identify
improper payments and accounting errors. Along the
same lines, Thompson joined a bipartisan group of
senators to pass the Regulatory Right-to-Know Act.
The act now requires the White House’s Office of
Management and Budget to disclose to the public the
costs and benefits of regulatory programs, as well as
an analysis of the impact of federal regulations on
state, local, and tribal governments, on small business, and on economic growth. Thompson believes
that “people have a right to know the costs and benefits of important regulatory decisions.”
Thompson’s service on the Governmental Affairs
Committee and the Senate Finance Committee made
him a potential vice presidential running mate for
George W. Bush in the 2000 election. Senator
Thompson has remained a fervent believer that “government closer to the people works best” and that
too often Congress gets involved in matters that are
better left to the local and state governments. “This
fits my longstanding concern that every time there is
a news story, we run to the floor and want to federalize something.”
Stating that he simply did not “have the heart for
another six-year term,” Thompson retired after eight
years of service in the U.S. Senate. He called the Senate a “remarkable place,” but he says, “I’m not 30
years old. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
up here. I don’t like spending 14- and 16-hour days
voting on ‘Sense of the Senate’ resolutions on irrelevant matters.” Divorced in the mid-1980s, Thompson
recently married media specialist Jeri Kehn from the
former Verner Liipfert law firm in Washington, D.C.
Thompson’s last days in the Senate were spent focusing on the investigation into the intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and creating
the Homeland Security Department. On Nov. 25, after a White House signing ceremony, he explained:
“Now the hard part comes. Putting the department
all together.” He felt fortunate to have accomplished
this historic overhaul, over which he had taken the
lead, on his last day in session with the U.S. Senate.
“Many times people put time and effort into things
without coming to fruition. … How many holes [do]
you have to dig without any success and spend time
on insignificant things?” But to Thompson, this victory was a clear sign of how quickly the nation is able
to change its priorities and focus to achieve what it
needs. After so many bouts of “frustration in the past,
going out with this is a tremendous thing.” He called
his time in the Senate “a tremendous honor.”
Thompson doesn’t plan to spend all of his newfound time acting. He plans to remain active in shaping public policy by making contributions outside of
elected office. “One of the nice parts is I don’t have
to have plans, don’t have to fill up a calendar for a
while.” He has accepted the presidency of the Federal City Council, a nonprofit group of Washingtonarea civic and business leaders seeking to promote
quality of life issues in the District of Columbia. In
some respects, this position will be a continuation of
his efforts on the Committee on Governmental Affairs. He also is considering other public policy projects. He has signed up with the Washington Speakers
Bureau for a series of speeches, will continue his appearances on “Law and Order,” and plans to explore
a teaching engagement with his alma matter, Vanderbilt University, including its law school. Eventually,
he will associate himself with a law firm but not for a
while, he says.
Thompson praised federal service and private-sector lawyers for all they accomplish in the federal system. “For Congress, laws are our stock in trade. But
so much of the real effect is on the fine print and interpretation. We have such a busy schedule that we
don’t have time to spend on the consequences of
what we do. Having good legal minds addressing the
ramifications and consequences of our legislative efforts is very important.”
Thompson is delighted with the shift to Republican control of the Senate and feels that the most significant and immediate focus will be on expediting
votes on judicial nominations. “We can now set the
agenda on the floor and in committees. It’s not a revolution but it is a sign, which we need to recognize
and to act accordingly. Most political capital is made
by watching the other side make mistakes.” We need
to use this opportunity to make our bully pulpit bigger in order to sell our ideas better and most importantly, put them into proper perspective, but not
overreach.”
President Bush has applauded Thompson for serving “the people of Tennessee with honor, distinction,
and class.” TFL
Jose Fuentes, former attorney general for Puerto Rico,
is counsel with the Washington, D.C., office of Reed
Smith LLP.
15th Annual Insurance Tax Law Seminar
June 19-20, 2003 • Hyatt Regency Washington, Washington, D.C.
For more information, call (202) 785-1614
20 | The Federal Lawyer | February 2003