Freddie Dalton Thompson (August 19, 1942 – November 1, 2015) was an American politician, attorney, lobbyist, columnist, actor, and radio personality. A member of the Republican Party, he served as a United States senator from Tennessee from 1994 to 2003. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the Republican Party presidential primaries for the 2008 United States presidential election.
He chaired the International Security Advisory Board at the U.S. Department of State, was a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, specializing in national security and intelligence.
Usually credited as Fred Dalton Thompson, he appeared in a number of movies and television shows including Matlock, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard 2, In the Line of Fire, Days of Thunder, and Cape Fear, as well as in commercials. He frequently portrayed governmental authority figures and military men. In the final months of his U.S. Senate term in 2002, Thompson joined the cast of the NBC television series Law & Order, starring as Manhattan District Attorney Arthur Branch.
Fred Thompson was born on August 19, 1942, at Colbert County Hospital (now Helen Keller Memorial Hospital) in Sheffield, Alabama. He was the son of Ruth Inez (née Bradley) and Fletcher Session Thompson, a used car salesman born in Lauderdale County, Alabama, on August 26, 1919, and who died in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, on May 27, 1990. Thompson was of primarily Scottish and some English and distant Dutch, ancestry.
He was raised in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, where he attended public schools and graduated from Lawrence County High School in 1960. During high school, he played football, and afterward worked during the day at the local post office and at night in the Murray bicycle assembly plant.
Thompson was raised attending churches of the Churches of Christ, and often credited his values to both his family upbringing and church teachings. In a 2007 interview, he stated, "I attend church when I'm in Tennessee. I'm [living] in McLean right now. I don't attend regularly when I'm up there." Later in life, he occasionally attended Vienna Presbyterian Church in Vienna, Virginia. He rarely spoke about religion during his 2008 presidential campaign, saying, "Me getting up and talking about what a wonderful person I am and that sort of thing, I'm not comfortable with that, and I don't think it does me any good."
In September 1959, at age 17, Thompson married Sarah Elizabeth Lindsey after learning she was pregnant. Their first child, Freddie Dalton "Tony" Thompson Jr., was born in April 1960. Two more children, Daniel and Elizabeth, followed soon after.
Thompson initially enrolled at Florence State College (now the University of North Alabama), becoming the first in his family to attend college. He later transferred to Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis), where he earned a double major in philosophy and political science in 1964. He was then awarded a scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University Law School, earning his Juris Doctor degree in 1967. During this time, both he and Sarah worked to support their growing family and cover his education expenses. The couple divorced in 1985.
Thompson was admitted to the state bar of Tennessee in 1967. At that time, he shortened his first name from Freddie to Fred.
He worked as an assistant U.S. attorney from 1969 to 1972, successfully prosecuting bank robberies and other cases. Thompson was the campaign manager for Republican U.S. Senator Howard Baker's re-election campaign in 1972, and was minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee in its investigation of the Watergate scandal (1973–1974).
In the 1980s, Thompson worked as an attorney, with law offices in Nashville and Washington, DC, handling personal injury claims and defending people accused of white collar crimes. He also accepted appointments as special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1980–1981), special counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee (1982), and member of the Appellate Court Nominating Commission for the State of Tennessee (1985–1987).
His clients included a German mining group and Japan's Toyota Motor Corporation. Thompson served on various corporate boards. He also did legal work and served on the board of directors for engineering firm Stone & Webster.
In 1973, Thompson was appointed minority counsel to assist the Republican senators on the Senate Watergate Committee, a special committee convened by the U.S. Senate to investigate the Watergate scandal. Thompson was sometimes credited for supplying Republican Senator Howard Baker's famous question, "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" This question is said to have helped frame the hearings in a way that eventually led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. The question remains popular and is often invoked by pundits commenting on political scandals.
A Republican staff member, Donald Sanders, found out about the White House tapes and informed the committee on July 13, 1973. Thompson was informed of the existence of the tapes, and he, in turn, informed Nixon's attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt. "Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home," Thompson later wrote, "I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action."
Three days after Sanders's discovery, at a public, televised committee hearing, Thompson asked former White House aide Alexander Butterfield the famous question, "Mr. Butterfield, were you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?" thereby publicly revealing the existence of tape recordings of conversations within the White House. National Public Radio later called that session and the discovery of the Watergate tapes "a turning point in the investigation."
Thompson's appointment as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate committee reportedly upset Nixon, who believed Thompson was not skilled enough to interrogate unfriendly witnesses and would be outfoxed by the committee Democrats. According to historian Stanley Kutler, however, Thompson and Baker "carried water for the White House, but I have to give them credit—they were watching out for their interests, too ... They weren't going to mindlessly go down the tubes [for Nixon]."
Journalist Scott Armstrong, a Democratic investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee, is critical of Thompson for having disclosed the committee's knowledge of the tapes to Buzhardt during an ongoing investigation, and says Thompson was "a mole for the White House" and that Thompson's actions gave the White House a chance to destroy the tapes. Thompson's 1975 book At That Point in Time, in turn, accused Armstrong of having been too close to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and of leaking committee information to him. In response to renewed interest in this matter, in 2007 during his presidential campaign, Thompson said, "I'm glad all of this has finally caused someone to read my Watergate book, even though it's taken them over 30 years."
Corruption case against Tennessee governor