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The Sense of the Senate

At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work.

Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

(opening animation)

Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Fred Thompson’s most exciting role would seem to be playing himself. Two years out of Vanderbilt University Law School, he was named an assistant U.S. attorney, later serving as minority counsel on the Senate Watergate committee. Not to mention his roles in 18 motion pictures. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1994, people were saying Fred Thompson might run for president. Instead, he’s retired from politics. Why? We’ll find out.

The topic before the House: The sense of the Senate. This week on Think Tank.

Ben Wattenberg: Senator Fred Thompson, thank you so much for joining us on 'Think Tank.'

Fred Thompson: Thank you.

Ben Wattenberg: Just give me a little thumbnail about where were you born, what’d you do, what happened.

Fred Thompson: Well my folks were from a little town of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. It’s about seventy miles south of Nashville on the Alabama line. I was actually born in Alabama. I was there for a few months, but was raised in Lawrenceburg. And I went back there and practiced law for a couple of years when I got out of law school.

Ben Wattenberg: ...Lawrenceburg...

Fred Thompson: Yes, there was about eight or nine thousand people back then I guess.
Ben Wattenberg: Where did you go to college?

Fred Thompson: I went to Memphis State undergrad and Vanderbilt Law School.

Ben Wattenberg: And then?

Fred Thompson: Well then I practiced law and went back to my little hometown...
Ben Wattenberg: You have brothers? Sisters?

Fred Thompson: ...and... got one younger brother. And went back to Nashville to become Assistant United States Attorney. When Nixon was elected President, there weren’t’ many Republican, young Republican lawyers in the middle of Tennessee. Pretty heavy Democratic territory. So I benefited from that. And so I had a chance to go up and try criminal cases, mainly, prosecute criminal cases in the federal court in Nashville. Of course some of them were moonshiners (laughter). I always said if my old granddaddy knew what I was doing, he’d probably turn over in his grave (laughter). But a lot of bank robbers and really bad guys. I was introduced to Howard Baker by a young friend of mine. And left there to go with the Baker campaign for reelection...

Ben Wattenberg: I see.

Fred Thompson: ...for his Senate seat.

Ben Wattenberg: And Howard Baker, as he used to say of himself with some people, came up to about your belly button, right?

Fred Thompson: That’s right (laughs). That young man, incidentally, was Lamar Alexander.

Ben Wattenberg: Oh really?

Fred Thompson: Who became governor of Tennessee and of course has taken my seat there in the United States Senate. So Lamar and I are kind of Baker boys and we got started out together a long about that time. The day I left the U.S. Attorney’s Office to go with the Baker campaign, it was a non-paying job, you know, was the day, that night of the Watergate break-in.

Ben Wattenberg: Oh, I see.

Fred Thompson: So that situation developed...

Ben Wattenberg: I see.

Fred Thompson: ...the campaign played out, he won, went back to Washington, called me up and says we got a little matter up here that might take a month or so that I want you to come up here and help me on as Republican Council on the Watergate Committee.

Ben Wattenberg: This is Senator Baker.

Fred Thompson: This is Senator Baker. So I went up, and, as I say, the rest is history. Turned out to be a year and a half.

Ben Wattenberg: And then you go back to Tennessee and decide to run for the Senate?

Fred Thompson: No. A lot of time elapses before that happens. I go back to Tennessee and open up a little law office. I didn’t have a lot of personal wealth. I had a young family at the time. It never was a burning desire that I had. As I got a little older and a little more settled professionally and a little bit more concerned about the direction my country was going in, I still didn’t plan on running for anything but I helped others in political campaigns, was active, would make speeches and so forth. So when I picked up the paper and saw that Al Gore had been selected to be Bill Clinton’s running mate, and shortly after that I knew there would be an open seat. The Governor appointed someone to take the seat for a little while. He wasn’t going to run himself. But there’d be an open seat, a level playing field. And I thought to myself the Senate’s the only political job I’ve ever had any interest in. If I was ever going to run, this was the time to do it so I decided to run for the Senate.

Ben Wattenberg: All right. So, you spent eight years in that very mysterious place to those of us who are on the outside. I mean we read the newspapers and we say oh that guy or those Senators, they’re always on a junket or they’re making so much money or God, they work so hard, you know, when they could be making three times as much money. They’re always making deals. And they’re serving on six different committees and there’s all this kind of stuff going on. I mean you have this whole mythology of clichŽs about how the place works. So what’s it like?

Thompson: That’s part of the problem with the Senate. It’s not easy to answer.

Ben Wattenberg: I mean, this is a course in American citizenship now. The people out there want to know.

Fred Thompson: A lot more than they ought to, let’s put it that way. Part of the problem with serving in the Senate is that there’s so many demands on your time. You’re literally running from one place to another and there’s not enough time to study, there’s not enough time to have down time with your colleagues. I used to hear stories about, you know, after hours and socializing and so forth and probably in some cases too much of that was going on. I never did any of it, and never knew of anybody who did any of it. I never went over to anybody’s office and socialized the entire time that I was there

Ben Wattenberg: Because of?

Fred Thompson: Because of the pace. You didn’t have time. You were always, you’re on several committees and subcommittees. If you take it seriously. If you prepare for the next day. Assuming that you’re not going out for a TV interview of some kind, over to the press gallery or downtown to one of the cable shows. And running back maybe for a late vote that night, that you might or might not actually have. Then you’ve got to get prepared for the next day. You just don’t have time for all of that and on the weekends, because of modern technology, we’ve got ourselves into a situation of constant motion. Not only does the telephone and the fax machine and the computers work all the time you’re there, now because you can get on a plane and get back to your district or your state in short order you’re expected to do that. They expect you back there on a real regular basis. You know, they used to come to town on a train, and stay for the session, and go back home on the train. It’s not like that anymore just because of the same modern pace that all of us live nowadays. Senate is, Congress is affected by that like everybody else is. So it is a more hectic pace than is good for us. We take on more than we should.

Ben Wattenberg: But even on that one you’ve got to say there’s a trade-off, I mean, from democratic theory point of view. It’s good that a legislator gets back and sees his folks. It’s also not good that he never gets a chance to sit down with some of his colleagues or somebody else over the weekend. It’s not a simple thing.

Fred Thompson: No it’s not a simple thing. But, you know, you need balance in all of that. But where we are today, I think, staying in touch with people. It’s easier nowadays to stay in touch with people, and get the sentiment, and get your ideas out to people than it used to be. So that would argue possibly for maybe getting on a plane a little less or attending a meeting fewer times. Unless you’re raising money, which is a whole ’nother problem. We’ve gone from a small dollar system to a huge dollar system and the donors are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And that’s what the whole soft money debate was all about. So you’re not talking to mom and pop very often. You’re talking to people who have given great sums of money to the party. And that has its built-in, obvious built-in problems.

Ben Wattenberg: Does the party, whatever they are and wherever those people are called the party, do they tell you what to do? The majority leader? Anybody? I mean suppose a big vote is coming up on Medicare or whatever and you sit down in the caucus and the sentiment of the caucus is let’s do X. When you walk out of there, you had walked in saying, you know, sort of thought Y was a better position but all the guys are going to do X. I guess I better do X. Is that?

Fred Thompson: No usually. It’s hard to answer that, Ben, yes or no. I mean I never had much problem with that because I always had my own ideas about what I wanted to do. And I would listen to my colleagues. And sometimes I would change my mind, but not often. We always had, on the Republican side four or five people at any given time who might not go along with the majority. The Democrats...

Ben Wattenberg: Including Senator Jeffords who ultimately...

Fred Thompson: Yes. Yes. The Democrats were always I thought much more cohesive and united. They seldom had anybody, with exception of one perhaps, who would get off their reservation on a party line issue.

Ben Wattenberg: Zell Miller.

Fred Thompson: Yeah. There are reasons why people belong to parties. And it’s becoming more and more aligned: liberal, conservative.

Ben Wattenberg: Right.

Fred Thompson: Generalities. But generally accurate generalities. There’s reasons for that. And you don’t vote the way you do usually because your side is telling you to do that. You vote that way because you happen to be a part of that side anyway and that’s the way that you believe.

Ben Wattenberg: Right.

Fred Thompson: Unless you’re running for a leadership position or something like that, you’re only responsible to folks back home, and that’s the people you listen to.

Ben Wattenberg But are people saying to you, gee if you vote for so-and-so, I’ll vote for the dam you want on Twiggle Creek or something?

Fred Thompson: Occasionally. Occasionally.

Ben Wattenberg: But that’s not the normal way of doing things?

Fred Thompson: No. It’s usually not juxtaposed like that. It’s like the rest of life. A lot goes unsaid. You know who the labor unions are supporting and you know who the AMA is supporting and things of that nature. Nobody has to remind you of those things. And you don’t have to be reminded of the fact that if you vote against something that is extremely important to one of your colleagues that he may be in a position, because of his committee position or something, to not go along with you in the future. And you’re aware of all that. Nobody ever threatens anybody.

Ben Wattenberg: Right. I mean some of it you look at it from the outside it’s so bizarre. We spent five years where you couldn’t pick up a news magazine without the cover being America’s falling apart, our bridges are falling down, our roads are falling down, our buildings are falling down, everything is that we need a new infrastructure, we need this, we need that. Then they pass a bill, a big one, Schuster’s bill I guess it was. This huge big transportation-is it transportation bill?

Fred Thompson: Um-hum.

Ben Wattenberg: Yeah. But it spent several hundred billion dollars over many years to do exactly what the news magazines told them to do.

Fred Thompson: You call it pork barrel.

Ben Wattenberg: You got it. (Thompson laughing) Pork barrel! We’re doling out the pork! And I guess some of it is pork but a lot of it is important stuff.

Fred Thompson: Yeah. It is important stuff. And the pork barrel accusation is partially right on, is partially true. And some of it is not. I mean there are certain things the federal government, even to a conservative...

Ben Wattenberg: Yeah.

Fred Thompson: ...should take care of. Infrastructure is one of those things, which is the subject of a lot of the pork barrel accusation.

Ben Wattenberg: Yeah, but somebody’s got to take care of it.

Fred Thompson: Somebody’s got to take care of it and our national infrastructure is something that we don’t do well on.

Ben Wattenberg: Right. Do you think that the American people, generally, look at the U.S. Senate or the system as a whole... but are we generally well governed the way the mishmash turns out at the end of the day?

Fred Thompson: Yeah. I think we are. I think that, first of all, our elected officials are a fair representation of the society they represent. They’re not all the same. They are some better than others. I think by and large the level probably is higher than the general public. By and large you’ve got people who really are wanting to do the right thing. Every human being, most all of us, have that in us and in this job, you have an opportunity to do something about it. So I think that’s a clear motivation. The problem is-there’re a couple of things going on that we could do better on and concern me about it as an institution, which I love. I mean you can’t spend that much money and that much time and effort and work, you know, and time with something and then turn around and trash it. And it was the greatest honor that I’ll ever have in my professional life for sure.

Ben Wattenberg: Not for sure. I mean ...

Fred Thompson: No, no, no, we can.

Ben Wattenberg: In Two Thousand and Eight you might run for President.

Fred Thompson: Well we...we...

Ben Wattenberg: How old are you now?

Fred Thompson: We can... I’m sixty. Practically a kid, right? But let’s stay on the subject (laughs).

Ben Wattenberg: Just trying to keep us in line.

Fred Thompson: The problem is that it is getting more partisan. The closeness of the numbers now make every little vote extremely important. And people more and more try to crack the partisan whip on both sides to keep people in line. It’s very, very close and you’re always looking toward the next election. And we’re becoming more of a professional body where people either spend huge sums of personal fortune to get elected or they have it kind of as a career. But the result of all that is that we spend an awful lot of time on fairly insignificant matters. That’s at the heart of the difficulty. It’s not the quality of the people or even the good will or intentions of the people on both sides of the aisle. It’s the fact that we’re getting into a situation now where we’re spending a lot of time on relatively insignificant matters and posturing against the other side for political advantage because the next election’s coming up and things are very close and control of the body is at stake. What does that do? That leaves the big things unattended to in large part. We’ve got an entitlement program that’s broken that something has got to happen. The boomers are going to be retiring as you know better than most. What’s going to happen there? We’ve got a tax system that is going to continue to drag down our economy. And most importantly we have left the national security issues go unattended until September Eleven.

Ben Wattenberg: You are very interested in that homeland security situation now?

Fred Thompson: Exactly. I had an opportunity to manage the bill. Last thing I did, last day I was in the Senate was the day we, in session, is the day we passed that. And we’re getting better. Our attention has been gotten.

Ben Wattenberg: Right.

Fred Thompson: It takes a lot to get our attention sometimes. And our attention has now been gotten.

Ben Wattenberg: You knock down two buildings and it’ll do it every time.

Fred Thompson: Yeah, but still...

Ben Wattenberg: That’s not the way you want it to happen.

Fred Thompson: But still, even yet, we’re up there now arguing over budget matters and some pork that legitimately should be called pork and things of that nature while we’re probably not putting enough in yet on homeland security and defense. We let our defenses slide. We let our intelligence capability slide and all that. While we’re here working fifteen hours a day some days--hard at work, honest, you know, listening to the people, going home every weekend and--but you know it wasn’t too long ago the burning issue was, you know, midnight basketball and the COPS program and school uniforms and things like that.

Ben Wattenberg: People say who are associated with the institution that, you know, gee it’s not as much fun anymore and we’ve talked about that. And I look all over through my Constitution and in no place does it say it’s supposed to be fun (Thompson laughs). I mean, you know, is it possible that some of these things that make it not fun also make it better government?

Fred Thompson: Well that’s an interesting thought. I’m like you, I never look at it from the standpoint of a question of fun, but it is a legitimate question as to whether or not you get a sense of fulfillment. No, I don’t think that our government would suffer if we did things in a way that made it more fulfilling, if we didn’t have the sense of the Senate baloney votes at nine or ten or eleven o’clock at night, not having so many committee assignments, not taking so much on to the federal government, not trying to deal with every jot and tittle of American society and concentrate on the few important things that the government ought to be concentrating on. I think it would make life easier and I think we’d be a better government for it. Clearly we’re the same human beings that we were some years ago, but we’ve got a tremendous more amount of pressure and responsibilities that we’ve taken on just simply because of the size of the government.

Ben Wattenberg: Let me ask you about two people, just because I was reading something coming down here in the car. Clarence Darrow. Were you a big Clarence Darrow fan? (Thompson laughs) Is that right? Was he your hero?

Fred Thompson: Well you’ve picked up something from somewhere on that. Yeah. When I was, I guess, sixteen or seventeen I read his autobiography, which was important in my deciding I wanted to be a lawyer, I think, You know, taking on a cause you believed in and standing up there trying a major lawsuit or something like that. Now, that appealed to me. Up to that point it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d ever have to do anything for a living. But it occurred to me that if I did, that would be a fun way of doing it. And that’s the only thing I ever wanted to do.

Ben Wattenberg: By today’s standards, though, Darrow would be a big liberal.

Fred Thompson: Oh sure. Well he was then.

Ben Wattenberg: He was then.

Fred Thompson: He was then. But part of it was happenstance. There were probably other lawyers I could have read about who would have been inspirational too. But I could see that process of people coming to you and needing your help and you being able to go out and champion them and stand between them and the rest of the world and how great our system was that allowed, you know, the most humble person to go to a lawyer and do that and let a lawyer stand between that little person and the rest of the world, the entire government. And that appealed to me.

Ben Wattenberg: The last person I wanted to talk about, who we haven’t mentioned in this discussion yet, is George W. Bush.

Fred Thompson: Um-hum.

Ben Wattenberg: It is said, again as part of this vast it is said, but it is said that he is forgetting about the Congress, forgetting about the Senate and now he won, he helped them win and, you know, he’s just going on his merry way. What about that?

Fred Thompson: Oh, he couldn’t forget about the Congress....he’d probably like to! But no President can forget about the Congress. I mean they know that that is the avenue down which all of his good intentions must flow for the most part, certainly domestically.

Ben Wattenber: What’s that old line? You either talk to me now or you’ll talk to me later?

Fred Thompson: (laughs) But every President has some difficulty with Congress and he’s the only one elected by all the people and the Presidents always feel that very strongly. Congress has its prerogatives, you know. They point out occasionally that it’s the first article of the Constitution.

Ben Wattenberg: Is the Congress.

Fred Thompson: Is the Congress, and Congress stays, Presidents go. And it’s the source of the conflict. And the checks and balances that we have in this country, which is so frustrating if you’re a part of it, but so beneficial if you’re objective about it. I always like to say the Senate, for example, is designed where not much important happens very often and it does that job very well. (laughs) And you can say that about, uh, the whole government, you know.

Ben Wattenberg: You could say that about life...

Fred Thompson: Say that about life. So something has got to be hopefully really good, or there’s got to be a consensus of some kind in order for it to get through.

Ben Wattenberg: I’ve decided in my dotage that life is really strange. You know, you look at this Twentieth Century and you say that there was the Bolshevik revolution and then communism comes in and then Nazism and everybody says that’s sort of sui generous, that’s different, that’s... then the Nazis come in. You say well, that’s really off the wall. Then the communists come back and the Cold War and you say this is not the way the world works. This is crazy just as an aberration and now you have the terror thing, which is a whole new axis. And I’m beginning to think, you know, maybe that’s what life is. It really is kaleidoscopic. It’s not the same.

Fred Thompson: (laughs) Just one doggone thing after another, isn’t it?

Ben Wattenberg: It’s just one doggone-and it isn’t the same dog either! (Thompson laughs).

Fred Thompson: Well that reminds me of a fellow who said every time I think I have an original thought I later learned I just didn’t know my history.

Ben Wattenberg: (laughs) Okay. What does a distinguished former Senator do next?

Fred Thompson: Well (laughs), whatever he wants to. That’s the whole point. I’m doing a TV show a couple of days a week in New York. And it’s going to leave me time to do some other things. I’m on a little speaking tour right now and still exercising the little bully pulpit that I have. I’m enjoying that very, very much. I’m talking to a think tank here in town about maybe doing some work with them. There’s some other charitable things that I’m interested in. Lots of different things. I’ll probably gravitate back toward the law and a law firm eventually. It’s my first love. But I don’t want to practice the way I used to but there’s still something about it that’s important and that I think I could make a contribution toward. I think what most people offer when they leave the Senate that I’ve seen is that they’re circumstance lawyers. There are circumstances nowadays, important matters that involve not only law but politics, public relations and things of that nature. Some of these problems require sound judgment, somebody that has a grounding in the law, knows what exposure that people can have in various circumstances, knows what discussions are perhaps going on on Capitol Hill behind closed doors in all probability about what they’re reading in The Wall Street Journal that day and what kind of stories are going to be produced out of that that might be injurious to a client or someone. It requires experience in judgment. And I think that’s the thing that most people gravitate toward.

Ben Wattenberg: Well good luck at it.

Fred Thompson: (laughing) Thanks.

Ben Wattenberg: Thank you very much for joining us, Senator Fred Thompson.

Fred Thompson: Thank you.

Ben Wattenberg: And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via e-mail. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

(credits)

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At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work.

Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

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