Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (21 page)

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.

However, in 1968 I was approached about becoming the campaign manager for a fellow by the name of John T. Williams, who was running against the entrenched congressman of our district, Ray Blanton. As I indicated earlier, Blanton would prove to be another political figure whose path I would cross more than once. I was excited and honored that the powers that be of the Republican establishment in our district (both of them) thought I could do this job. Although I knew how uphill the battle would be, I had no idea how hopeless the endeavor was. The fact that they were turning to a kid just out of school to manage a congressional campaign should have been my first clue. John T. was a very nice, energetic fellow in his mid-fifties who’d served as a United States marshal. He was determined to shake every hand in the district and do his dead level best to win.

Despite the odds, there were other issues that might have given a saner man pause. The campaign headquarters, where I would have to spend the majority of my time, was in Jackson, Tennessee, about seventy miles away. The campaign had no money at that time and I would have to sleep in the campaign headquarters. So if I took on this task, it would mean living out of a suitcase, sleeping on a couch, with low pay for a hopeless cause. Naturally, with Sarah’s blessing, I took the job.

I spent most of my days and many of my nights on the telephone trying to raise money, scheduling the candidate, putting out fires among local bickering supporters, and filling in as a surrogate for the candidate. We finally raised
enough money to put up some billboards. I decided that our theme should be “John T. Williams. To help clean up the mess in Washington.” Sound familiar? The theme may have been pretty effective, but we never got to find out. The billboards, as it turned out, were so far back off the highway, and the “To help clean up the mess in Washington” part was printed in such small letters, that you couldn’t read the words from the road.

There was one event in that campaign that was especially significant for me. Governor Ronald Reagan of California was barnstorming for several Republican candidates across the country and made a speech for my candidate at the Coliseum in Jackson, Tennessee. As campaign manager I got to sit backstage with Governor Reagan for a few minutes before he went onstage. He turned to me and said, “What do you think I ought to tell them?” Taken by surprise, I gave him a few thoughts. I said, “I’d just acknowledge that you don’t know John T. personally but that you know what he stands for. And it’s the same thing that you stand for.” He went out and said exactly what I had suggested. So Reagan had me for life even before I really understood his philosophy. His philosophy was a bonus.

John T. was the most energetic campaigner I’d met, but on election night I learned one of those lessons that has to be experienced firsthand before it hits home: Don’t expect to win a race against a popular incumbent congressman when you have very little money. We lost every county in the district
except one. I was encouraged by the fact that we almost carried Lawrence County.

I resumed my law practice, exhilarated by the experience but glad to get back to my profession, where results were at least somewhat related to effort. However, in 1968 something else occurred that would have a major impact on my career—the election of Richard Nixon as president. It seemed like a very faraway event and something that had nothing to do with me. Actually, the presidential election had been a watershed election for Tennessee and the South. People were becoming more and more concerned about the breakdown in law and order and civil society that we were increasingly seeing on our TV screens. These sentiments were held by many Tennessee Democrats who voted for Nixon, allowing him to carry the state.

As the joke goes about drug users, “If you remember the 1960s, you weren’t there.” I was one of the ones who wasn’t there. As things were heating up, I was settling down. Ironically, I had missed the countercultural rebellion that was being carried out in the streets, but in a way I became a beneficiary of it.

In 1968 a new president appointed not only all of the United States Attorneys but all of the Assistant United States Attorneys, as well. My name came up in political circles as a possible AUSA in Nashville. I was also helped by the fact that there were precious few young Republican lawyers in
Middle Tennessee at that time. Early in 1969, I received an offer from the newly appointed U.S. Attorney, Charles Anderson, to become one of his five assistants in Nashville. The office had jurisdiction over forty counties in Middle Tennessee, including Lawrence County. The offer was somewhat unexpected and exciting. It had never really occurred to me that I would leave Lawrenceburg, and I received advice from some of the leading attorneys there that moving to Nashville at this stage of my career would be a mistake. I was just establishing myself, getting to know the judges and starting to develop a reputation. All of that would be set back if I went to Nashville. However, by taking the job of Assistant United States Attorney, I would be one of the higher-ranking federal legal figures in Middle Tennessee, trying federal criminal and civil cases. This was no small potatoes for a fellow who had just been out of law school for two years. Sarah and I discussed this extensively, and, as usual, we had a meeting of the minds that this looked like an adventure too interesting to pass up. However, I told A.D. of my decision with very mixed emotions and not at all sure that I was doing the right thing. He seemed to understand. Besides, I planned to get the experience and return to Lawrenceburg in a couple of years, because at heart I was a country lawyer. Of course, we never moved back, even though that “heart” part has never changed.