Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (22 page)

Upon arriving in Nashville, I learned that I had about as
much trial experience as anyone else in that office, and before long I was prosecuting most of the serious federal crime cases. I proudly displayed my certificate of appointment on my office wall. It was signed by Attorney General John Mitchell. The first time I met John Mitchell, however, was when I was interrogating him three years later in the middle of the Watergate investigation.

P
ROBABLY LIKE MOST PEOPLE
of my generation and younger, I am amazed at how ubiquitous smoking is in the old classic movies. It was the epitome of cool. When I watch oldies, I marvel at the old-time moviemakers’ ability to keep continuity with regard to the length of the cigarette the actor is smoking when a simple scene might be shot over a time span of hours or even days. This is part of the cost of knowing the inside of moviemaking—noticing the trivialities when trying to relax and enjoy the movie. Smart-aleck movie watchers (myself excepted, of course) and movie reviewers like nothing better than to point out that the blinds were pulled in the first part of the scene and open in the last part without anyone on-screen having opened them.

I had to deal with the cigarette continuity problem only once in a movie. Although I never smoked cigarettes, I smoked through a scene with Alec Baldwin. (There’s no truth to the rumor that his political views drove me to it. To
drink, maybe, but not to smoke.) We were doing a scene in
Hunt for Red October
in which I played an admiral. I had no trouble adapting. I smoked that cigarette and held it just the way that Dad always did. It was a bittersweet remembrance.

By the time people became aware of the harmful effects of smoking, Dad had long since become addicted. Finally, after many years, common sense won out and he quit—cold turkey. Apparently, the decision had come too late.

In 1990, when my parents were on a trip to Arizona, Dad felt a pain in his chest. He had a pretty good idea as to what the problem was. For most of his life he was a two- or three-pack-a-day man. He started out by rolling his own out of store-bought cigarette paper and a pouch of Country Gentleman tobacco.

When the pain became severe, they turned the car around and headed home. In a remarkable feat of stamina, Dad drove straight through from Arizona to Lawrenceburg. He wanted to know, and the diagnosis was quick to follow. It was as bad as feared. When Mom told me that Dad had lung cancer, there was a feeling of unreality about it all. For a while I had trouble imagining something that Dad couldn’t handle. But over the next several months he steadily declined.

It was the most remarkable thing. Nothing about him changed. He was dying the way he lived—a little melancholy, and trying not to take things any more seriously than absolutely necessary.

During his many days in the hospital, he struck up a friendship with one particular nurse—a portly black lady whose wit was a fair match for Dad’s. One day something came up about smoking. She said to Dad, “You know, I’m a nurse and I smoked for ten years before I could give it up.”

Dad thought for a minute and said, “Well, I smoked heavy for about fifty years.” He paused and then said with a straight face, “And I was just getting good at it.”

She just smiled, shook her head, and walked out of the room. She thought she was going to have a serious conversation about smoking, but there would be no mea culpas from Fletcher—not to any of us mortals, anyway.

The decision was made to operate and remove part of one of Dad’s lungs—a substantial part, as it turned out. Immediately after the operation, they rolled him to where I and other family members were. He was barely conscious and had tubes running from everywhere. I walked beside the gurney with the doctor, a nurse, and others on the way to intensive care. As our somber procession made its way down the hall, Dad motioned to me. I could tell he wanted to write something. I gave him a pen and a scrap of paper that I had on me. With a weak and shaky hand he wrote the word
SUE
and handed it back to his lawyer son. To the dismay of all around me, I doubled over in laughter. And for some reason, when I showed it to the surgeon, he didn’t seem to think it was as funny as I did.

Four months later, Dad passed away. For all those months in the hospital, Mom spent every night with him in his room, with rare exceptions. Later, she moved to Franklin, Tennessee, in the Nashville area where my brother Ken and I lived.

It was sort of the Thompson male tradition not to share much of a personal nature about our feelings with one another. I guess we never felt the need to. I knew all I needed to know about Dad, from the lessons he taught me, but mostly by the way he lived his life. I heard Senator Sam Irvin of Watergate fame say something that stayed with me: “If you can paint a really good picture of a cow, you don’t have to write the word ‘cow’ under it.” To me, Dad had painted a really good picture of a cow. Yet there is another dimension to a person that often comes out on their best and worst days. Dad had suffered through some awful days, but he had the calm and inner strength of the proverbial Christian holding four aces, which is how he viewed himself.

It may seem odd to revisit such a sad and painful time and emphasize the humorous things he said and did, but those are some of the things that made him the unique man that he was. When life’s absurd happenings and ironies presented themselves and seemed to require us to either laugh or cry, Fletch always chose to laugh if at all possible—or better still, make someone else laugh. It was never calculated; he never told jokes as such. His take on things was immediate and honest.

Amid the sadness that his humor helped mask, he knew at the end that he had been a good man and done his best. Just because a man isn’t famous or doesn’t leave a lot of money doesn’t mean he doesn’t leave a legacy. A part of Dad’s is the fact that, all these years later, I often still experience situations that cause me to think, “What would Dad say about that?” And I smile.

It was January 28, 1995. I was sitting at my desk on the floor of the United States Senate prior to delivering my maiden speech. It was in support of a bill I was cosponsoring that required members of Congress in the operation of their offices to abide by the same laws that other citizens had to follow (a revolutionary concept even then). I figured that if members of Congress had to abide by the employment, OSHA, and other laws that they imposed upon American businesses and citizens, they would be more careful in the passage of such laws. I had been sworn in a few days earlier. Someone on behalf of the leadership was droning on to an almost empty chamber about the agenda for the day. I assumed that the speaker was stalling long enough for the crowd to assemble to hear my speech. Even the section for the press corps was empty. Perhaps they had heard me speak before.

As I gazed around the beautiful and historic surroundings, my eyes fell on the gallery above me and to my right.
That’s where I had sat by myself one afternoon twenty-seven years earlier, a year out of law school. I’d come to Washington for the Young Republicans Convention at the Shoreham Hotel, but having grown weary of the organized activities there, I snuck away to watch Senators Goldwater, Humphrey, and other political giants of the day deliberate the issues. I’d been transfixed. Now instead of observing, I was participating.

For me, the trip from the Senate gallery to the Senate floor had been a long one. I was pleased about the way things had worked out. I had been given a rare opportunity to make a difference in the direction of my country. A couple of years earlier, I had made the decision to leave a life that would have been the envy of a lot of people to win an uphill Senate campaign, and this speech was going to be the beginning of my opportunity to make a difference.

As I got into the speech I worked in American history, the Constitution, the common sense of the American people, and why the Senate could not afford to turn its back on this important piece of legislation. I thought I was laying the groundwork for a new era of responsibility in Washington.

As I was gathering my papers together after the speech, one of the few senators still on the floor, an older gentleman, came over to me, extended his hands in congratulations, and said, “Good speech, Fred.” It was a moment of great personal satisfaction. Then he said, “Can I ask you just one question?”
“Absolutely,” I responded, prepared to defend my position. He said, “Was that a real submarine that you fellows used in
Hunt for Red October
?”

There was only one fellow I knew who could have fully appreciated that story. I wish I could have told it to him.

I
GREW UP
at a time when the United States was starting to reach its full potential. We were becoming the most powerful and economically successful country in the history of the world and were beginning to make real strides toward social justice. We became the symbol for freedom around the world.

After World War II, people came off the farm and into small towns all over the South, bringing with them their independence, strong religious beliefs, and often a humorous take on life that probably helped them deal with the hard times so many of them endured.

There was an underlying sense of optimism tempered by fatalism: “You can’t control the weather. There’ll be a better crop next year.” There were absolutes. Your word was your bond. A lot depended on it if they were going to build a civil society. There was an understanding that their life
was better than their parents’ and a strong belief that their kids’ life would be better than their own. I really don’t believe that my parents’ generation thought that they “could be anything they wanted to be.” Theirs was a generation that just wanted life to be a little better than it had been. But they inculcated into the next generation—my generation—a firm belief that
we
could be anything we wanted to be. That belief, assumption really, has been the basis for any success I have had.

Growing up in Lawrenceburg, I was taught that I was supposed to handle the things that I had control over and deal with the rest “like a man.”