Fred Dalton Thompson

Fred Dalton Thompson, born August 19, 1942, at Colbert County Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama, was an American politician, attorney, lobbyist, actor, radio personality, and columnist who died on November 1, 2015. He was the son of Ruth Inez Thompson and Fletcher Session Thompson, a used car salesman from Lauderdale County, Alabama. Thompson grew up in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, where he attended public schools and graduated from Lawrence County High School in 1960. While in high school he played football, and after graduating he held jobs at the local post office and at a Murray bicycle assembly plant. He was the first member of his family to attend college, initially enrolling at Florence State College before transferring to Memphis State University, where he earned a double major in philosophy and political science in 1964. He subsequently received a scholarship to Vanderbilt University Law School, graduating with a Juris Doctor degree in 1967. At seventeen, in September 1959, he married Sarah Elizabeth Lindsey; the couple had three children — Freddie Dalton Thompson Jr., Daniel, and Elizabeth — before divorcing in 1985. Upon admission to the Tennessee bar in 1967, he shortened his first name from Freddie to Fred.

Thompson began his legal career as an assistant United States attorney from 1969 to 1972, prosecuting bank robberies and other federal cases. He managed Republican Senator Howard Baker's 1972 re-election campaign and subsequently served as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee during its 1973–1974 investigation of the Watergate scandal. In that role, he publicly questioned former White House aide Alexander Butterfield at a televised hearing, asking whether listening devices had been installed in the Oval Office, thereby revealing the existence of White House tape recordings. National Public Radio later described that session as a turning point in the investigation. Thompson published an account of his Watergate experience in his 1975 book At That Point in Time. In 1977, he represented Marie Ragghianti, a former Tennessee Parole Board chair who had been fired for refusing to release felons who had bribed aides to Governor Ray Blanton. A jury awarded Ragghianti $38,000 in back pay and ordered her reinstatement. During the 1980s, Thompson maintained law offices in Nashville and Washington, D.C., handling personal injury claims and white-collar defense work, with clients that included a German mining group and Toyota Motor Corporation. He also accepted appointments as special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1980 to 1981 and to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1982, and served on the Appellate Court Nominating Commission for the State of Tennessee from 1985 to 1987.

A Republican, Thompson was elected to the United States Senate from Tennessee in 1994 and served until 2003. In the final months of his Senate term in 2002, he joined the cast of the NBC series Law and Order, portraying Manhattan District Attorney Arthur Branch. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2008 election cycle. Following his Senate career, Thompson chaired the International Security Advisory Board at the United States Department of State, served on the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission, held membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute with a focus on national security and intelligence.

Throughout his career Thompson also maintained a substantial presence in film and television, frequently cast as governmental authority figures and military men. His screen credits included Matlock, Die Hard 2, The Hunt for Red October, Days of Thunder, Cape Fear, and In the Line of Fire, among other productions, as well as commercial work. He extended his performing career to the stage, appearing on Broadway in 2013 in A Time to Kill. Thompson was of primarily English ancestry, with distant Dutch roots, and was raised in the Churches of Christ tradition.