Watergate prosecutor. Movie star. Senator.
To me, Fred Dalton Thompson, who died Sunday at age 73 after a life you couldn’t make up, was “Boss.”
I was 23 and full of idealism. Back then all I knew was that I was a die-hard Republican and wanted to work in politics. I had moved to Washington, D.C., eight months prior with no car. Suddenly I was hired by my home state’s senator to be his driver.
There is something special about working for your home-state senator or congressman on Capitol Hill, but for me it went beyond that. My mom and aunts grew up with Fred Thompson in Lawrenceburg. His father, Fletcher, worked at my granddad’s car lot, Caperton Chevrolet. This is a man I’d heard about my whole life, not to mention seen in movies like Days of Thunder, The Hunt for Red October and Cape Fear.
Being a U.S. senator’s driver and being without a car was clearly not going to work. I flew home to Nashville, drove my car up and spent the weekend frantically trying to learn the D.C. road system. My first driving experience with him was awkward, to say the least. He gets in the car and doesn’t say a word. I drive him from the Capitol to his apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue while he reads the newspaper I had waiting for him. Not a single word is spoken the whole time, until he gets out and says, “Thank you.”
One thing I realized quickly about the Senator was that despite being a politician, a movie star and great on camera, he was an introvert. It took a while for him to open up. Staffers who had worked for him a year would ask, “What’s he really like?” At that point I’d only been driving him for a couple of weeks. Not a lot of small talk at first. But we went from riding silently to singing Hank Jr. loudly on the way to the airport.
I’ve had some cool jobs: chief of staff to the Tennessee House of Representatives, executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party, now president of my own political consulting company. But I learned more about politics and life in general being Fred Thompson’s driver than anything I’ve done since. When talking about my career once, I was bemoaning my lack of a clear direction. He responded, “Hell, I’m almost 60 and I still don’t know what I wanna be when I grow up.” That’s one thing I learned from him: Life is a journey.
I have so many favorite memories. We drove past the Department of Justice one time and I said, (continue reading at Nashville Scene)