Grin and Bear It

He was interested in sports, and if Freddie Thompson wasn't what you'd call a finesse player—he was a mess of arms and legs running with a ball—he managed to lead Lawrenceburg High to the state championships in basketball and football. Yet even on the field he was a clown. During one football game, Thompson took a hard tackle and didn't get up. It looked as though he'd been knocked out. When his coach and teammates rushed over, Freddie opened his eyes and grinned. "How's the crowd taking it?" he asked. He kept still a few beats longer, then sprang to his feet and took in the cheers from the stands. Thompson was voted most outstanding athlete, but he never received the award. The school's teachers, fed up with his classroom antics, demanded he be stripped of the prize.

Thompson's interest in sports waned when he fell for Sarah Lindsey, a local beauty queen and daughter of a prominent family. She was a year ahead of him in school; he cut practice to spend time with her. A few months after she graduated, Sarah got pregnant. Thompson was 16. He proposed, but her parents wouldn't hear of it. Sarah was on her way to Vanderbilt to study English; they weren't about to let her tie herself down to a goof-off who they didn't believe had much of a future. Still, Sarah insisted that there was something special about Freddie, and she urged them to trust her. In September 1959, two weeks after Thompson's 17th birthday, they were married. They named their son, born the next spring, Fred Jr. A senior in high school, Thompson was a husband and father.

Sarah put off college and Thompson moved into her parents' house. He was through with sports; he needed to make money to support his new family, and he began working nights at her family's factory building church pews. Friends say they saw a change in him. No longer the clown, Thompson seemed determined to prove that Sarah's parents were wrong about him. "He studied more, socialized less," Moore recalls. "He basically focused on his family." With tutoring from Sarah, Thompson brought up his grades. His senior-year epigram, inscribed next to his picture in the yearbook, read: "The lazier a man is, the more he plans to do tomorrow."

That fall, the couple headed to nearby Florence State College in Alabama. For the first time in his life, Thompson learned what it was like to work hard. They had no money; Thompson dropped out of school and took on three jobs. He returned to school the next spring and majored in physical education, with the aim of becoming a high-school basketball coach. He didn't think he was cut out for anything else. With a second baby, daughter Betsy, on the way, the couple moved back to Tennessee and enrolled at Memphis State. But Thompson no longer saw himself coaching ball. Influenced by Sarah's uncle, a respected attorney, he set his sights on law school. To prepare, he took on a new double major: philosophy and political science. Still working odd jobs between classes, he managed to earn top grades, and won a scholarship to Vanderbilt Law School. His third child, Daniel, was born during his first year, and Thompson supported the family working nights as a motel desk clerk. In 1967, he graduated from law school near the top of his class.

The Fred Thompson who returned home to Lawrenceburg to work for Sarah's uncle barely resembled the class clown who'd left a few years earlier. "He had his feet on the ground and a good head on his shoulders," says Tom Crews, who has known Thompson since they were kids. "He had really matured." Now an ambitious country lawyer handling parking tickets, divorces and wills, Thompson also began dabbling in politics. In college, he'd read Barry Goldwater's influential Republican call to arms, "The Conscience of a Conservative." The book stuck with Thompson, and he decided to start a local Young Republicans committee. At the time, there wasn't much interest; most folks in Lawrenceburg were Democrats.

Still, Thompson persuaded Crews and other friends to join. In 1968, Thompson signed on as campaign manager for a local Republican congressional candidate. The bid failed, but Thompson's enthusiasm got him noticed by the state's GOP elite, including Baker, then a senator, and his protégé, an up-and-coming pol named Lamar Alexander. Thompson's name was passed to the Nixon White House, and in 1969, Thompson was rewarded with a job as assistant U.S. attorney in Nashville. Thompson was a natural in the performance theater of a courtroom. He prosecuted bank robbers and moonshiners, racking up one conviction after another. He liked the work, and he liked the attention it brought him. The star prosecutor wasn't shy about getting his name in the paper. When Baker ran for re-election in 1972, he asked Thompson to help manage his campaign. "There were so few Republicans in Middle Tennessee at the time," Alexander tells NEWSWEEK. "The truth is, he was about the only one we knew."