Bigger Than Life

He found himself at a little table in the corner of a crowded Senate staff room, forced to move his chair every time someone went to the restroom. He worked long hours, ate late dinners at the Monocle or the Carroll Arms, and stayed in a small apartment with two other staff members, hurling paperbacks across the room to get his friend Howard Liebengood to stop snoring. He sometimes returned home for the weekend to see his family.

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"It didn't start out being that big a deal," he says. "It grew. And then you go out and then everybody on the street is talking about it, and you realize this thing you've been working on for several weeks has grown enormous."

President Richard M. Nixon cursed when he learned that Baker had hired "that kid" from Tennessee. Baker reassured Nixon, "He's tough. He's 6 feet 5 inches, a big mean fella." But months later, Nixon was still cursing when Thompson's name came up. "He's dumb as hell," he growled. "Fred Thompson. Who is he?"

Scott Armstrong, a Democratic staff member, thinks Baker intentionally hired someone who didn't know the ins and outs of Washington. "He was a retriever. Baker would throw the stick and he'd come back with it," he says. "He's an actor. He plays roles. When Baker wasn't around, he was at sea. No one was writing the script for him."

Baker argues otherwise: "We were all in over our heads, as it turns out. But one of the things I liked about Fred then . . . is that he wasn't overwhelmed by it."

In Armstrong's view, Thompson and Baker were working with the White House to shape its defense -- "trying to put the fix in for Nixon."

Thompson calls that "absurd" and says his contacts with Nixon's aides were appropriate, a view shared today by several Democratic staffers who recall Thompson fondly. "The White House trusted nobody. I don't think they even trusted Fred or Senator Baker," says Rufus Edmisten, a Democratic staffer. Terry Lenzner, another Democratic staffer, grew to recognize Thompson as "a solid guy and a good thinker" and says: "By the end of the investigation I had complete trust in him."

Thompson would eventually write a book about Watergate, "At That Point in Time," in which he acknowledged his reluctance to face Nixon's culpability in Watergate: He wrote that he was subconsciously looking for "a reason to believe that Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, was not a crook."

Until Watergate, Thompson hadn't appreciated the power of television. "Even I, with my trial lawyer's egotism, was taken aback one night when Sarah and I walked into a restaurant and several young couples broke into applause," he wrote.

Alexander Butterfield, a former White House aide, told Senate investigators behind closed doors that Nixon had installed a secret taping system in the White House. Thompson wasn't in the room for the revelation, but he was allowed to ask the key question when Butterfield testified on national television: "Are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?"

Edmisten remembers one day, after the secret tapes revealed Nixon's involvement in the coverup, when someone said to Thompson, "Fred, it looks like your man's gone."

"Fred didn't answer . . .," Edmisten says. "He just had this pained look and sort of shook his head and walked on."