Fred Thompson larger than life on screen or Hill

Fred Dalton Thompson was a big man with a big voice, a big, diverse career and a multifaceted life. That life came to a quiet end Sunday when, according to a statement from his family, the familiar lawyer, actor and politician died from a recurrence of lymphoma at his Nashville home. He was 73.

He became a successful figure in both Washington and Hollywood who would earn wealth and fame. But neither his politics nor his acting needed scripting for Thompson to understand the reality of working families' lives. An Alabama native and the son of an automobile salesman, Thompson grew up in Tennessee where his size, strength and skills made him a star athlete. In his first year of marriage to his first wife, the couple lived in public housing; he worked his way through college and law school in a post office, a motel and a bicycle factory.

Though he was an unimpressive student in high school, his mind turned out to be at least as strong and agile as his body: He became an assistant U.S. attorney just two years after his graduation from law school at Vanderbilt, and later joined the reelection campaign of Tennessee's Republican U.S. Sen. Howard Baker.

It was an important and historic convergence of two men -- Baker and Thompson -- and a moment: the unfolding Watergate scandal enveloping the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Baker would name Thompson to be chief minority counsel on the Senate select committee investigating the Watergate break-in and cover-up. It is Thompson who is now generally credited with having brought to light the existence of a secret taping system in the Nixon Oval Office -- the proverbial "smoking gun" that would force Nixon to resign in disgrace.

After returning to private practice in Tennessee, Thompson would be cast to play himself in a 1985 movie about a high-profile 1977 whistleblower case in which he had been chief plaintiff counsel, and it launched an on-and-off acting career that would land him in several prominent film and television roles.

In 1994 he ran in, and easily won, a special election to fill the unexpired Senate term of then Vice President Al Gore, and was just as easily reelected to a full term two years later. He retired from the Senate when his term ended in 2003, and would return to acting in perhaps his most famous role -- a five-year stint as District Attorney Arthur Branch on TV's long-running "Law & Order."

Fred Thompson was a lifelong conservative even most liberals couldn't help but like, which makes his passing all the more poignant in these bitterly and sometimes poisonously uncompromising political times.

Gore said of Thompson that his "extraordinary integrity while working with Sen. Howard Baker on the Watergate committee helped our nation find its way. I was deeply inspired by his matter-of-fact, no-nonsense moral courage in that crucible. Tennessee and our nation owe a great debt to Fred Thompson."

This story was originally published November 2, 2015 at 4:49 PM with the headline "Fred Thompson larger than life on screen or Hill."