How Fred Thompson got to Hollywood - RIP

How Fred Thompson got to Hollywood - The Washington Post

By Justin Wm. Moyer November 2, 2015

To a generation of Americans old enough to remember the Watergate hearings, Fred Thompson, who died Sunday at 73, was the Senate attorney whose question to a White House aide prompted the revelation that President Richard Nixon recorded conversations in the Oval Office. ...

Yet Thompson didn’t plan the second career that, after his forgettable 2008 presidential campaign, is a large part of his legacy. He blossomed as a thespian half-a-decade after Watergate when, as a
lawyer back in Nashville, he reluctantly took a very real case — and ended up playing himself in the movie of the story.

“The decision to take one of the least remunerative and longest-shot cases I’d ever had led to one of the most interesting chapters of my life,” he wrote in “Teaching the Pig to Dance,” a 2010 memoir. “It’s like I opened the door to what I thought was the courthouse and walked into Disneyland.”

In 1976, Marie Ragghianti, a mother of three who put herself through Vanderbilt University, was appointed chairman of Tennessee’s parole board by Gov. Ray Blanton (D). Yet she ran afoul of Blanton when, after learning the governor took cash in exchange for a convict’s clemency, she started voting against his recommendations. In 1978, she was fired after what turned out to be a largely groundless investigation of her expense records. She was also put under state surveillance, set up for DUI charges and falsely alleged to have stolen credit cards.

So, Ragghianti went to see a Tennessee lawyer she had seen on TV during Watergate: Fred Thompson.

“I tried to talk her out of a lawsuit,” Thompson wrote. “They could make her life miserable in ways that she could not understand.” Another problem: “Marie had uttered the most terrifying words that a lawyer can ever hear: ‘I am broke.'”

But Ragghianti’s story tugged at his heartstrings.

“The more I thought about it, the more I knew she was right about one thing: What they had done to her was cruel and unfair,” Thompson wrote. “… I never did like Blanton anyway. It would be fun to rattle his cage.”

The client secured her lawyer. As it turned out, the FBI was already on to Blanton’s scheming. Not only did Thompson and Ragghianti triumph in their civil case, but the governor was sentenced to three years in prison for extortion, among other charges. ...

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