The Star Stays Out.

What happened to Fred Thompson?

Excuse me, but shouldn't Fred Thompson be gearing up for his presidential campaign about now? His admirers consider him a natural: charismatic, articulate, savvy, tough. His resume is one of the most unusual and appealing in politics. But he has endorsed his fellow Tennessean, Lamar Alexander, for president.

"I kept my options open," says Thompson, but "as time went on it just didn't feel right. For me, not having an inherent personal desire to run, there would have to be a very good reason. The person and the times must come together." His service as Republican counsel to the Watergate committee, his midlife career as a movie actor, his election to the Senate-all of these things, he says, came naturally and unexpectedly. "I have never been one to plan things out. In some respects, I'm the exact opposite of my buddy Lamar. Lamar sees a goal, he plans, and more likely than not he achieves what he wants. I don't do that."

Besides which, he says, "these are kind of strange times. I think that, as a nation, we're in a caretaker stage right now. We've had peace and prosperity. There's no perceived need for any particular direction." Our era, he maintains, is one of "small ideas," as exemplified by President Clinton's push for school uniforms. A leader has to be prepared not only to follow public opinion, but to suggest a different course. And "that's not the way I want to spend my time: trying to convince people they're not as well off as they think they are."

In the Republican sweep of 1994, no politician showed more promise than Thompson. He was, in fact, the pride of the whole, eager bunch. Mere weeks after the election-before he was sworn in, even-Thompson was tabbed by then-majority leader Bob Dole to give the GOP response to an economic address by Clinton. The senator-elect's five-minute talk wowed both the party establishment and the press. "A Star Is Born," ran the New York Times headline the next day. The comparisons to the great Reagan himself came fast and furious. A New Republic article on the senator was titled "Reagan Redux." The mentioning class began to mention him as a possible vice-presidential nominee in 1996, and certainly as a contender for the top prize in 2000.

Says one Republican insider, now grown cold on Thompson, "We were so excited to have him. He was so magnetic, so talented-not geeky like the rest of us. Everyone wanted to love him, especially [majority leader] Trent Lott. We were going to have a camera guy! He could have been our champion! But Trent got his heart broken over him, as so many of us did."

What happened is that Thompson, as chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, led the investigation into the campaign-finance abuses of 1996-this was the "Asia fundraising scandal." Republicans wanted White House blood; and Thompson, in their view, failed to draw enough. One veteran Republican operative says, flatly, "He made a hash of it," outfoxed and out-bullied by the Democrats. Thompson's conservative critics also lament his support for campaign-finance reform and his antipathy to tort reform. On top of all that, they think he seems joyless, arrogant, and hostile to the political p's and q's that ordinarily make for success in Washington.

In short, there is a perception in GOP-land that Thompson's career is stalled, if not defunct. The mentioners do not mention him as veep next year. After the conclusion of the fundraising investigation, one column in The Tennessean began, "A year ago, [Thompson] looked like a rising star. Today he looks more like a fading comet." He may continue to be chairman of a powerful committee; but Reagan, mutter his detractors, has yet to be reduxed.

Thompson takes these complaints largely in stride. He is a thoughtful, plainspoken, physically imposing fellow, the only human being you will ever see rock back in a large wingback chair. He points out that he has held office for only four years, and, in Washington, "people get built up fast, and they get taken down fast." Sure, conservatives hungry for a spokesman were tickled by that response to Clinton's address back in 1994, but "the idea that they would build me up based on reading a five-minute speech into a monitor is kind of silly." And then they were "disappointed that I wasn't able to 'get Bill Clinton' in my hearings, so they consider the hearings a failure. That's just part of life."

As for the impression that he is unhappy in the Senate-one observer reports that he often scowls and seems to grind his teeth-Thompson says, smiling, "That's just my natural countenance." He then allows, "I'm agitated and frustrated a good part of the time. There's no question about it. A lot of it has to do with scheduling and the way the place operates. Maybe I haven't been here long enough to settle in and get the flow of it." He notes that "I waited until I was a little older before I came here, so it's not that being a senator is in and of itself enough to cause you to walk around with a smile on your face all the time. If I were 36 instead of 56, maybe I'd feel differently."

Was Thompson, like most of his party, disappointed in the outcome of his Asia- gate probe? "Of course I was disappointed, on many levels. Mainly on the level of truth and justice." But "on the level of process and doing as well as we could with the opportunity we had, I'm satisfied"-though "you can't be completely satisfied when you know you got stiffed, in certain respects."

Thompson is referring chiefly to the behavior of his committee's Democrats, the memory of which visibly appalls him even today, a year and a half later. Republicans faulted him for bending over backwards to accommodate the minority; that minority-the Democrats-tarred him as a partisan witch-hunter anyway. Thompson says that he had Watergate in the back of his mind-"too much so, in some respects"-and tried to follow the Watergate model, which demands a certain broadness.

"A lot of my friends," he says, "thought that if we could just get something on the Democrats-and God knows there was a lot to get-we'd be in clover." But Thompson opted to tread lightly, recognizing that "today the accuser is almost as suspect as the accused. There's a good deal of skepticism about all of us in the political process"-which, he argues, happens to be "the major part of Clinton's success." Indeed, "that's why he survived." What Thompson had not sufficiently appreciated is the vitriol, coupled with a knack for sabotage, of the Democrats.

"There was nothing I could have done," he pleads, "to cause John Glenn [the senior Democrat on the committee] to try to have a fair, down-the-middle investigation." Could he hazard a guess as to why Glenn, in the waning days of a long and relatively dignified career, chose to play the part of White House protector? After a long pause, he answers, "I got some ideas, but I'd just rather not get into it. I can only say that it's one of the most disappointing things that I've ever encountered. I've been around hearings and practiced a lot of law and all, but I didn't expect that. I can't read his mind, but it was consistent, it was persistent, and there never was a moment when he deviated from what he had decided to do."

What about the suspicion that there was an exchange between Glenn and the president: obstruction for a valedictory space flight? "Well, that's between him and the good Lord," says Thompson. "I certainly don't know the answer and never will."

Thompson has concluded that traditional investigative hearings are a thing of the past. As it stands, "You have to find out all you're going to find out beforehand and use your hearings to demonstrate what you've already discovered." Why? Because "there's too much partisanship and too short an attention span among the media, especially television. We were deemed a failure literally the day after our hearings started." Most of the press considered the hearings too dull, too cautious, too fussy. Thompson held some off-the-record meetings with reporters, "and I said, 'Look, guys: Pay attention. I don't have John Dean and a taping system, but there's some very interesting stuff here. This was the most corrupt political campaign we've ever seen. You need to keep up with it, even if it doesn't seem blockbuster.' And they all nodded, said they understood. Bullsh**: They didn't. I should have saved my breath. The name of the game is the president: Are you going to get him or not?"

The Asia-gate investigation led by Rep. Chris Cox in the House, Thompson believes, shows that "you can still succeed." (The results of that inquiry are as yet unknown to the public.) "But they didn't have hearings. They did all their work behind closed doors, in secret, which doesn't necessarily portend good things."

Not only was "ol' Fred," as the senator calls himself, unable to destroy the president over China; many conservatives are miffed that he voted to acquit Clinton on one of the impeachment counts-that concerning perjury. (He voted to convict on obstruction of justice.) Thompson explains that he found himself "encumbered" by his legal education; the perjury charge was inconsistent with "the facts, the Constitution, and my perception of what the Founding Fathers had in mind."

As for Clinton himself, Thompson has given this extraordinary figure some thought: "He's a man of his times. He's forgiven for more than people have traditionally been forgiven. Less is expected of him. We're more into personal relations and everyone's motivations than we are what they stand for." Because of nonstop and pervasive media, "the president is there with you, lives with you, on a daily basis. And we're more comfortable with a buddy than we are with a father." The remarkable thing about Clinton is "his utter lack of shame. He literally-I mean this-has no shame. He's not affected the way normal people are by humiliation. For him, it's all a part of the game. It's a matter of maneuvering to the next point. And it serves him well in the kind of environment we have now."

Confronting further conservative criticisms, Thompson cheerfully acknowledges that he is "off the [Republican] reservation" on campaign-finance reform. He contends that "it's just not right to take large sums of money from people who have legislation before you. It's that basic. The idea of mixing policy and money in that way is just so obviously a problem . . . It's kind of like an elephant in a bathtub: If you don't see it at first glance, chances are you never will." The situation "may not be fixable," he says-but ought to be.

In answer to his critics on tort reform-one of them complains that he is "in the pocket" of his fellow trial lawyers-Thompson has a single word, which he freely expands on: federalism. The question, says Thompson, should not be, "Do we think people are being sued too much this week?" It should be, "Do we believe that certain decisions ought to be made at certain levels of government?" Moreover, "we're not supposed to legislate by anecdote." For every "coffee-in-the-lap" story, Thompson and others are happy to provide a tale of a litigant unjustly squashed.

Fred Thompson's political career is not dead; but it is quieter than it was at the beginning, when balloons and confetti were everywhere, and hopes were at their highest. He is content with his committee positions and disavows any interest in a leadership post. He may indeed run for president someday, "if I feel, This is my time and place. It would have to be soon, obviously." Thompson, says one close to him, is like Reagan, not only in his naturalness before the camera, but in that he has other places to go: He didn't make his career in politics; he may well end it outside of politics.

In the meantime, says the senator, "my main ambition is to be involved in some good causes, do exactly what I think is right, and at the end of the day feel that I've made a difference"-a decent aspiration, however modest.