Thompson’s truck carries dual image
FRANKLIN, Tenn. – It’s just an old red pickup, with a gouged and rusted hood and an expired U.S. Senate license plate, parked behind his mother’s home off a busy highway in this gentrifying town south of Nashville.
But for Fred Thompson, the 1990 Chevy was more than a means of transportation. It was a good-luck charm that boosted his first political campaign in 1994, when his prospects were flagging.
Like Bill Clinton’s saxophone, Ronald Reagan’s cowboy hat and Jimmy Carter’s sweaters, the red truck became shorthand for something the politician was trying to sell, and might again, if Thompson, as is widely expected, announces in September that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination.
To Thompson’s supporters, the red truck signaled his conservative credentials and folksy ways. To Thompson’s opponents, it was a stage prop for a sophisticated Washington insider playing a plain-talking country lawyer, a way to flash populist credentials to which the Republican lobbyist and actor was hardly entitled.
Thompson’s 86-year-old mother, Ruth, could not be less impressed with either interpretation. “I don’t know why everyone’s so interested in that truck,” she said as she stood in the doorway of her modest brick home one recent humid morning. “It won’t even start. The battery’s dead!”
But in the late spring of 1994, the truck helped jump-start Thompson’s Senate campaign. Thompson was the front-runner for the GOP nomination, but Rep. Jim Cooper, his presumed Democratic opponent, had a big lead in the polls, greater name recognition and a lot more money. Thompson was in the doldrums.
“He was a very unhappy candidate,” said political consultant Tom Ingram, who masterminded the campaign. “He was complaining about all the Republican events – the coffees and teas and chicken dinners. So I said, ‘What would you like to do?’ “
Thompson, the son of a used car dealer who had grown up in modest circumstances, told Ingram he would like to get a truck and drive around the state meeting people. Up to that point, Thompson had been tooling around Tennessee in a Lincoln Town Car.
“So why don’t you do that?” said Ingram, who is now chief of staff to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and part of an informal support network for Thompson, an actor known for his role as the district attorney on NBC’s “Law & Order.”
In August 1994, Thompson leased, and later purchased, a used, lipstick red Chevy pickup with manual transmission, an extended cab and maroon velour seats.
But he didn’t just ditch the Town Car. He also shed his tailored suits and ties for jeans, work shirts and beat-up cowboy boots. “It’s not a costume,” he told supporters at one rally. “It’s what we wear where I come from.”
Thompson may not have been a country lawyer, but he knew how to act like one. A Knoxville newspaper reported that he gave speeches standing in the truck’s bed and invited voters and reporters along for his “truck-capades.”
Thompson’s opponent, the son of one-time Tennessee Gov. Prentice Cooper, was furious at what he believed to be Thompson’s affectation. He ran a commercial featuring a shot of Thompson’s Washington home and called him a “Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon-spreading millionaire Washington special-interest lobbyist.”
Cooper’s attempt to paint Thompson as a phony didn’t work. Thompson captured 60 percent of the vote, then drove the pickup to Washington for his swearing-in.
To this day, Thompson is attacked for what turned out to be a successful bit of political stagecraft. “He was about as close to being a salt-of-the-earth Southerner as Truman Capote,” Noam Scheiber wrote in the New Republic, “and it was a stretch to think average Tennesseans wouldn’t pick up on the dissonance. Yet the gambit proved wildly successful.”
Ingram doubted the truck would play a part in any Thompson presidential campaign, should the former senator decide to jump in.
“You gotta be careful about using things that worked in a statewide race,” he said. “They don’t necessarily translate into a national race.”