Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (17 page)

A
LOT OF CHANGES
were taking place, many of them within me. School was taking me to places that I had never been before. I felt like I’d been thrown in the lake and was discovering I knew how to swim. In fact, I loved the water. The professors, the subjects, the library books I checked out for extra reading, all presented me with a vast array of new ideas and questions that sparked my imagination and made me hungry for more. In other words, college was doing for me exactly what it was supposed to do. Never far from my mind was what was enabling this transformation: If I had been a single guy living in that frat house on Mynders Street, the only serious ideas I would have had could have fit in a thimble with room left over. And they would have had nothing to do with Socrates or Plato unless they sold beer or wore skirts.

I was drawn to the subjects of philosophy and political science, even serving as president of the Philosophy Club. I
suppose imprecise subjects where all ideas are on the table were natural choices for a guy who had still not quite mastered the multiplication tables. How do we know what we know? Is it through our experience or our senses, which can deceive us, or do humans inherently know certain things? Are ethics and morality objective or subjective? I was especially interested in the interrelation of the two subjects and how powerful ideas precede political movements—how the supposed nonpolitical conclusions of philosophers like some of the Greeks, Locke, Hegel, and Bentham form the basis of political movements for years, even centuries thereafter. Philosophy had to do with the purpose and nature of man. It seemed to me that once you resolved those questions in your mind, then your politics are pretty well defined for you.

I read all I could get my hands on about the French Revolution. The French Revolution served as the opening salvo—starting with Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—in a war of ideas about the nature of man that has been fought ever since. Rousseau viewed man as essentially innocent, corrupted by society, and if unfettered, he would live happily ever after. He supported the Revolution, in spite of all its excesses, as a good thing that would serve as a beneficial example for mankind. Burke believed that man tended to err and would engage in excesses if unrestrained by tradition, authority, and God. He predicted that the Revolution would lead to more bloodshed and misery than good. To me, Burke won the first philosophical battle between liberalism and
conservatism. However, my own political views were developing rather slowly.

I didn’t quite yet see how all of this translated into the politics of the day. Back home when someone would ask me what my major was in college and I would say philosophy, I could invariably tell they were thinking: “What in the heck is he going to do with that?” So I would add with a straight face, “I am planning on coming back to Lawrenceburg and opening up a little philosophy shop on the square.” Some would laugh, and some said they thought that it would be a good idea.

For me—with all that I learned from my parents around the dinner table and my long talks with the Lindsey men—the basic political issue was “What is the proper role of government?” I was affected by countervailing factors. There was the Scotch-Irish Southern part of me that didn’t want anybody telling me what to do—especially the government (although I didn’t mind taking government school loans). I saw myself as independent (even if I wasn’t). Mainly, I saw myself not as I was—on the bottom rung of the economic ladder—but as the man I planned to be. There was simply not one of my acquaintances who had worked hard and behaved himself who wasn’t doing pretty well.

Dad was a good example of that. As I was growing up, my folks had very little tolerance for people who were “lazy and no-’count” (with the possible exception of myself). The first question upon hearing of a good girl’s impending marriage
was “Is he a hard worker?” If so, then morals and character were pretty well assumed. And identifying with “the little man” was part of my heritage. Ma and Pa Thompson had a little bust of Franklin Roosevelt on the “whatnot shelf” in their living room. Memories of the Great Depression never completely left them—and never left my mom and dad, for that matter.

In my various jobs I had never been particularly respectful of authority. Even at my in-laws’ factory I had a run-in with the foreman who didn’t like the way I was stacking lumber and made what I thought were some unnecessary comments about it. If you were a “working man” you understood your position, but nobody that I knew would put up with disparaging comments even from his boss. None of this had translated into any particular sympathy for a political party. Oscar had actually taken me with him to an organizing meeting of the Lawrence County Democratic Party a year or so earlier.

On November 22, 1963, I was walking home from class when I heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Like everyone else I was shocked and dismayed. Not knowing anything else to do, I went to the office of the head of the Political Science Department, Dr. Edwin Buell, whom I respected and who taught two of my classes. Others were also gathered there. We all had the need to share this terrible experience and talk about it. There was an immediate and substantial sentiment that right-wing rhetoric had instigated this tragedy. Dr. Buell pointed out that even if that
was true, the conservative leader, Barry Goldwater, could not be blamed for such talk.

I remember being pleasantly surprised by the professor’s reaction. Earlier that year, we were required to do a book report. I chose
The Road to Serfdom
by F. A. Hayek, a conservative classic that demonstrated the folly of centralized economic planning and the loss of freedom that comes from it. Dr. Buell approved the selection, but only if I would incorporate the work of a Hayek critic, Herman Finer’s
The Road to Reaction
. I was quite certain that no other student was being asked to provide “balance” in his book report. These two incidents demonstrated to me that the professor was basically a fair-minded man but when it came to ideology he simply couldn’t let the conservative viewpoint go unchallenged.

Sarah’s folks had given us a little portable TV for Christmas, and we watched in anguish along with the rest of the nation as President Kennedy’s little boy, not much older than Tony, saluted as the horse-drawn carriage carrying his daddy’s coffin rolled by. I had no strong feelings one way or the other about Kennedy as a president, but the human tragedy of those few days focused me intensely on the fragility of life and the threat of harm out there in the real world. I watched President Johnson’s touching speech after his swearing-in. I took note of his Texas accent and his seeming sincerity. “Maybe this fellow will keep me in the Democratic Party,” I thought.

Youth and deadlines allowed me to refocus quickly. Not to mention a constant strain of life’s inevitable trials, such as everyone in the family coming down with intestinal flu at the same time, or having the car stolen at work one night with our Christmas packages in the trunk (thoughtfully, I left the key in the ignition, so the thieves could have a merrier holiday) and walking home miles in the snow. I developed my sales and diplomatic skills, as I was able to fit quite a few women with size 9 feet into size 7½ shoes, at their insistence. There is a whole generation of ladies out there with crippled feet, and I did my part. “Looks good to me, ma’am.”

The grades kept improving—pretty much all A’s and B’s. Although I could have gone to several law schools after three years of college, I wanted to take a shot at getting into Vanderbilt, which required a college degree. Sarah had already graduated, and we decided that we would stay at Memphis straight through the summer of 1964 to make up for the semester that I had lost and get my degree. One day I received a call from Dr. Buell. He told me that Tulane Law School gave a full-tuition scholarship to a Memphis State political science student, and he had selected me to be the recipient. I was ecstatic. But I still wanted to go to Vanderbilt. Not only was it in Tennessee, but Vanderbilt had long represented achievement that I, until recently, considered to be way beyond my reach—both scholastically and financially.

I applied to Vanderbilt with a generous letter of recommendation from an unlikely source—Mrs. Buckner, the
teacher who led the effort to stop my “Most Athletic” designation as a high school junior. A Vanderbilt graduate, she’d kept up with my efforts since that time (easy to do in a small town) and was more than happy to help me with regard to Vanderbilt Law School. She was a significant reminder of a simple but powerful lesson: When you don’t do well, bad things tend to happen to you. And when you try to do your best, you often get lucky. Soon we received the word we had been waiting for. I had been accepted into Vanderbilt Law School with a half-tuition scholarship. That was it. We would make up the difference in loans and work.

There was just one final hurdle to overcome during my final semester: a liberal professor. Many conservative students across the country know what I am talking about.

By my senior year, I had increasingly grown enamored of conservative thinking, and when it became apparent that Barry Goldwater was going to be the Republican nominee for president, I read his little book,
The Conscience of a Conservative
, and it had a powerful impact on me. It carried a message of individualism and freedom. It laid out the ways in which government was growing too big and stifling individual initiative. His words rang true to me. They placed into focus and provided a landing place for my many scattered political thoughts. Also, they were being presented by what appeared to be a somewhat cantankerous straight shooter with an accent that could just as well come from the hills of Tennessee as the desert in Arizona. Goldwater was
not your average politician. He and his thinking inspired me. I even liked the fact that the experts said he couldn’t win the presidency. It all appealed to my youthful idealism.

Although my friends and family had conservative viewpoints, the Republican Party had little standing in the South; everyone still seemed to be trying to reconcile their values with the policies of the Democratic Party. But it’s a reconciliation that I could not make. So although my state, my country, and my dad, along with most of the Lindseys, were Democratic, I decided I was going to be a Republican. Pap is the only Republican I had really known, and by this time he had passed away. So in the beginning it was just Barry and me. Besides, I wasn’t smoking pot or demonstrating in the street, and this allowed me to be a rebel too, in my own way.

So with the confidence of a general with no army behind him, I would sit in my liberal professor’s history course and take it all in. He would periodically stop reading his lecture notes long enough to launch into an anti-U.S. diatribe. By this time, I was reading anything I could get my hands on that was political, and I discovered that he was getting a lot of his material from
The New Republic
, the main liberal magazine of the day. I, on the other hand, was getting rebuttal material from William F. Buckley’s
National Review
. It made for a combustible combination. I would raise my hand and beg to disagree with him on his assertions, rebutting his talking points with my own.

One day the subject was the downtrodden condition of
some little country and how their plight was the fault of the good old U.S. of A. You might say I hit a nerve that day, because in the middle of our little back-and-forth he picked up his papers and marched out of the class, stopping at the door to say, “Be careful, Mr. Thompson, you are going to wake up with your head missing some morning.” From the hand of some peasant, I presumed. Being quick on the uptake, I immediately concluded that he was not happy with me—on a personal basis. Actually, my thought was more along the lines of “Holy ——.” I could imagine an F on my final transcript and a reevaluation by Vanderbilt. After a restless night, I went to the dean of students and told him what had happened and that I didn’t deserve this impending doom. He was noncommittal. But when the grades came out, I received a B in the class. And I still had my head … and a future in Nashville as a law student.

Our two and a half years in Memphis was a special time in our lives. Betsy had been born. We had proven to ourselves that in fact we could do the things we had set out to do. But it was also bittersweet in some ways. The fact is that I cannot remember the name of one person I graduated with. We simply did not spend any time at all on campus except when we were having class. Even though the trade-offs made it more than worth it, we clearly missed out on some relationships that could have lasted a lifetime. I had started keeping a journal while in Memphis. With rare exceptions I would set out the day’s happenings and my observations on them and
the world at night before I went to bed. I kept this up for seven or eight years until I lost the journals, apparently in one of our many moves. But many times I have thought about the first entry I made in that journal one night at home in Memphis. I remember starting out with a statement that was somewhat defensive because I had never considered the keeping of a “diary” to be a very manly thing to do. Therefore, I noted that I was going to call it a journal instead of a diary and that I was keeping this journal because after I had become a United States senator, perhaps future generations of Thompsons would be interested in my early years. It was totally tongue in cheek—meant to be humorous.