PERFECTLY IN CHARACTER

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

Fred Thompson has always been cast in parts he was made for. Each character--the admiral in The Hunt for Red October, the White House chief of staff in In the Line of Fire, the CIA director in No Way Out--was a gruff, folksy, take-charge type, a guy just like--well, Fred Thompson. He got his Hollywood break literally playing himself in Marie, the movie version of a celebrated case he had handled as a trial lawyer, laying bare the clemency-selling scandal that landed a Tennessee Governor in prison. And he had already been a Senator on the screen by the time Tennessee voters got around to electing him one.

Look for him next in a part that should come just as naturally, when he becomes the point man for Republicans pursuing the scandals that have sprung up around the Clinton White House. After only two years in the Senate, Thompson stands to become chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, with the Senate's most wide-ranging permanent investigative subcommittee at his disposal.

Thompson has said he is not interested in going over the Whitewater ground laboriously covered by the past two Congresses. But the Democratic Party's dubious fund-raising practices are fertile territory for someone whose zeal for campaign-finance reform has not endeared him to his colleagues. Pressure for a full-blown congressional investigation intensified last week when Attorney General Janet Reno rejected requests for an independent counsel. And Thompson has suggested that there still may be questions worth raising about how the White House handled the firing of its travel office or how it gathered FBI files on prominent Republicans. With so many possible transgressions for him to probe, Thompson may want to borrow his favorite line as Die Hard 2's unflappable Dulles Airport chief air-traffic controller: "Stack 'em, pack 'em and rack 'em."

The part will feel like something of a sequel to the 6-ft. 6-in. Tennessean, whose face seems permanently fixed in a leaden-browed scowl. He got his first test before the lights and cameras during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings. As the panel's 30-year-old Republican counsel, Thompson put aside party loyalty to ask ex-Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield the question that revealed the existence of a taping system in the White House. Says Thompson's mentor, Howard Baker, who was the Watergate Committee's top Republican: "He's a man of deep conviction and great steadiness."

The son of a used-car dealer from Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, Thompson earned his way through Memphis State and Vanderbilt Law School selling shoes door to door and working in a bicycle factory. He was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Tennessee when Baker recruited him for the Watergate Committee.

Thompson has been guarded of late in his comments about the Administration. But in an interview a few days before the election, he pronounced himself "mightily, mightily disgusted" with revelations of Democratic fund-raising irregularities, which he said made Nixon's tactic of shaking down corporate contributions seem "pretty paltry in comparison." For Clinton to try to deflect the controversy by recommitting himself to a bill--co-sponsored by Thompson--that would ban many of the President's own campaign practices "shows breathtaking audacity," the Senator added.

Even before he came to the Senate, Thompson had little patience for chasing the money it takes to get elected. Bouncing along dark Tennessee roads from one fund raiser to the next, he would give his campaign manager, Bill Lacy, long disquisitions on the flaws of the current system. An underdog against a better-financed Democrat, Thompson was finally exasperated enough by conventional campaigning to don battered boots and lease a red pickup to travel the state talking about how "Ol' Fred" would bring common sense to Washington. Voters loved the whole bit, even when it came from a rich lawyer with a Washington lobbying practice.

Washington has been similarly enthralled. The week he became a Senator, Thompson was selected to give the G.O.P. response to Clinton's televised announcement of the tax-cut plan he had cobbled together in the wake of the devastating 1994 election. Thompson delivered it sitting casually atop a desk, and it lasted only five minutes. But it was enough to produce the drooling headline a star is born on Frank Rich's column in the New York Times.

Having promised to serve no more than two terms in the Senate, Thompson has shown little regard for its clubby folkways. He quickly signed on to his friend John McCain's campaign-finance-reform bill and began battling for such internally unpopular measures as term limits. Two years in a row, he has killed otherwise automatic congressional pay raises by demanding they be voted on separately.

At the same time, however, the experience of Watergate has made Thompson wary of what is sometimes done in the name of reform. He believes that the laws passed in its wake actually created some of the abuses that riddle the system today. For instance, political-action committees, now considered the very essence of special-interest insiderism, were intended as tools for the little guy, giving small donors a chance to gain more influence by pooling their contributions. "It shows me the difficulty of micromanaging this problem with legislation," Thompson says.

That Watergate paralyzed Washington, leaving little energy for getting anything else done, was not its worst legacy, in Thompson's eyes. Congress took advantage of a weakened Chief Executive to pass laws that permanently undermined the presidency, giving Congress more say in areas that range from committing troops to combat to forcing the President into spending the money it votes. Says Thompson: "It really has to do with the balance of power, and checks and balances. When you have a White House under siege, those things tend to get out of kilter."

Thompson may have other reasons to be concerned about preserving the powers of the President. He is being mentioned as one of his party's best prospects for the year 2000. Of course, another Tennessean is Clinton's understudy; by then, Al Gore will have had eight years to learn the role.