Portfolio: In Only Attempt At High-Profile Senate Hearing, Thompson "Blew It"

In his many film and television roles, Fred Thompson has almost always played a strong executive. On Law & Order, as Arthur Branch, the inexplicably Southern and conservative Manhattan district attorney, he's invariably telling Sam Waterston's deputy-D.A. character to settle the case. In The Hunt for Red October, he commands an aircraft carrier, fighting the Soviets.

Closer to the White House, he's an irritable chief of staff in In the Line of Fire, and in two other films he, perhaps presciently, plays the president. But Thompson's real executive experience is limited. He has never run a large organization, as did that other actor to whom he's often likened, Ronald Reagan, California's governor for eight years. Compared with this year's crop of presidential wannabes, he has less executive experience than, say, Mitt Romney or even former Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich. True, as a lawyer in Tennessee, Thompson won acclaim for representing a whistleblower in a cash-for-clemency scheme, and he did a respectable job as the Republican counsel on the Senate Watergate committee. But running anything? Please. You could argue that Thompson's only executive experience came at an outpost called the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, where he wielded the chairman's gavel from 1997 to 2001. Running a committee involves setting an agenda and bringing people together; it takes some executive skill but not as much as, for example, a governorship does.

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