The late Sen. Fred Thompson, who died Sunday in Nashville, "got tired of the crap" that went on while he was in Washington, a former colleague said Monday, and he would have been embarrassed at the antics of today's Republican senators.
"He was a guy, when he went to the caucus, he didn't like sitting around saying, 'How do we diddle Bill Clinton today? How do we lose sleep today to figure out how to blow up stuff and send it down to Clinton?'" ex-Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyoming, a close friend of the late lawmaker and actor told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
Instead, Simpson said Thompson called such talk "kid stuff," and it was.
"It was petty and childish, and that was totally opposed to his makeup," said Simpson. "He just couldn't handle the horrible little diddle, the get this guy, get that group. He got fed up."
Thompson left the Senate in 2003 and ran for the presidency four years later, but he entered the race too late, said Simpson, but that doesn't mean he wasn't loved.
"He was a tremendous guy," he said. "He may have had adversaries, but he didn't have enemies."
And if Thompson were a senator now, he'd tamp down the rhetoric quickly, said Simpson.
"He would get up like a big bear, a big grizzly in the misty meadow and say, 'What the hell are you bastards doing?' And we would all look around and realize how embarrassing it was," said Simpson.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.