Senatorial Investigation

If it takes one to know one, this look at Tennessee senators can make a real contribution.

by JACKSON BAKER

Tennessee Senators, 1911-2001

by Sen. William H. Frist
with J. Lee Annis Jr.
Madison Books, 304 pp, $24.95

his week sees both the publication of this volume and the beginning of a book tour of the state by its author, who, not coincidentally, perhaps, is now an incumbent U.S. Senator himself. Both the book's appearance and the promotional tour for it happen to be simultaneous with a statewide tour by his likely Democratic opponent next year, U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr.

Under the circumstances, Frist's book is bound to be a help to him. There are occasional partisan touches: Vice President Al Gore is referred to, somewhat slyly, as "a transplanted Tennessean," and an early campaign by former Senator Jim Sasser, whom Frist beat in 1994, was characterized, according to the current senator, by "class envy."

But for the most part this rather comprehensive tome reflects a scrupulous effort to be fair -- presumably reflecting both Frist's moderate Republicanism (though, given his party's conservative climate today, he would probably not characterize it that way) and the senator's recognition that Tennessee straddles the ideological dividing lines and always has.

Under those circumstances, and given the more than adequate help he seems to have gotten from researchers on his staff and from co-author J. Lee Annis Jr., Frist's book is bound to be a help to general readers, also -- and especially to the political junkies of the Volunteer State.

The implicit thesis of the book is that Tennessee's representatives in the Senate have remained faithful to their state's inherent bias against vested power -- whether as populists of the left or as conservative opponents of an entrenched governmental machinery. This is a convenient tack for a middle-of-the-road politician to take, and it has the added advantage of possibly being true.

The book begins with Senator Luke Lea, who served from 1911 to 1917 and, in general, functions as a sequel to a 1942 volume by the late Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, Tennessee Senators as Seen by One of Their Successors.

There are useful nuggets scattered throughout. One learns, for example, that the little-known Lea made a dead-serious effort, after his Senate service was over, to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm from his post-World War I exile in Holland. (Lea, who was convicted of bank fraud, also served a prison term in North Carolina -- a fact linking him to another thread of Tennessee politics.) And it is interesting to know that the first Senator William Brock -- a Democrat and the grandfather of the second, a Republican -- was the candy manufacturer who gave the chocolate-covered cherry to the world.

There are good takes on the careers of two prominent allies of FDR and the New Deal -- McKellar (of Memphis) and Cordell Hull -- and, from roughly the term (1949-1963) of Estes Kefauver on, some fascinating interplay between the life of Frist and his family, on one hand, and that of Tennessee incumbent politicians on the other.

Frist's father -- Dr. Thomas Frist, the founder of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) -- was the personal physician of former Governor Frank Clement (who, as it happens, made two futile tries for the Senate himself). Dr. Bill Frist himself administered therapy to Ross Bass when the former Senator, late in life, developed lung cancer.

Senator Frist's medical background (as a pioneer in transplant surgery) turns up as a leitmotif in several of the book's chapters. For example, in appraising Kefauver -- foe of the Crump machine, of Democratic big-city bosses, and of organized crime -- he administers his highest praise for the former presidential aspirant's little remembered expose of price-fixing in the pharmaceutical industry.

Understandably, Howard Baker, whom Frist claims as "my political mentor," comes off well as a statesman and an agent of fair-minded compromise. But Frist tries hard to find redeeming words for almost everybody -- even his erstwhile opponent Sasser, whom he praises for being "a good family man" of "populist principles."

And he has this to say about Vice President Gore (the second of two Albert Gores to have served the state in the Senate, of course): "I can't say I welcome another four years of a Democratic administration, but I will say we will need the Lord's help if we have one and it's not Al Gore's." Left-handed or not, that's semi-gracious.

There is a matter-of-fact savvy in these pages, too, as when Frist acknowledges that Tennesseans' apparent bias against a fourth senatorial term was as much of a reason why he beat Jim Sasser as any other.

Self-serving or not, the book is a decent read and a valuable -- and occasionally illuminating -- contribution to the political history of the state. Oh, and co-author Annis handles the chapter -- appreciative without being obsequious -- on Frist himself.