LAWRENCEBURG, TENN. — In the summer of 1959, everyone could see that Sarah Elizabeth Lindsey was going places. Beautiful and brainy, she had edited the yearbook, joined the science club and graduated near the top of her class. In the fall, she'd be off to college.
Her boyfriend, Freddie Thompson, was another story.
A year behind Lindsey in school, he was a 6-foot-5 stick of undeveloped potential, awkward and lacking in drive. He seemed to devote himself only to pickup basketball games played at the Concrete Court, a slab set down for a building not yet constructed.
Sometime that summer, Lindsey told Thompson she was pregnant. He responded, friends say, by asking her to marry him.
Today, with a kickoff tour through early-voting Iowa, Thompson formally offers himself as a candidate for president, the highest ambition in American politics. But the onetime Senate from Tennessee did not grow up with such ambition. He married into it.
That union did not last, but it gave Freddie Thompson an education, a profession, a political party and even a new first name.
The Lindseys, who initially held some of the same doubts about Thompson's work ethic that now shadow his candidacy, would prove to be the most important audience he ever won over. Though Sarah agreed to the marriage, her family, which included Lawrenceburg Mayor Ed Lindsey, held a meeting to discuss whether to block it. Opinion was running against Thompson until Sarah's grandfather, a distinguished lawyer named William H. "Bid" Lindsey, spoke up.
"If Sarah Elizabeth sees something in him," Bid Lindsey declared, "then there must be something there."
With that, Thompson was adopted into one of Lawrenceburg's leading clans -- a family of attorneys, judges, manufacturers and Republicans. Freddie and Sarah exchanged vows in a Methodist church during the second week of his senior year. Seven months later, in April 1960, 17-year-old Thompson had a son.
Over the next decade, Thompson would prove that, with prodding and a little help from loved ones, he could rise above difficulties. By 30, he would land the job that made him famous: top Republican counsel to the Senate Watergate committee.
"It wasn't a pleasant situation at first," recalls Ed Lindsey, Sarah's uncle, "but we accepted Freddie into the family, with no residual animosity or feeling about his personal circumstances. We took Fred in and tried to teach him."
