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The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville has published part one of a three-part series of stories on Fred Thompson. Today's story profiles Thompson's years growing up in sleepy Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, and Thompson's college and law school years and his entry into politics.

After law school, sometime around the late 1960s, Thompson became politically active. His friend Tom Crews, a longtime local educator, remembered a Republican gathering at the courthouse around 1969 or '70. Thompson "all of sudden walked in" and asked whether the county had a Young Republicans group.

"Don't you think we need one?" Thompson asked. "He said, 'Why don't you and I undertake this?' "

But in the first meeting of the Young Republicans of Lawrence County, it was clear that Thompson was the leader, Crews said.

He had a charisma that people followed. Though his father had once run unsuccessfully for local office as a Democrat, Thompson would get a seat on the county's Republican Executive Committee. That gave him entrée to statewide party leaders, according to a biography of Tennessee senators co-authored by Thompson's former colleague Bill Frist. Those GOP luminaries included U.S. Sen. Howard Baker. Those political contacts helped him land a job in Nashville as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Nixon administration.

In 1972, he directed Baker's re-election campaign in Middle Tennessee. The powerful East Tennessee senator reciprocated by summoning Thompson to Washington the next year to serve as minority counsel on the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal.

Read the whole thing. Parts 2 and 3 are scheduled for Monday and Tuesday.