Soon after Bill Frist’s mother brought him home from the hospital, she appeared on the front porch carrying a baby basket with Bill sound asleep in it. He was only a few days old. Bill’s mother said she wanted to go down the street to her sister’s house, and she asked Mr. John to wait with baby Bill until she returned. “I’ll be back in five minutes,” she promised, and off she went. “So I sat down on the porch next to the boy,” Mr. John continued, “and no sooner had she left than a bright light came down from heaven. An angel wrapped his golden wings around the baby and said, ‘John, don’t worry about this baby. He’s going to be fine.’” Mr. John caught his breath and finished reporting the angel’s words. “‘One day, he’s going to be president of the United States.’” With this, Mr. John took another deep breath, and added, “That Senate race? That ain’t nothing. He’s got that in the bag.” Mr. John died that night, shortly after learning Bill Frist had defeated an eighteen-year incumbent, Democratic senator Jim Sasser.[58]
With his laserlike mind, Frist makes Bush and Cheney look like filament bulbs near burnout, and their authoritarianism was troubling enough. Frist is Richard Nixon with Bill Clinton’s brains, and Nixon was no mental slouch. Frist is without question a social dominator, and dominators, obviously, cannot hide their tendency to dominate. No one describes Bill Frist’s dominating personality better than Frist himself in his first book,
Frist was in a serious motorcycle accident during his high school years. While he said this brush with death punctured some of his “sense of self-importance,” the accident also somewhat strangely resulted in “a romantic patina to an aloofness that had been growing in me since earliest childhood.” He was building what he calls a “Great Wall” between himself and his peers, “emotional brick by emotional brick.” His Great Wall runs throughout his narrative, and he explained that only later did he “come to believe that every man who wants to lead builds such a wall, though few of them talk about it.” Frist reported that by the time he headed to Princeton for his undergraduate studies, his “wall was almost complete. Few of my early acquaintances dared or cared to scale it, and I languished behind it without many close friends.”[61]
As is often the case with authoritarians, politics caught Frist’s attention during his college years; he would graduate from Princeton in 1974. He spent the summer of 1972 in Washington as an intern in the office of Democratic congressman Joe Evins, the senior member of the Tennessee delegation. Evins advised Frist that if he planned to go into politics he should start with a career outside of the political world. Frist even cast his romantic life in terms of dominance. “Imagining myself a leader,” and a Ulysses no less, he wrote that when heading off to Harvard Medical School, “I possibly wanted a Penelope back home waiting for me.” He found her, proposed, and dumped her just days before the wedding.
At medical school Frist had his Great Wall fully erected and was determined to outdo himself: “I realized that instead of molding doctors, medical school was in the business of stripping human beings of everything but the raw, almost insane, ambition you must have to simply get through.” This, he confessed, is when an infamous incident occurred that Frist explained was the result of his temporarily losing sight of the big picture. What he described, however, is actually typical of a dominator playing the game his way and then justifying his own conduct. Frist had taken time off from his regular coursework to study cardiac physiology through laboratory work. He spent “days and nights on end in the lab, taking hearts out of cats, dissecting each heart,” and studying and recording the effects of various medicines on the hearts. With six weeks to go to complete his project, Frist ran out of cats. “Desperate, obsessed with my work, I visited the various animal shelters in the Boston suburbs, collecting cats, taking them home, treating them as pets for a few days, then carting them off to the lab to die in the interest of science…. It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do, and I was totally schizoid about the entire matter…. I was going a little crazy.”[62]
Frist was likely not going crazy; rather, he was manipulating to succeed. Lying to people who run animal shelters—not to mention misleading the poor animals, who, as Ron Rosenbaum wrote in the
When Bill Frist was first elected he promised Tennessee voters that he would limit himself to two terms. With his second term ending in 2006, and having made it clear that he would not run for the Senate again, it appears Frist may be ready to attempt to fulfill the promise of Mr. John’s angel. But he faces a serious problem, for like many social dominators in the political arena, he was tempted to overreach and was caught. Frist owns stock in the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), a corporation his father founded and his brother built. When Frist arrived in the Senate he placed his shares in a blind trust, meaning he theoretically did not know how the trustee was handling his investment, thereby insulating himself from any conflict of interest in voting as a senator. Publicly, Frist has told conflicting stories about whether he tracked the status of this trust.[65] It is clear he did, however, because on June 13, 2005, a month before the company issued its second-quarter earnings—which would fail to meet the estimates of Wall Street analysts—Frist sold his shares in the company. At the time Frist unloaded his holdings they were selling at their highest value in years, between $57.21 and $58.60. When the earnings report was issued, the stock’s price dropped almost $5.00.[66] Anyone who had a major holding in the company, as Frist did, would have made a great deal of money by selling the shares before the bad news was made public—millions of dollars. (Martha Stewart, meanwhile, went to jail for her deception about receiving insider information that made her a few thousand.) Frist claims he did nothing wrong, but both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York are investigating to determine whether he acted on inside information about the company on which his brother Tom now serves as a member of the board of directors and of which Tom was once chairman.[67] But as threatening as this investigation might be to Frist’s bid for the presidency, even more troublesome will be his record as Senate majority leader, where his leadership skills have been tested.
“Most Capitol Hill observers now regard Frist as ‘the weakest majority leader in perhaps 50 years,’” said Charles Cook, the editor of a nonpartisan political report, in an interview with Bloomberg News. Cook, who has one of the best records for predicting political contests, said he did not think that Frist “has a snowball’s chance in hell” of getting the GOP nomination. If Frist’s standing with his peers suffered, he also damaged his image as a clear- thinking man of medicine when he pandered to the religious right during the debate over Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman being kept alive by a feeding tube in a Florida hospital. After viewing videos prepared by a group supporting federal intervention to halt the withdrawal of life-support measures, Frist reported—as Dr. Frist— that Terri Schiavo was “not somebody in a persistent vegetative state.” Both the House and Senate passed a law granting a federal court jurisdiction in the case, and President Bush flew back to Washington to sign the emergency measure. The federal judge, however, agreed with the state judges who had reviewed, and rereviewed, all the expert testimony, and had refused to intervene. The court battle to keep Schiavo on life support eventually ended with her death, and an autopsy showed that she had been blind and that her brain had atrophied severely. Dr.
