In his many film and television roles, Fred Thompson has almost always played a strong executive. On Law & Order, as Arthur Branch, the inexplicably Southern and conservative Manhattan district attorney, he’s invariably telling Sam Waterston’s deputy-D.A. character to settle the case. In The Hunt for Red October, he commands an aircraft carrier, fighting the Soviets.

Closer to the White House, he’s an irritable chief of staff in In the Line of Fire, and in two other films he, perhaps presciently, plays the president. But Thompson’s real executive experience is limited. He has never run a large organization, as did that other actor to whom he’s often likened, Ronald Reagan, California’s governor for eight years. Compared with this year’s crop of presidential wannabes, he has less executive experience than, say, Mitt Romney or even former Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich. True, as a lawyer in Tennessee, Thompson won acclaim for representing a whistleblower in a cash-for-clemency scheme, and he did a respectable job as the Republican counsel on the Senate Watergate committee. But running anything? Please. You could argue that Thompson’s only executive experience came at an outpost called the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, where he wielded the chairman’s gavel from 1997 to 2001. Running a committee involves setting an agenda and bringing people together; it takes some executive skill but not as much as, for example, a governorship does.

The Governmental Affairs Committee, since given the more sweeping name Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has a purview that mostly encompasses waste. By far the most important set of hearings that Thompson managed as chairman was an examination of campaign-finance abuses during the 1996 presidential election. The hearings made front-page news for months and were covered live. They offer one of those occasions where we can judge potential presidents—how they fought for their ideals and balanced constituencies, roused the public, and moved their colleagues. At this crucial moment, Thompson blew it.

The hearings began after disclosures of sleaziness in Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. Some of those incidents are now well-known. There was Al Gore’s famed visit to a Buddhist temple in California and the White House coffees for top donors, not to mention the practice of allowing major contributors to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. (Hey, better that than, say, letting oil bigwigs have their way, as seems to have happened with Dick Cheney’s energy task force of a few years back.) Some Clinton donors, 22 to be exact, were convicted of making illegal campaign contributions. The names of those embroiled—James Riady, Maria Hsia, John Huang—read like answers in a ’90s version of political Trivial Pursuit. (I should note that my spouse worked for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential bid and now works for Hillary Clinton, but did not work on the 1996 campaign.)

In 1997, as these revelations unfolded, Thompson used his chairman’s powers to investigate. For Thompson, the hearings represented his highest-profile appearance since being elected a senator from Tennessee in 1994, when he took over the seat vacated by Al Gore. Then as now, Thompson was a star, and the campaign-finance hearings should have been a natural fit for him. During the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, Thompson earned plaudits for his bipartisanship and for famously asking the questions that revealed to the public the existence of a White House taping system.