Indeed, when the campaign-finance hearings opened on July 8, 1997, Thompson, the actor-senator, showed his flair for the dramatic. He announced that the proceedings would reveal the Chinese government’s effort to manipulate America’s elections through an elaborate scheme of financing campaigns. He went on, “The plan had a goal: to buy access and influence in furtherance of Chinese government interests. . . .  The committee believes that . . . Chinese government officials crafted a plan to increase China’s influence over the U.S. political process. . . . Although most discussions of the plan [focus] on Congress, our investigation suggests it affected the 1996 presidential race and state elections as well.”

The charge made headlines but so too did the immediate rebuttal from Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth and the committee’s ranking Democrat. Glenn had seen the same intelligence that Thompson had and remained less than convinced. During the next several months, as the hearings progressed, a number of campaign-finance abuses were uncovered, but the explosive charge with which Thompson began the hearings—that the Chinese government had manipulated American elections—was never proved. Indeed, it was disputed. Imagine if the Warren Commission had split over whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

When the committee issued its final report, in March 1998, Thompson had failed to forge the kind of bipartisan consensus that dominated the Watergate hearings, which were co-chaired by his mentor, former Republican Senate leader Howard Baker of Tennessee. Thompson’s committee fractured. While acknowledging the abuses of the campaign-finance system and Beijing’s efforts to lobby in Washington, Democrats never bought his claims of Chinese-government money infiltrating the Clinton campaign or any congressional race. (Today, in echoes of the Thompson hearings, the right is making noises that Norman Hsu, the recently arrested financier who donated to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, might be part of a Beijing plot.) Even the reflexively bipartisan Joe Lieberman couldn’t sign on to Thompson’s report.

To be fair, Thompson’s hearings weren’t a total failure. He extracted a lot of sleaze out of Democratic witnesses and, as a supporter of his friend John McCain’s then long-shot proposal for campaign-finance reform, he at least tried to use the hearings to promote the larger issue of cleaning up elections. He was willing to ask Republicans some tough questions as well, at one point grilling lobbyist Haley Barbour, now governor of Mississippi, about his ties to Chinese lobbyists. But the hearings never turned into a galvanizing force for campaign-finance reform. The McCain measure remained stalled and wouldn’t pass until four years later, in 2002, owing little to Thompson’s efforts. In the end, as newspapers noted at the time, Thompson wrapped up the hearings under enormous pressure from Senate Republicans to end them, lest he start probing too deeply into G.O.P. campaign woes.

The specifics of campaign finance from a decade ago aren’t that important. But if Americans are looking for competent governance after the current president, there’s no indication that Thompson, for all his stage presence, is any more capable of delivering it. And if the country’s now looking for a uniter instead of a divider, there’s even less indication that Thompson is that man. Tasked with investigating what everyone acknowledged to be a particularly flawed campaign in a flawed system, Thompson managed to alienate both Democrats and his own party.

It’s worth contrasting Thompson with another Tennessee senator and presidential aspirant, Democrat Estes Kefauver, whose seat Thompson held. Compared with Thompson, Kefauver was a whirling dervish. His famed hearings deposed more than 600 witnesses and led to a huge crackdown on organized crime. Unlike Thompson, Kefauver really took it to his own party. He bucked Democrats who wanted him to avoid investigating Chicago’s corruption and pressed ahead, helping bring about the defeat of the Senate majority leader, a Democrat from Illinois.

Look, if it’s any consolation to Thompson, his eight-year Senate career more closely resembles that of John F. Kennedy (who served the same tenure): modest in achievement, high in glamour. But Kennedy showed his mettle in other ways—the grit he displayed with the sinking of PT-109, for instance. Thompson’s trajectory as a lawyer, lobbyist, senator, and actor shows someone who’s good at pretending to be someone like that.