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.

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.