Conservatives Without Conscience

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, Transplant: A Heart Surgeon’s Account of the Life-and-Death Dramas of the New Medicine. The memoir opens with Frist at the top of his game as a cardiac surgeon, and it is clear that in the operating room, he is the man in charge. He called himself a good quarterback, a position he played at a private high school. It is immediately clear that Bill Frist has always been a driven individual—a born dominator and seeker of power. As the “youngest of five children,” he wrote, he could “hardly help but be a demanding little tyrant.” Frist says of his kindergarten years, “I ruled not just over my family but over my friends—or should I say subjects—who always opted to come to my house.”[59] In the lower grades, “I longed to be first in everything, to be king of the hill, the grammar school capo di capi. I imagine I was quite insufferable. I hated—and often too quickly abandoned—anything at which I did not excel. I sought out whatever made me feel useful, different, and in control. I felt most comfortable with slightly younger boys who could look up to me, admire me…. I resented anyone my age who was more popular, bigger, faster, or smarter. I was jealous of them. I feared them. They might take over.” In high school, he acknowledged he “became a deadly serious overachiever,” with his “raging hormones of adolescence” spawning “an urge to excel and a desire to lead.” He was class president for three of four years, yearbook editor, quarterback of the football team, and voted most likely to succeed during his senior year.[60]

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.