WP, "The Sleuth," Mary Ann Akers
Thompson Camp Tight-Lipped About Wife Jeri
Fred Thompson's "testing the waters" campaign hasn't done itself any favors by being so evasive when it comes to questions about Mrs. Thompson. Perhaps if the topic weren't so shrouded in mystery, Newsweek magazine wouldn't have created a mini firestorm with its story this week suggesting Jeri Kehn Thompson may have been married before - and possibly never divorced - since her name pops up in public records as Jeri Kehn Alvey, which is the last name of her ex-boyfriend. "It's unclear exactly when she may have been married or when she may have gotten divorced," the magazine wrote. "When asked directly about it, the campaign would neither confirm nor deny a previous marriage."
Why the secrecy?
It certainly piqued the interest of other political reporters who wondered why the campaign wouldn't have simply said "No, she has never been married before" if, in fact, she had never been married before. The Post, in an in-depth profile of Jeri Thompson in Sunday's paper, reported that the would-be first lady lived with a guy named Bernard "Chip" Alvey and, in court judgments against her, used Alvey's last name. The paper attributed Alvey as saying the couple had never married. By mid-day Monday, a Thompson spokeswoman confirmed to the Washington Post's Alec MacGillis, who co-wrote the Thompson profile, that Fred Thompson is indeed Jeri's first husband....
Today, Fred Thompson, in an exclusive interview with the National Review's Byron York, provided a hint as to why his operation is so secretive when it comes to Jeri. Thompson spun it this way: "I think the problem is that Jeri refuses to go out in public and behave like a candidate's wife before I'm a candidate. The fact that she's not out there promoting herself seems to greatly concern some people in the media, so they have gone back to old boyfriends, the families of old boyfriends, high-school classmates, basically anything that can be dredged up to fill this void that they perceive has been created."
The 64-year-old former senator also defended his 40-year-old wife's heavy-handed role in his presidential exploratory effort, whose early staff shakeup was partly the result of tension between aides and Mrs. Thompson. The way Thompson tells it, his wife was just following orders. He said while he was disengaging himself from his radio and television contracts at the same time that his exploratory committee was getting underway, "I asked her to do certain things for me. She did what I asked her to do."
Meanwhile, asked when Mrs. Thompson would be playing a less mysterious and more visible role on the campaign trail, Thompson spokeswoman Linda Rozett said, "Sorry, I don't have a comment today."...
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2007/08/thompson_camp_tightlipped_abou.html
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