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.
At medical school Frist had his Great Wall fully erected and was determined to outdo himself: “I realized that instead of molding doctors, medical school was in the business of stripping human beings of everything but the raw, almost insane, ambition you must have to simply get through.” This, he confessed, is when an infamous incident occurred that Frist explained was the result of his temporarily losing sight of the big picture. What he described, however, is actually typical of a dominator playing the game his way and then justifying his own conduct. Frist had taken time off from his regular coursework to study cardiac physiology through laboratory work. He spent “days and nights on end in the lab, taking hearts out of cats, dissecting each heart,” and studying and recording the effects of various medicines on the hearts. With six weeks to go to complete his project, Frist ran out of cats. “Desperate, obsessed with my work, I visited the various animal shelters in the Boston suburbs, collecting cats, taking them home, treating them as pets for a few days, then carting them off to the lab to die in the interest of science…. It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do, and I was totally schizoid about the entire matter…. I was going a little crazy.”[62]
Frist was likely not going crazy; rather, he was manipulating to succeed. Lying to people who run animal shelters—not to mention misleading the poor animals, who, as Ron Rosenbaum wrote in the New York Observer, had just come off “mean-street” unaware that they were headed for execution—was cruel. Rosenbaum checked the General Laws of Massachusetts, and clearly Frist, a serial cat killer, could have been prosecuted for cruelty to animals.[63] No doubt Frist committed fraud in obtaining the animals as well. This issue arose during the 1994 Senate campaign, and one of Frist’s professional campaign consultants conceded that the revelation was a bullet they had dodged. “Thank God he wasn’t experimenting with dogs,” the consultant observed, because “that would have killed him in coon-hunting Tennessee.”[64]
When Bill Frist was first elected he promised Tennessee voters that he would limit himself to two terms. With his second term ending in 2006, and having made it clear that he would not run for the Senate again, it appears Frist may be ready to attempt to fulfill the promise of Mr. John’s angel. But he faces a serious problem, for like many social dominators in the political arena, he was tempted to overreach and was caught. Frist owns stock in the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), a corporation his father founded and his brother built. When Frist arrived in the Senate he placed his shares in a blind trust, meaning he theoretically did not know how the trustee was handling his investment, thereby insulating himself from any conflict of interest in voting as a senator. Publicly, Frist has told conflicting stories about whether he tracked the status of this trust.[65] It is clear he did, however, because on June 13, 2005, a month before the company issued its second-quarter earnings—which would fail to meet the estimates of Wall Street analysts—Frist sold his shares in the company. At the time Frist unloaded his holdings they were selling at their highest value in years, between $57.21 and $58.60. When the earnings report was issued, the stock’s price dropped almost $5.00.[66] Anyone who had a major holding in the company, as Frist did, would have made a great deal of money by selling the shares before the bad news was made public—millions of dollars. (Martha Stewart, meanwhile, went to jail for her deception about receiving insider information that made her a few thousand.) Frist claims he did nothing wrong, but both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York are investigating to determine whether he acted on inside information about the company on which his brother Tom now serves as a member of the board of directors and of which Tom was once chairman.[67] But as threatening as this investigation might be to Frist’s bid for the presidency, even more troublesome will be his record as Senate majority leader, where his leadership skills have been tested.
59.
William H. Frist,
63.
The General Laws of Massachusetts, Chapter 272: Section 77 at http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/272-77.htm. The relevant part of the statute reads: “Chapter 272: Section 77. Whoever…mutilates or kills an animal…or procures an animal to be…mutilated or killed…shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than 5 years or imprisoned in the house of correction for not more than 2 1/2 years or by a fine of not more than $2,500, or both such fine and imprisonment.”
64.
David Beiler, “Surgical Precision: How Senate Power Jim Sasser Was Stomped by a Political Novice in Tennessee,”
65.
Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, “Letters Show First Notified of Stocks in ‘Bind’ Trust: Documents Contradict Comments on Holdings,”
66.
“SEC Ratchets up Probe of Frist’s HCA Stock Sale, People Say,” Bloomberg. com (September 27, 2005) at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=awvqzH_6IT1o&refer=us.
67.
Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and R. Jeffrey Smith, “SEC, Justice Investigate Frist’s Sale of Stock,”