LJWorld.com

When Fred Thompson finally announces his candidacy next month, it will be the closest thing to a successful draft of a presidential candidate in more than a half-century.

It isn't that the actor-turned-U.S. senator-turned-actor had to have his arm twisted to run. But Thompson did need to be convinced it would be more than a fool's errand, and he clearly was not planning on running for president until others sought him out.

The rest of the current White House aspirants, all of whom have been planning to run since at least the end of 2004, have been thinking about becoming president since they were in high school, if not kindergarten.

Whether Thompson turns out to be anything other than a historical footnote will be determined by what happens after he announces his candidacy, now expected Labor Day week.

But, by actually doing so, he will be the first White House hopeful to actually run because others persuaded him to since Dwight Eisenhower returned to the United States in the spring of 1952 and won the presidency later that year.

Eisenhower, the architect of the D-Day invasion and the supreme commander of NATO, was serving in Europe in 1951 and early 1952. He had actually turned down the efforts of some Democrats to draft him as their presidential candidate in 1948.

Eisenhower agreed to run on the GOP banner in 1952 after he won the New Hampshire primary when supporters placed his name on the ballot without his permission.

The effort to convince Thompson to run was nothing as elaborate as the one that drafted Eisenhower, but these are far different times and the process is far more complex, expensive and time-consuming.

Friends, including former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, R-Tenn., who has been Thompson's mentor over the years, began urging him to run early this year when none of the GOP candidates seemed to light a fire with grass-roots Republicans.

In fact, polls still show that many more Republicans than Democrats are unhappy with the current field of party candidates. Among those who express a preference, Thompson now consistently runs second behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in both national polls and those in most states, although not the two early key tests - Iowa and New Hampshire.

Actually, the attempt to draft Thompson was probably more like the one undertaken by the friends of Colin Powell to convince the then-former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to seek the 1996 GOP nomination.

But Powell, who would subsequently serve as President George W. Bush's secretary of state, had never run for political office. Despite the hype, he never seemed to be seriously considering running.

The other major unsuccessful attempt to draft a presidential candidate came in 1964, when then-former Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, who at the time was serving as the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, won the New Hampshire Republican primary after friends ran a write-in campaign for him. But he, too, never became a full-blown candidate.

Although the surface similarities between Thompson and Eisenhower seem few - Ike was a certified war hero, and Fred just played similar roles in the movies - both have the benefit of being nonpolitical celebrities.

Moreover, just as many in the GOP have turned to Thompson this year out of disappointment with the current field, there was a similar sense among many Republicans in 1952 about the poor prospects in November for their candidates.

And - as the specter of a Korean War that had dragged on too long hung over the country in 1952 - today there is deep disenchantment about the continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq.

Yet that analogy is inexact. The Korean War was directed by a Democratic president, Harry Truman, who would eventually choose not to seek reelection in the face of polls that would have made his campaign difficult. Republican Eisenhower was able to capitalize on that public frustration with a war run by a Democratic president.

Today, the frustration is with a Republican president who will not be on the ballot. And Bush's GOP affiliation will make it more difficult for someone such as Thompson to benefit politically from the widespread unhappiness in the country.

Only time will tell whether Thompson ultimately follows Eisenhower into the Oval Office, but already he has come further than anyone could have predicted just nine months ago.