NYT dazzled about Fred?

If I were a Fred Thompson hating liberal, I'd call this piece anti-climactic. If I were a staunch Fred supporter, I might call it an insult-laden compliment. A hit piece in disguise, or just a sloppy hit piece?

Take it as you will; it's a moderately lengthy "news" story, that ends with a complimentary quote from a Clintonista.

But there's three pages not-so-flattering Fred reading to get there...

Such as when Thompson was brought in to help investigate the Watergate scandal, another Nixon quote:

“You’d think this guy would be so totally dazzled to be in Washington that he’d be lost,” Mr. Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, in February 1973.

Of course the obligatory "dumb as hell" quote was tossed in, but not after the NYT made Thompson and Nixon best friends:

“The White House saw him as an ally,” recalled Leonard Garment, Mr. Nixon’s former special counsel. “But he wasn’t sitting in our laps.”

There's more:

In his book about Watergate, Mr. Thompson writes of questioning Mr. Dean about $4,850 that he had taken, though later repaid, from a White House slush fund to pay for his honeymoon.

What Mr. Thompson does not say, but the tapes show, is that the president’s men had fed him the information, and that he had reported straight back to Mr. Buzhardt.

“Thompson hinted that he had admitted it,” Alexander M. Haig, who had replaced Mr. Haldeman as chief of staff, told the president on June 18.

Mr. Nixon was jubilant, and the honeymoon story was leaked to The New York Times. The two men also discussed Mr. Thompson’s account of Mr. Dean’s “rambling” and “not particularly effective performance.”

Yeah, it's the NYT's compliment to Fred Thompson: the tall and slender Tennessean investigator that was both fair and a Nixon Whitehouse stool pigeon.

BONUS: Be sure to look for the earth-shattering revelation about Thompson's fornication, teen pregnancy and subsequent teen marriage. (Could that be the "colorful and wide-ranging" stuff Andrew Sullivan was sure we'd find out)?