Thompson always has needed to prove, in public, that he’s a solid guy. When former senator Howard Baker got him a job as a U.S. attorney in Nashville, locals groused that he’d been rewarded for connections, not talent - and he won 14 of the 15 bank-robbery cases he tried. He’d never worked a day in Washington when Baker asked him to be minority counsel of the Senate Watergate committee - and he performed round-the-clock, skillfully. When Hollywood wanted to make a film about a case he’d won, he overcame the director’s skepticism, played himself - and launched an acting career. He and Sarah divorced in 1985 but remain in touch. ““One by one, he’s made the most of whatever opportunities have come his way,’’ she says. ““That’s his ambition: to handle whatever comes - as the hero.''

Now, at 54, Sen. Fred Thompson again has something to prove - and a chance to play the hero. This week his Senate committee begins hearings on the role of foreign money in politics, especially the 1996 campaign of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Big questions are at stake. Did China try to infiltrate the U.S. government? Did it do so through Asian-Americans with Little Rock connections to Clinton? Was the nation’s economic security breached? What did top Democrats know, and when did they know it?

Thompson has always relished lawman roles, and he’s written a tentative script for the show that starts this week. A parade of presidential intimates is expected, including longtime Clinton friend Harold Ickes and former Democratic chairman Don Fowler. They’ll be asked about what Thompson calls the ““lust for cash’’ in the White House. Ickes will be asked about new evidence suggesting that the president made fund-raising calls from the Oval Office. On Jan. 29, 1996, NEWSWEEK has learned, Clinton placed a call to Maryland businessman Robert Meyerhoff, apparently to help finalize a $100,000 donation to Democrats, minutes after finishing an Oval Office meeting.

Thompson also plans to lay out the stories of mysterious Asian-Americans who investigators think may have funneled illegal cash into the campaign in an effort to obtain trade secrets. New documents obtained by the committee suggest that a key member of the Asian-American network - John Huang - faxed sensitive government documents to executives of the Lippo Group, a giant Indonesian conglomerate with close ties to Beijing.

It’s a complicated story, and even John Grisham might not be able to make these murky details compelling to a country that would rather be at the beach than watching C-Span. Tracking the flow of foreign money is hard enough, but virtually every key witness who might testify about it is out of the country, missing or prepared to take the Fifth. Clinton - who is close to three key absent figures: Huang, James Riady and Yah Lin Trie - has issued no public plea that they come forward. It’s hard to make gripping theater out of hearings when the ““bad guys’’ don’t show up.

The political surround isn’t any better. The veneer of ““bipartisan’’ spirit that gives credibility to such proceedings could disappear in the hearing room. Indeed, behind the scenes, the committee has been bickering over everything from office space to subpoenas. Democratic witnesses (and some Republicans) have delayed at every turn, postponing depositions for months at a time, refusing to turn over documents - and then unloading cratefuls of paper. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. John Glenn, has repeatedly expressed outrage at what he considers unfair treatment, particularly Thompson’s failure to quickly approve subpoe- nas aimed at the GOP. The Democrat even threatened to walk out before he and Thompson made up. But Glenn - a former astronaut who’d like Clinton’s permission to return to space - could still bolt.

Convinced that Thompson is vulnerable, the White House is on the attack. ““Our message is: this is just another Republican witch hunt,’’ said a White House aide. Emboldened by polls that they say prove the scandal is failing to resonate with the public, Clintonites will install spinners in the hearing room to try to instantly undercut each Thompson story line.

One such vignette involves Yogesh Gandhi, a donor who was allowed to present an award to Clinton in 1996 after contributing $325,000 that investigators believe may have come from foreign sources. Thompson may call Gandhi soon. But when he appears, NEWSWEEK has learned, Clintonites will distribute pictures of Gandhi giving the same award to Presidents Reagan and Bush.

Conventional wisdom is that Thompson has a dud on his hands. ““I may have lowered expectations a little too well,’’ he told NEWSWEEK with a rueful chuckle. Still, he has a strategy:

Hook ’em early. Though Thompson was a litigator, his experience in film is probably his most relevant credential these days. In Hollywood terms, his first task is to generate good, early word-of-mouth. With Watergate, there was a specific event to focus on - the break-in - and much public curiosity. The committee built suspense by starting with obscure witnesses. That won’t work this time. The press and public will quickly tune out if they aren’t hooked fast.

So Thompson would like to begin the hearings with witnesses close to the president. Besides Ickes and Fowler, the chairman hopes to call Clinton consigliere Bruce Lindsey and Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff. Another likely ““name’’ witness is Marvin Rosen, the flamboyant Florida fund raiser who became the money chief for the party. If they get angry - and the volatile Ickes will be pushed - so much the better.

Look for contradictions. In politics, Thompson has had two mentors: the patriarch of his former wife’s family, Judge William Holliman Lindsey, and former senator Baker. Both taught a laid-back form of Southern political storytelling. In hearings, Baker’s method was to let witnesses go on - until they said something that would later complicate life for a higher-up. It’s not ““Perry Mason’’ - sudden, bathetic confessions - but country-lawyer common sense. ““What catches them in the end are the contradictions,’’ he says. Thompson and his aides are hoping Fowler and Rosen will blame the White House for fund-raising missteps, and that Ickes will blame the DNC and the campaign - and that the explanations by all three will provoke rebuttals from others. Who, for example, arranged for donor Johnny Chung to visit the White House 49 times, and escort Chinese businessmen to meet the president and First Lady? Thompson will wait patiently for finger-pointing to begin.

It’s all in the narrative. Thompson deeply respects Sam Dash, the Georgetown professor who was lead Democratic counsel of the Watergate committee. Dash says the key is to establish a story line. ““You need a cohesive story that presents an outrage to the American people,’’ says Dash. At this point, Thompson’s best dramatic bet is the ““story’’ of John Huang, the China-born American who has known Clinton since Arkansas, and whom investigators suspect may have been involved in economic espionage. But since Huang himself won’t testify, his narrative is likely to resemble a film noir mystery: ““The Third Man,’’ known primarily by the lengthy shadows he cast.

Huang will ““very likely’’ be called, committee sources say, though they know in advance he will almost certainly take the Fifth. But he works as a central character, since he touches all the major players and alleged illegal conduct, in and out of government. Huang’s friendship with Clinton goes back to 1985, when he hosted the then governor of Arkansas on a trade-mission visit to Hong Kong. Huang was working for the Lippo Group, one of whose principals, James T. Riady, had learned the banking business in Little Rock in the mid-’80s. The Lippo Group, which has strong ties to mainland China, treated Clinton to a lavish harbor cruise and seafood banquet in Hong Kong in 1985. ““The boat trip was the fun highlight of the trip!’’ Clinton later wrote in a fulsome thank-you letter.

Those old Arkansas ties - plus $135,000 in Lippo-related contributions to Clinton’s 1992 campaign - gave Huang and Riady entree to the new administration, and they both wanted Huang to get a job. In July 1994 Huang landed an important trade-policy position at the Commerce Department. Before he left Lippo, he was given $870,000 in severance pay and bonuses - most of which came from a Lippo shell company called Hip Hing Holdings. Investigators think that Hip Hing may have served as a conduit for questionable payments to the DNC and to such Clinton cronies as Webster Hubbell. Investigators also believe some of the money was funneled into the United States from Indonesia, NEWSWEEK has learned. Using the cash to bankroll political campaigns would be illegal.

Though he will look at Huang’s role in raising $3.4 million for the Democrats, Thompson will focus more closely on his activities at Commerce: precisely how Huang received his top-security clearance, and from whom; his access to sensitive intelligence, and his continued contacts with his former employer, Lippo.

Thompson, sources say, will try to make the circumstantial case that Huang was an economic spy for the Riadys and, by extension, Beijing. (One theory: that the Chinese government may have used Lippo, and other overseas Chinese conduits, to direct money into U.S. campaigns in search of information and potential influence.) Committee staffers have developed evidence that Huang was in close contact with Lippo by phone, and through fax facilities he used at the Washington office of Stephens, Inc., the huge Little Rock investment firm, which had its own close ties to Lippo. Thompson, NEWSWEEK has learned, plans to call a Stephens secretary, who is expected to testify that Huang showed up at the Stephens office with Commerce documents. Commerce officials will raise questions about Huang’s qualifications for the job he got. One expected witness is Jeffrey Garten, now the dean of the Yale School of Management, who will testify that Huang made few, if any, useful contributions commensurate with his high rank and security clearance. Bill Clinton apparently appreciated Huang’s talents: in an Oval Office meeting, he personally assigned Huang to raise money for the DNC.

Don’t get your own party mad. Thompson is not quite the accommodating Border State moderate he seems. He became a Republican when the party was struggling to grow in Tennessee. Loyalty in combat was required, and Thompson never had the rough bark of partisanship rubbed off by service in the state legislature or the Congress. A close reading of Thompson’s Watergate book, ““At That Point in Time,’’ shows a man profoundly disappointed by Nixon - but even more so by his own failure to defend his Republican brethren. ““My side was being “had’,’’ he wrote bitterly, ““and I was permitting it to happen.''

Early on, Thompson angered - and frightened - GOP colleagues by insisting he would conduct a sweeping probe of both parties’ fund raising. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Now he’s striving to protect his ““side’’ without losing all vestiges of bipartisanship. So he will not, for example, vigorously pursue all of the ““foreign money’’ story early. That’s because one of the strongest examples of overseas financing of a U.S. campaign entity involves the GOP’s National Policy Forum, a think tank chaired by former Republican chairman Haley Barbour. NEWSWEEK has learned that the NPF took $50,000 from a California company called Panda Industries, a company headed by a Los Angeles-based Indonesian businessman named Ted Sioeng. His business dealings with China are being scrutinized by U.S. law-enforcement agents after his name turned up in secret intelligence intercepts concerning Chinese efforts to buy political influence in Washington. Thompson will allow the Democrats to hold three days of hearings on Republican foreign-money questions - but only at the end of the month.

After the big-name witnesses and the Story of Huang, Thompson is planning to focus on Charlie Trie, the former Little Rock restaurateur now hiding from government subpoena in the Far East. By April 1996 Ickes had known that questions had been raised about the true source of money Trie had raised for Clinton’s legal-defense fund. Yet Trie was allowed to continue serving as a major party fund raiser - and he presented $100,000 in checks to aides at Clinton’s 1996 birthday party at Radio City Music Hall. Thompson will also highlight the infamous ““Temple of Doom’’ Buddhist fund-raiser, in which monks forked over big checks. Investigators are touting it as a clear example of money laundering - and the most direct threat to Al Gore, a potential presidential rival in 2000.

The hearings are by far the biggest role Thompson has ever played. The question is how to define victory. He was reared in a white hat-black hat world. Thompson’s parents were devout members of the fundamentalist, abstemious Church of Christ. Their beliefs, said Sarah Thompson, were simple: ““If you aren’t a member of the church, you are going to hell.’’ In 1958 his father, Fletch, made a quixotic run as a ““reformer’’ for county sheriff. He lost, but not before declaring from the steps of the courthouse that the ““biggest bootlegger in the county’’ was within the sound of his voice.

His son now tends to see things in shades of gray. Watergate, he wrote, was not a lesson in the triumph of good over evil, but in the inevitable corruption of power. Clear victory for the white hats happens only in the movies. A few years ago, Thompson toyed with the idea of producing his own movie. It would be about a small-town lawyer, he says, ““A “To Kill a Mockingbird’ kind of thing.’’ It never got off the ground. Now he has another chance, in another way, to do the film in real life. We’ll soon see if he can handle the part.

with elusive witnesses and partisan bickering

Hunag intends to take the Fifth. Riady is in Indonesia, Trie in China. The veep won’t be summoned to testify. But here’s what Thompson would like to ask if he could bring them before his commitee.

John Huang

LINK: The former Lippo man asked for CIA reports on China trade while working for Ron Brown at Commerce

QUESTION: Did he pass classified economic in formation to Lippo–or to Chinese officials?

James Riady

LINK: Lippo scion and longtime FOB visited Clinton shortly before Huang moved from Commerce to DNC.

QUESTION: Did Riady help funnel illegal money in to Clinton’s campaign?

Yah Lin Trie

LINK: As his partner wired money from a Bank of China account, Trie donated hundreds of thousands to Clinton.

QUESTION: Did Trie’s contributions come from foreign, and therefore illegal, sources?

Al Gore

LINK: He spoke at Buddhist temple fund-raiser despite NSC’s warnings to his staff about a “hidden aagenda.”

QUESTION: Were impoverished monks reimbursed by Taiwanese sources?