Conservatives Without Conscience

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.