David Michael Miller
1. That’s his real first name, bestowed when his father told his birth doctor, “We’ll call him Tommy.” In his first race for state Assembly, some political rivals tried to get him booted from the ballot by arguing, erroneously, that he was not using his given name.
2. Thompson’s father, Allan Edward Thompson, liked to carry $1,000 in cash in his pocket. “Years later,” Thompson relates in his new book, “I made a point of carrying a little more than that,” to show that he’d done better. (Asked what’s in his wallet during an interview, Thompson checks and says, “I’ve got $1,500. You want to count it?”)
3. He attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., while working as a student intern for a Wisconsin congressman. He liked it.
4. Thompson met his wife, Sue Ann, a public school teacher, when he was in the state Assembly and she came to the Capitol to lobby lawmakers for more school funding. He says he told her, “I can’t give you the support you’re asking for, but how about lunch?”
5. He lost much of the hearing in his right ear while headed to the Rose Bowl in 2000, possibly due to a virus he picked up on the plane.
6. Thompson, in his book, says he cries easily, and co-author Doug Moe attests, “He can’t talk about his family or even his love for Wisconsin without starting to cry.”
7. When he was U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, Thompson would “police the grounds,” pulling cigarettes out of people’s mouths. “A couple of times I got slapped.”
8. After leaving HHS, Thompson became part-owner of a racing horse, Flashy Bull, which finished 14th (of 20) in the 2006 Kentucky Derby.
9. He told 2016 presidential aspirant Donald Trump he was “wasting his time” campaigning in Wisconsin, but changed his mind a few days later after seeing a preponderance of Trump signs. He called to say, “Donald, I was wrong. You need to come back to Wisconsin. You can win.”
10. At HHS, Thompson created an emergency operations center with a large map that had one city “far and away most prominently displayed, in letters big enough that anyone would think it must be the center of the universe,” which it was to him. That city was Elroy, Wisconsin.
