And was nothing until she met Thompson who helped her with her career, according to the Washington Post:

On a hot Saturday in June 2002, Fred D. Thompson married his second wife, Jeri Kehn, in an unventilated Congregational church in her home town of Naperville, Ill. Kehn, in a Valentino gown, was a 35-year-old media consultant for a Washington law firm; Thompson, a 59-year-old U.S. senator from Tennessee.
[…]
It was a triumphal return for Kehn, who had left Naperville for college and spent much of her 20s biding her time in Nashville without a clear career path, living with a boyfriend whose main claim to fame was getting arrested in Red Square for unfurling a pizza-parlor banner in the last days of the Cold War. Kehn left three court judgments behind her in Nashville, one of which remains unpaid today, and a court twice garnished her wages.
But after meeting Fred Thompson, Kehn began establishing herself in Washington Republican circles, and marriage more than consolidated her place in the city. Today, Jeri Thompson, 40, has emerged as a driving and at times divisive force within the presidential campaign her husband is preparing to launch, one that could make her the nation’s youngest first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy.
[…]
How much Kehn’s ties to Thompson helped her in Washington is hard to gauge. May said it was no secret that Kehn was dating Thompson, who divorced his first wife in 1985 and developed a reputation as a ladies’ man linked to, among others, country singer Lorrie Morgan and cosmetics executive and GOP fundraiser Georgette Mosbacher.
[…]
Despite the unglamorous nature of her first job in Washington, Jeri Thompson’s supporters today describe her as a powerful political operative. Whether that label fits her roughly five years of full-time work here is hard to determine, given the relatively low profile she kept at her various jobs.
[…]

From the RNC, Kehn moved to the Senate Republican Conference, and from there to the public relations and lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller, where she worked full time from February 2001 to January 2002.

According to two people who have worked for Burson-Marsteller, one currently and another formerly, Kehn got the job at the behest of Kenneth Rietz, the head of the firm’s Washington office at the time, as a favor to Rietz’s friend Fred Thompson. (Rietz, now retired from the firm, is a Thompson campaign adviser.)

But Charlie Black, chairman of BKSH & Associates, a lobbying subsidiary of Burson parent WPP Group, disagrees. “We had to recruit hard to get her to come to Burson,” said Black, an adviser to McCain’s campaign.

If anyone thinks that the Post isn’t biased, compare this write up to the ones that they’ve done on Elizabeth Edwards. You certainly aren’t going to read about Clinton’s current or past affairs in the pages of the Post. The Post might as well put a huge banner on it’s front page reading, “We don’t like Thompson and are going to do what we can to undermine his campaign.”
BTW, I’m not voting for his wife, I’m voting for him. I really don’t care if she’s a bimbo or not, a control freak or not. Reports like this only show how low the press will go to drag this presidential election into the gutter.