Alan K. Simpson, a Folksy Republican Force in the Senate, Dies at 93
A plain-spoken lawmaker from Wyoming, he balanced his conservative views with moderate stands on abortion rights, gay marriage and immigration reform.
Alan K. Simpson, a plain-spoken former Republican senator from Wyoming who championed immigration reforms and conservative candidates for the Supreme Court while fighting running battles with women’s groups, environmentalists and the press, died on Friday in hospice in Cody, Wyo. He was 93.
He had been struggling to recover from a broken hip that he sustained in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a group of museums of which he was a board member for 56 years. The statement said his recovery had been hindered by complications of a case of frostbite to his left foot that he endured about five years ago and that required the amputation of his left leg below the knee.
Folksy, irreverent and sometimes cantankerous, a gaunt, 6-foot-7 beanpole with a ranch hand’s soft drawl, Mr. Simpson was a three-term senator, from 1979 to 1997, whom school children and tourists in the gallery sometimes took for a Mr. Smith-goes-to-Washington oddball, especially during his occasional rants against “bug-eyed zealots” and “super-greenies,” as he liked to call environmental lobbyists.
The son of a former Wyoming governor and United States senator, Mr. Simpson had been a hell-raiser as a teenager. He and some friends shot up mailboxes, killed a cow with rifles and set fire to an abandoned federal property. He punched a police officer who arrested him. While no one had been seriously hurt, he faced prison. But he was put on probation for two years and paid restitution.
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“I was a monster,” he acknowledged in a 2009 friend-of-the-court brief for the United States Supreme Court, pleading for a second chance, like the one he had been given six decades earlier, for two juveniles accused of crimes. With the help of a probation officer, he said, he redeemed his life.
Mr. Simpson went on to earn undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Wyoming, served two years in the U.S. Army, was a city attorney in Cody and, entering politics, served 13 years in the State Legislature before being elected to the Senate seat once held by his father. Among his best friends were Dick Cheney and President George H.W. Bush, who considered him to be his vice-presidential running-mate in 1988. (Mr. Bush chose Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana instead.)
Mr. Simpson had love-hate relationships with the press. Many journalists liked his earthy humor and easy accessibility. But his language could be coarse and his tone contemptuous when he attacked the news media, sometimes singling out reporters by name. He crossed a line when he accused Peter Arnett of CNN of being an enemy “sympathizer” for his reporting from Iraq during the Persian Gulf war, and wrongly accused him of bias in the Vietnam War because he had married a Vietnamese woman.
His political positions sometimes seemed contradictory, or perhaps personal. He supported abortion rights and right-wing nominees to the United States Supreme Court who might overturn Roe v. Wade. And partly out of a friendship forged when he was a 12-year-old Boy Scout, he called on the nation to apologize to Japanese Americans who were interned as potential security risks during World War II.
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But he was entertainingly unpredictable.
“Simpson turns out to be one of the most refreshing breezes that occasionally gentles their way through congressional pomp and fustian to remind that all is not lost,” The Washington Post reported soon after his arrival in Washington. The senator, the paper said, would sometimes answer his own phone. Once, when a caller asked, “Where is that skinny bastard?” he replied, “Speaking.”
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Immigration and Abortion
In the early 1980s, Senator Simpson sponsored bills to tighten border controls and curtail the influx of illegal immigrants. It was against the law for undocumented aliens to work in the United States, but not illegal to hire them, so Senator Simpson and Representative Peter Rodino, a New Jersey Democrat, proposed bills to penalize employers who hired illegal immigrants and offered legal status to many already living in this country.
The Senate passed immigration bills in 1982, 1983 and 1985. The House passed one in 1984. But the two chambers could not settle differences. It was not until 1986 that both houses passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, sponsored by Senator Simpson and Representatives Rodino and Romano L. Mazzoli, a Kentucky Democrat. It was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
The measure required employers to attest to their employees’ immigration status, made it illegal to hire or recruit illegal immigrants knowingly, legalized some seasonal agricultural immigrants who were undocumented, and legalized undocumented aliens who had entered the country before 1982 and resided continuously thereafter, committed no crimes, paid taxes and spoke English.
Some experts called it an administrative nightmare. Later reforms sponsored by Mr. Simpson and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, led to the admission of more highly skilled and educated immigrants. But sharp rises in illegal immigration continued until after the terrorist attacks of 2001, which led to more robust border enforcement and sweeping national security measures.
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Besides supporting abortion rights, Mr. Simpson voted against a ban on late-term abortions, but he opposed federal funding for abortions except to save a woman’s life or if a pregnancy arose from incest or rape.
He incurred the wrath of women’s and civil rights groups in hearings on the nominations of Judges Robert H. Bork, David Souter and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He supported all three, and joined the Senate’s unanimous confirmations of three other Reagan nominees: Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981, Antonin Scalia in 1986 and Anthony Kennedy in 1988. He also voted to elevate Associate Justice William Rehnquist to Chief Justice in 1986.
In 1987, Mr. Simpson was one of the Judiciary Committee’s strongest supporters of Judge Bork, whose belief that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the intent of its original founders was viewed by women’s groups as a signal that on the Supreme Court he would vote to reverse the 1973 landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion rights.
A speech by Senator Kennedy, titled “Robert Bork’s America,” offered a litany of negative images, including “a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions,” but it was rejected by Judge Bork’s supporters as a misrepresentation. Nonetheless, fears that Judge Bork would curtail settled rights of Black people and women created a national outcry, and the Senate rejected his nomination, 58 to 42.
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The Thomas Hearings
In 1990, Mr. Simpson again became an ogre to women’s groups in hearings on President Bush’s nominee to the high court, Judge Souter, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The National Organization for Women and the N.A.A.C.P. vehemently opposed his nomination. Mr. Simpson called the groups so closed-minded that “you couldn’t change them if you herded them over a cliff in a buffalo romp.” Judge Souter was confirmed 90-9.
Senator Simpson’s standing with women took another hit in 1991 when, defending another Bush nominee, Judge Thomas, he joined a counterattack against Anita Hill, who testified that the judge had sexually harassed her at two government agencies. Mr. Simpson brandished a sheaf of what he called derogatory correspondence about Ms. Hill.
He read aloud one statement from a prosecutor suggesting that Ms. Hill could be delusional, but he declined to release any of the letters publicly. Women’s and civil rights groups were furious, but Judge Thomas was confirmed, 52 to 48.
In a 2018 telephone interview from Cody for this obituary, Mr. Simpson was asked why, since he had generally supported giving women choices on abortion, he had supported Supreme Court nominees who might have voted against Roe v. Wade.
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“I didn’t give a damn about that,” he replied. “I knew these people. I was not thinking about nuances. I wanted people on the court regardless of ideologies. I wanted credible public servants with brains.”
Mr. Simpson did not seek re-election in 1996. Months after leaving the Senate, he published a memoir, “Right In the Old Gazoo: A Lifetime of Scrapping With the Press.” The former presidential aide David Gergen, in a review for The New York Times, said that Mr. Simpson justifiably complained that he had often been painted in harsh caricatures by the press.
“Alan Simpson was a much more valuable public servant than his critics admit,” Mr. Gergen wrote. “He worked effectively to create bipartisan coalitions that moved important legislation through Congress. His personal friendships and his humor were part of the glue that kept the place together. And unlike most of his critics, he owned up to mistakes.”
Reflecting on his Senate career in the obituary interview, Mr. Simpson said: “It was a real roller-coaster ride. Humor is what really saved my ass.” Then, referring to his wife, Ann Simpson, who had been listening in, he added: “Ann has wandered off. She knows when I’m about to put my foot in it.”
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A Political Lineage
Alan Kooi Simpson was born in Denver on Sept. 2, 1931, the younger of two sons of Milward and Lorna Kooi (pronounced Coy) Simpson, whose ancestors were Dutch. His father was Wyoming’s governor from 1955 to 1959 and a United States senator from 1962 to 1967.
As a Boy Scout in 1943, Alan visited Japanese American scouts whose families were interned during World War II near Ralston, Wyo. Behind fences holding 13,000 people, mostly women and children, Alan met 12-year-old Norman Y. Mineta. Years later their friendship was renewed as Mr. Mineta became a Democratic congressman and Secretary of Transportation under President George W. Bush.
Mr. Simpson’s older brother, Peter K. Simpson, became a historian, an administrator and a professor at the University of Wyoming, a state legislator from 1981 to 1984, and the state’s 1986 Republican candidate for governor.
After his teenage run-ins with the law, Alan graduated from Cody High School in 1949 and from the University of Wyoming at Laramie in 1954.
That year, he married his college sweetheart, Ann Schroll, who survives him. He is also survived by his three children: William Simpson, a district court judge in Wyoming; Colin Simpson, a former Wyoming state legislator; and Susan Simpson Gallagher, who owns an art gallery in Cody with her husband, John; Mr. Simpson’s brother, Peter; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
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Mr. Simpson was in the Army in 1955-56 and graduated from law school in 1958. He joined a law firm, was Cody’s city attorney for a decade and a Wyoming state legislator from 1964 to 1977.
From 1997 to 2000, Mr. Simpson taught at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, then returned to Wyoming to practice law.
In 2010, President Barack Obama named him and Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, as co-chairmen of an independent bipartisan commission that proposed $4 trillion in spending cuts and tax increases to cope with mounting federal deficits. Mr. Obama did not endorse the recommendations, but adopted most of them in his own 10-year deficit-cutting plan.
Mr. Simpson was a longtime supporter of gay rights, including same-sex marriage. And he became a proponent of amending the Constitution to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that prohibited the government, under First Amendment free-speech guarantees, from limiting political campaign spending by corporations, labor unions and other groups.
Mr. Simpson, in a funeral eulogy for George H.W. Bush in Washington in 2018, recalled that they had met had in 1962, when their fathers were senators. They remained close friends thereafter.
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“The most decent and honorable person I ever met was my friend George Bush,” Mr. Simpson said. “One of nature’s noblemen. His epitaph, perhaps just a single letter, the letter ‘L’ for loyalty. It coursed through his blood. Loyalty to his country, loyalty to his family, loyalty to his friends, loyalty to the institutions of government and always, always, always a friend to his friends.”
Mr. Simpson’s death elicited a tribute from former President George W. Bush, who in a statement lauded Mr. Simpson’s “loyal friendship and sharp sense of humor.”
He added, “When eulogizing my dad at the National Cathedral, Alan quipped, ‘Those who travel the high road of humility in Washington, D.C., are not bothered by heavy traffic.’”
