This is a story about walking with a giant.
In contrast to the smallness of today’s politics, Sen. Al Simpson of Wyoming was a giant. Both physically — at 6 feet, 7 inches, he was the tallest member of the Senate in his day — and in largeness of spirit.
“He was a free spirit with how he conducted himself with people, and with the press,” said his lifelong friend, President George H.W. Bush. “He wouldn’t run for cover. He’d say, ‘Here’s what I think.’”
Al, who died in the early morning hours of March 14 at age 93 after struggling to recover from a broken hip, was our modern-day Lincoln: rough-hewn, straight-talking, folksy, but smart as a bow whip with unshakeable character.
He lit up every room he was ever in, drawing people to him like flies to honey. Armed with a million jokes and a billion stories and self-deprecating anecdotes that never grew old, he could make you laugh like no one else.
When he spoke to you, he’d lean his lithe frame down, lower his voice in confidence, and then tell you a secret especially picked for you.
“So much of Washington now is Simonized, sanitized, airbrushed, all the rough edges are burnished away,” his longtime colleague Erskine Bowles told Wyoming PBS once.
Not Al. There was a genuine human being behind those twinkling eyes.
Plain-spoken and direct, with uncommon common sense, his sayings were legion throughout Capitol Hill.
"Getting this bill passed is going to be more difficult than giving dry birth to a live porcupine."
“Those who travel the high road of humility are not troubled by heavy traffic in D.C.”
“You have integrity and nothing else matters. You don’t have integrity and nothing else matters.”
Through his great and humanizing sense of humor, he made friends of all his adversaries.
“He was gifted in crossing party lines and building bipartisan consensus,” his son Colin said in a statement after his dad’s death. “He would relate to legislative colleagues in a manner that allowed them to feel valued and listened to without being taken advantage of.”
At the same time, Simpson “was formidable and people knew it,” Colin Simpson said. “But he was also vulnerable because he spoke from the heart."
The small-town Republican created a talk show called "Face-Off" with his political opposite, big-city Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy, in which the two debated national issues and socially important topics.
They taped the show five days a week come political rain or shine. For eight years straight. Then after duking it out on air, they’d usually retire to a Capitol Hill watering hole to break bread and share a whiskey.
Historian David McCullough, another charter member of the FOA club, (Friend of Al) put it this way:
“He has the gift of talk and camaraderie, prerequisites for people in political life. But I think it’s more than that. Because he holds no grudges. If you have a knock-down argument with him about politics or an issue of the moment in the national spotlight, there’s no hard feelings afterward. He is in that way emblematic of a kind of civility that has alas eroded in American political life.”
I was fortunate enough to once spend an evening with Al and McCullough at a restaurant in Washington with his son Colin, Colin’s wife, Debbie, and my wife, Kelsey. The two octogenarians, arm in arm, broke out in song for some reason, probably out of the sheer pleasure of each other’s company. They sang old, Americana kinds of songs, like “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “Putting on the Ritz,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," and “It’s a Wonderful World.” It was loud and lusty singing that made the rest of the restaurant turn their heads, stop their meals, and watch and smile — and eventually join in.
“He’s much more sophisticated than people realized,” McCullough told a Wyoming interviewer. “He loved music. He loved to go to Europe. He loved to go to great museums and art galleries. He loved being with sophisticated people and listening to them. And learning.”
“Those are the softening agents of life,” Al said in an interview. “If you don’t have music or art or books or things that civilize you … politics is barbaric.”
Al and I liked to disagree agreeably about the press and its role in American life, a lifelong obsession of his. He wrote a book on my profession and its often rough treatment of he and his colleagues called “Right in the Old Gazoo,” a Gazoo being the south end of a north-traveling horse.
He used to tell me he didn’t expect us journalists to be cheerleaders, but thought we ought to spend maybe a little less time tearing the country down and a little more time building it up.
“By now, the media have trained their microscopes on every local blemish, picked every state pimple, and scratched the scab off every national sore, to the point where our beautiful country is barely recognizable,” he wrote in “Gazoo.”
“Remember,” he went on, “you’re not journalists first. I’m not a politician first. We are citizens of the United States of America first. And if we’ve forgotten that, we’re in a heap of trouble.”
From a teenager breaking federal laws to a revered senator making them, Simpson broke the mold. The same guy who shot 72 bullets into a mailbox for fun as a kid wound up second in command in the Senate where he sponsored 338 bills and amendments and co-sponsored more than 2000 other pieces of legislation, including major immigration reform way back in 1985.
Simpson retired from the Senate on Jan. 3, 1997, and went on to serve as director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
In July 2022, Simpson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. President Joe Biden praised him for “forging real relationships, even with people on the other side of the aisle” and for being “one of the most decent, stand-up, genuine guys I’ve ever served with.”
When asked about the honor by a PBS reporter, he replied: “My parole officer always believed in my capacity for redemption, even when my actions did not inspire confidence.”
His humor, more than anything, was his superpower.
“Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life,” he told me once sitting around a campfire at the Bobcat, his magnificent ranch on the south fork of the Shoshone.
“Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.”
When I was in college in Colorado Springs with his son Colin, I once invited him to speak to the members of my fraternity, and he graciously agreed. He showed up at the hotel we reserved, and to his horror, the auditorium where he was to speak opened up on the pool, where little children were splashing in the background. Al, known occasionally for an off-color remark, had to rewrite his whole speech then and there so as not to offend the ears of babes.
Years later, Colin showed me the text of speech, which Al had kept all those years, with about a hundred paragraphs X'ed out in slashing ballpoint pen.
Al never forgave me for that night, which means he gave Colin and me endless good-natured crap about it every time we got together, turning it into a great running joke among us for 40 years, making us laugh and laugh and laugh until we cried.
The world is a lot smaller without Alan K. Simpson in it — less joyful, less honest, less funny. We live in a different America now. Something feels gone forever with his passing. He and his generation kept our moral compass true, and now he and his fellow saints are marching on.
Al, as usual, said it best:
“The thing about the Senate is, the giants are gone,” he told biographer Donald Hardy. “Whether they were Republicans or Democrats, they were giants in days long past.”
That same biographer once asked Al how he hoped to be remembered.
“Just write this on my stone,” he said with a wry smile. “You would have wanted him on your side.”
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