CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, a political legend whose quick wit bridged partisan gaps in the years before today’s political acrimony, has died. He was 93.
Simpson died early Friday after struggling to recover from a broken hip in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a group of museums where he was a board member for 56 years.
“He was an uncommonly generous man,” Pete Simpson, his older brother, said in the statement. “And I mean generous in an absolutely unconditional way. Giving of his time, giving of his energy — and he did it in politics and he did it in the family, forever.”
Along with former Vice President Dick Cheney, Simpson was a towering Republican figure from Wyoming, the least-populated state. Unlike Cheney, Simpson was famous for his humor.
“We have two political parties in this country, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I belong to the Stupid Party,” was among Simpson’s many well-known quips.
A political moderate by current standards, Simpson’s three terms as senator from 1979 to 1997 covered the Republican Party’s rejuvenation under President Ronald Reagan. Simpson played a key role rallying GOP senators around the party’s legislative agenda as a top Senate leader during that time.
Simpson was better known for holding his own views, though, with sometimes caustic certainty. A deficit hawk with sharp descriptions of people who relied on government assistance, Simpson supported abortion rights — an example of moderation that contributed to his fade in the GOP.
His Democratic friends included Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, and Norman Mineta, transportation secretary under President George W. Bush.
Simpson and Mineta met as Boy Scouts when Mineta and his family were imprisoned as Japanese-Americans in the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center near Simpson’s hometown of Cody, Wyoming, during World War II.
After leaving politics, both promoted awareness of the incarceration of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in camps during the war. Mineta, who died in 2022, recalled that Simpson once was asked what was the biggest difference between them as a Republican and a Democrat.
“Alan thought about it and he said, ‘Well, I wear size 15 shoes and he wears a size 8 and a half,’” Mineta replied, according to the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation.
Simpson was “gifted in crossing party lines and building bipartisan consensus,” Colin Simpson, one of his three children and a former Wyoming House speaker, said in the statement.
“Dad and Pete have anchored the extended Simpson family for decades with the same love, humor, compassion and dedication their parents did before them,” he said. “Dad was a mighty force and with Mom’s steady hand by his side we are so blessed and proud to have been along for the ride of a lifetime.”
In 2010, President Barack Obama tasked Simpson with co-leading a debt-reduction commission that developed a plan to save $4 trillion through tax hikes and spending cuts. The plan lacked support for serious consideration by Congress.
At 6-foot-7, Simpson was literally a towering figure — tallest on record in the Senate until Alabama Sen. Luther Strange, who is 6-foot-9, took office in 2017.
Big as Simpson’s shoes were, he had huge ones to fill politically.
His father, Milward Simpson, was a governor, U.S. senator and state legislator. His mother, Lorna Kooi Simpson, was president of the Red Cross in Cody and on the local planning commission.
“I saw Dad loved politics and the law, and I wanted to do that,” Simpson once said.
Simpson was born in Denver in 1931. After a childhood of reckless gun-shooting and vandalism in Cody that put him in danger and in trouble with the law, he graduated from Cody High School in 1949 and the University of Wyoming in 1954.
Also that year he married Ann Schroll, of Greybull, Wyoming, and joined the U.S. Army, where he served in the Fifth Infantry Division and the Second Armored “Hell on Wheels” Division in Germany.
Alan and Ann Simpson celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary with a community ice cream social attended by relatives and hundreds of others in a Cody park last summer.
After leaving the Army, Simpson got a law degree from the University of Wyoming in 1958 and joined his father’s law practice, where he worked for the next 19 years. He was elected to the Wyoming House in 1964 and served there until his election to the U.S. Senate in 1976.
A football and basketball athlete at the University of Wyoming, Simpson fondly described politics as a “contact sport.”
“I’ve been called everything,” he said in 2003. “What the hell. If you don’t like the combat, get out.”
Simpson’s candor made him popular with voters. He also was known as a well-read, hardworking and sometimes hard-nosed politician involved in immigration, veterans’ affairs and environmental issues.
He served on the Immigration Subcommittee and the Veterans Affairs Committee, among others.
Simpson opposed sentences of life without parole for juveniles and said he supported review of criminal sentences after a period of time.
“When they get to be 30 or 40 and they been in the clink for 20 years, or 30 or 40, and they have learned how to read and how to do things, why not?” he told The Associated Press in 2009.
By 1995, he’d had enough of the Senate and decided not to run again.
“Part of me said I could do this for another three or four years but not six,” he said at the time. “The old fire in the belly is out. The edge is off.”
Others of his family in politics and government included his older brother, Pete, a University of Wyoming historian who served in the Wyoming House and was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for governor in 1986. Alan Simpson’s son Colin was speaker of the Wyoming House, and his nephew Milward Simpson directed the state parks department.
After leaving the Senate, Simpson taught about politics and the media at Harvard University and the University of Wyoming. In speeches he often urged college students to be politically involved.
In 2022, President Joe Biden awarded Simpson the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Simpson is survived by his wife, Ann; his brother Pete Simpson; sons Colin Simpson and William Simpson; and daughter Susan Simpson Gallagher.