CNN
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Alan Simpson, a longtime Republican senator from Wyoming who championed bipartisan solutions and steadfastly advocated for a moderate blend of conservatism, 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 provided to The Associated Press.
Simpson, a man of blunt rhetoric whose towering 6-foot-7 stature made him an instantly recognizable figure on Capitol Hill, made a career of taking on difficult congressional assignments, bringing his signature candor to epic legislative battles.
During the 1980s, Simpson was at the heart of seminal debates over environmental protection, nuclear regulation, and care for veterans – always injecting a healthy dose of humor to his work. ”In your country club, your church and business, about 15% of the people are screwballs, lightweights and boobs, and you would not want those people unrepresented in Congress,” he once said.
Simpson largely aligned with his party on key votes and championed GOP prescriptions for social welfare rollbacks, immigration and foreign policy. But he wasn’t afraid to cross party lines on pressing issues, as he supported abortion rights and was an early GOP advocate for same-sex marriage. “I’ve worked very closely with the gay-lesbian community; we’re all human beings, for God’s sake,” he said in 2008.
Simpson’s support for same-sex marriage was especially apparent in a contentious interview with comedian Bill Maher in 2004 after Maher quipped that he’d apologize to “the two gay people in Wyoming” for a joke about gay Republican lawmakers.
“Oh come on, pal. That’s just bullsh*t,” Simpson said. “And I don’t have to come on this program – I don’t have to come on this program when Matthew Shepard was killed in this state and the people of this state were offended. So put that one in your pipe.”
Simpson was also a fierce supporter of federal support of the arts. “If you’re just interested in politics alone, it’s barbaric. That won’t keep you alive,” he once said.
“You have to have the marvelous softening agents of books and letters and art and culture and theater, and I love that, and that’s what Ann and I have always thoroughly supported and loved and independently and also politically.”
His unapologetic nature attracted friendships as much as it challenged them. Simpson’s decades-long alliance with former Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, survived a tense dispute with Cheney’s wife, Lynne, who reportedly told Simpson to “shut up” at a reception in 2013. According to Simpson, the exchange took place after Cheney’s granddaughter asked him to sign a football for charity but couldn’t confirm if it would be used to raise money for Liz Cheney’s Senate campaign.
“I’m not out to hurt anyone,” Simpson said at the time. “That’s not who I am.”
Simpson is survived by his wife of 70 years, Ann, and their three children; Colin, Susan and William.
Born in Denver on September 2, 1931, Simpson grew up in Cody, Wyoming, a town of fewer than 10,000 people. His father, Milward Simpson, served in the Senate and as governor of Wyoming, while his mother, Lorna Kooi Simpson, served as president of the Cody Red Cross.
A self-proclaimed “monster” in his youth, Simpson was on federal probation for two years after shooting mailboxes with his friends. His behavior reached an inflection point after he says he “belted” a police officer trying to arrest him after Simpson had shoved another man outside a pool hall. Simpson ended up in jail for a night in a “sea of puke and urine.”
Simpson, spurned from the experience, described a “creeping maturity” that shifted the trajectory of his life. “The older you get, the more you realize … your own attitude is stupefying, and arrogant, and cocky, and a miserable way to live.”
“Anybody in our society − unless they are totally out to lunch − can understand that a guy of 25 or 35 is not the same guy of 17. You can’t just throw a kid in the clink forever.”
After completing high school in Cody, he graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1954 and earned his law degree from the school four years later.
Two years in the US Army and work as a private attorney would precede a winding political journey that began in earnest in 1965 when Simpson was elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives, a post he would hold for more than a decade.
Simpson would leverage those years, and his reputation for bringing life experiences to the job, into a successful Senate bid in 1978. The tallest senator in US history until 2017, Simpson served as Republican whip from 1985 to 1995 and was even considered a potential candidate for vice president in 1988.
“I’m a legislator. I love to legislate,” he told the University of Virginia’s Miller Center in 2008. “Plotting, strategizing, philosophizing, those things mean nothing to me. I’m a trigger guy. Give me an issue; let me wrench the emotion, fear, guilt, and racism out of it and get some facts into it and see if we can pass the son-of-a-bitch.”
Simpson declined to run for reelection in 1996 and went on to teach at Harvard University. But his years away from Capitol Hill didn’t dull his disdain for partisanship. In 2010, he co-chaired a bipartisan Presidential Commission on deficit reduction alongside Democrat Erskine Bowles. The panel, created by then-President Barack Obama, was tasked with identifying policies to “improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run.”
While the group’s plan failed to gain traction, Simpson’s role in the effort vaulted him back into the political spotlight as a commanding voice on national debt, an issue he tried to impress upon young people.
“Stop Instagramming your breakfast and tweeting your first world problems and getting on YouTube so you can see ‘Gangnam Style,’” he said in a 2012 video in which the octogenarian hopped to the song in an effort to raise awareness about the national debt.
In a statement released after Simpson’s death, former President George W. Bush described Simpson as “one of the finest public servants ever to have graced our nation’s capital” and noted how the former senator delivered a eulogy at the funeral for his father, former President George H. W. Bush, in 2018.
“My family will remember him best not for his many accomplishments, but for his loyal friendship – and sharp sense of humor,” Bush said.
Then-President Joe Biden cited Simpson’s “spirit” when he presented his former Senate colleague with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in July 2022.
“He allowed his conscience to be his guide. And he believed in forging real relationships even with people on the other side of the aisle, proving we can do anything when we work together as the United States of America,” Biden said from the White House.
“It matters, it matters, it matters. We need more of your spirit back in the United States Senate on both sides of the aisle.”
Indeed, by the end of life, Simpson had also identified the growing political divide in Congress as a key threat to the nation’s well-being, lamenting to CNN in 2018, “You can see the bitterness that goes on.”
“You see the fact that if they’re a Democrat, you just ignore them, or if they’re a Republican, you ignore them.”
CNN’s Jeff Zeleny and Michael Williams contributed to this report.
