"He has to do the heavy lifting and the windows and the wash, and also protect the president." -- Alan K. Simpson
Alan Kooi Simpson (born September 2, 1931) is an American politician who served from 1979 to 1997 as a United States senator from Wyoming as a member of the Republican Party. His father, Milward L. Simpson, was also a member of the U.S. Senate from Wyoming (1962—1967) and a former governor of Wyoming (1955—1959) as well.
"An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.""Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word.""He's a million rubber bands in his resilience.""If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.""The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.""There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberties, only a long staircase where each step downward must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.""You were doing a sadistic little disservice to your country."
As a young man, Simpson was a Boy Scout, and visited Japanese American Boy Scouts who, along with their families, had been interned in Wyoming during World War II. There, he developed a friendship with Norman Mineta, who later became a U.S. Congressman and cabinet member. They served together in Congress and on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, and remain close friends.
One of Simpson's babysitters as a young boy was the future lieutenant governor and education superintendent of Louisiana, William J. "Bill" Dodd, who played baseball for a time as a young man in Cody with teammate Milward Simpson.
Yet, Simpson's youth was clearly not all baseball games and scout jamborees. In a recent brief in support of the claimant in the Supreme Court case Graham v. Florida , Simpson admitted that as a juvenile he was on federal probation for shooting mailboxes and punched a cop and...in his own words...“was a monster.”
Alan Simpson graduated from Cody High School in Cody, Wyoming, in 1949 and attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1950 for a postgraduate year. He graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1954 with a Bachelor of Science degree and in 1958 with a Juris Doctor degree. In 1954 he married Susan Ann Schroll, who was a fellow student at the University of Wyoming. He served in the United States Army in Germany from 1955—1956 with the 10th Infantry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division and with the 12th Armored Infantry Battalion, Second Armored Division.
He was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at the University of Wyoming.
Senator Simpson is a Freemason and holds the 33rd Degree and The Order of The Grand Cross from The Supreme Council 0f Masonry. Southern Masonic Jurisdiction.
Simpson was elected to the U.S. Senate on November 7, 1978, but was appointed to the post early on January 1, 1979, following the resignation of Clifford P. Hansen. From 1985 to 1995, Simpson was the Republican whip, Assistant Republican Leader in the Senate, having served with then Republican Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. He was chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee from 1981 to 1987 and again from 1995 to 1997 when Republicans regained control of the Senate. He also chaired the Immigration and Refugee Subcommittee of Judiciary; the Nuclear Regulation Subcommittee; the Social Security Subcommittee and the Committee on Aging. In 1995, he lost the whip's job to Trent Lott of Mississippi, and he did not seek reelection to the Senate in 1996. From 1997 to 2000, Simpson taught at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and served for two years as the Director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School.
Simpson returned to his home of Cody and practices law there with his two lawyer sons (William and Colin) in the firm of Simpson, Kepler and Edwards. The three are also partners in the firm of Burg Simpson Eldredge Hersh and Jardine of Englewood, Colorado. Colin Simpson, the third generation of his family in Wyoming politics, is a Republican member of the Wyoming House of Representatives and served as Speaker of the House for the 59th session of the Legislature, 2008 to March 2010. He is also a candidate for Governor.
Alan Simpson teaches periodically at his alma mater — the University of Wyoming at Laramie — with his brother Pete. He has completed serving as chair of the UW capital "Campaign for Distinction", which raised $204 million. That success was celebrated by the gala event, "An Extraordinary Evening", featuring former President George H.W. Bush (who had reportedly considered Simpson for the vice presidency in 1988) and Vice President Dick Cheney — another UW alumnus — and his wife Lynne V. Cheney.
Simpson serves on the Commission for Continuity in Government. He also serves as co-chair of Americans for Campaign Reform with former Senate colleagues Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska; is active with the National Commission on Writing; is on the Advisory Board of Common Good (a legal reform coalition); is a former member of the American Battle Monuments Commission, and was a member of the Iraq Study Group.
Simpson's father, Milward Simpson, also served in the Senate and was among some Republican members who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 strictly on constitutional grounds. Alan Simpson, however, has been an outspoken advocate for access to abortion stating it is a horrible situation but a deeply intimate and personal decision and should not be a political issue in a party that believes in "government out of our lives" and "the right to be left alone" and "the precious right of privacy". He supports gay and lesbian rights, and equality for all persons regardless of race, color, creed, gender, or sexual orientation. In an article in the Washington Post, the former senator wrote an article criticizing the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy stating "'Gay' is an artificial category that says little about a person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge."
In 2001, Simpson became Honorary Chairman of the Republican Unity Coalition (RUC), a gay/straight alliance within the Republican Party. In this capacity, Simpson personally recruited President Gerald R. Ford to serve on the RUC's Advisory Board.
In 2002, Simpson was involved in the Republican gubernatorial primary on behalf of former Democrat Eli Bebout of Riverton. Simpson criticized Bebout's principal challengers Raymond Breedlove Hunkins of Wheatland, and Bill Sniffen of Lander in Fremont County. Bebout defeated the two but then lost the general election to the Democratic nominee David Duane "Dave" Freudenthal, a former United States Attorney appointed by President Bill Clinton.
Simpson is an Honorary Board Member of the humanitarian organization Wings of Hope.
In 2006, Mr. Simpson was one of ten member contributors to the Iraq Study Group Report.
Simpson was appointed in 2010 to co-chair President Barack Obama's fiscal commission with co-chair Erskine Bowles.
Simpson invited controversy and calls for his retirement as a result of an email he sent to National Older Women's League executive director, Ashley Carson, on Tuesday, August 24, 2010. In the email (a response to a Huffington Post blog entry by Ms. Carson ) Simpson told Carson:
"And yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!"
The June 7, 1994, edition of the now-defunct supermarket tabloid Weekly World News reported that 12 U.S. Senators were aliens from other planets, including Simpson. The Associated Press ran a follow-up piece which confirmed the tongue-in-cheek participation of Senate offices in the story. Then-Senator Simpson's spokesman Charles Pelkey, when asked about Simpson's galactic origins, told the AP: "We've got only one thing to say: Klaatu barada nikto." This was a reference to the 1951 science fiction classic film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien arrives by flying saucer in Washington, D.C. Simpson also utters this phrase in a brief cameo in Men in Black.
Simpson also played himself in a cameo appearance for the 1993 film Dave. [1]
