♪ >> Anybody who's been in politics has had their skinorn off their body, but if you're successful, it grows back double-strength.

>> One of the great things about Al was he never had any hesitation about telling people exactly what he thought.

On more than one occasion that got him in trouble.

>> The only reason I ever worked hard was so I wouldn't make an ass out of myself.

>> What I found out very, very quickly was that Al Simpson was interested in getting things done for Wyoming, and he was interested in getting things done for the country.

>> Humor is your sword and your shield.

All humor is serious.

All humor comes from personal pain.

>> We've had a wonderful life, but he was a wild young man.

>> I'm entitled to be called a fool, boob, idiot, bonehead, screwball.

That's fair, but never let them distort who you are, who you are as a person.

♪ >>> People who work in Washington, D.C., often tire of the political rhetoric and posturing and long to get back to the heartland, a place like Wyoming, where they can listen to the voices of Americans not often heard in the corridors of power.

But 30 years ago, Alan Simpson traveled in the opposite direction -- from Little Cody, Wyoming, to the nation's capital, and a real voice arrived in Washington.

Tall, funny, straight-talking, and unafraid of tough issues, he took the place by storm.

In the first part of the story, we'll learn about Simpson's roots and the beginning of a political career that would take him to the inner sanctum of the most powerful government in the world and back again to Wyoming.

♪ >>> The bloodlines that landed Alan Simpson in Wyoming flow through the history of the American frontier.

His first ancestor to come west was frontiersman Finn Burnett, who arrived in 1862, when what is now Wyoming was still a territorial outpost.

>> Fincelius Burnett, he was born in Monticello, Missouri, in the '40s and then of course the Civil War came and Missouri was, you could best say, terribly confused.

They didn't know whether they were north or south or pro-slavery, anti-slavery in the same state.

He took off, he just -- he told his family later, he said, I didn't know whether I'd be killed by the north or the south.

He came into Wyoming in 1862.

That's a few years before statehood, before we were a territory.

He became a settler at Fort Phil Kearny, which was a PX guy.

Then he went over South Pass City.

He was looking for gold, like everybody else, and he got over and stayed at a boarding house there, and then in that boarding house, he met my great-grandmother.

>>> Alan Simpson's great-grandparents settled in the Wind River Basin, where Finn Burnett worked on the Shoshone Indian Reservation, teaching the previously nomadic tribe how to farm.

Maggie, Al Simpson's grandmother, who the family would call Nanny, grew up in this frontier world and took a job teaching Indian students Latin at St. Steven's Mission on the reservation.

Then William L. Simpson arrived from Colorado.

>> He heard that if you learned a little Latin, you could become a lawyer, and he heard that there was this young woman at St. Steven's who seemed to teach a little Latin, so he rode over there.

She taught him some Latin phrases that lawyers could use to dazzle their opponents.

>>> Will Simpson married schoolteacher Maggie Burnett.

When he wasn't dazzling courtrooms, he was carousing and gambling and getting into scrapes.

From Lander, to Cody, to Jackson to Meeteetse.

>> Shot the banker in the ear in Meeteetse.

The banker said, you know, Will, we don't like Democrats here in Park County, and he bounced the Democrat party check signed by my grandfather, and my grandfather went in, he said, hey, if you do that again, something bad'll happen to you.

And old Hayes bounced another one, and my grandfather went in and shot pieces of his ear.

But the headline was beautiful.

It says, local attorney shoots Meeteetse banker.

♪ >>> Will Simpson had a temper.

In another incident in Cody, it cost the life of a cowboy who accosted him over a divorce case.

>> Our mother said one time that his comment was, I'm living with it all my life.

He said, I'll never forget the look in his eye when I shot him, I have to live with that forever.

So we had never heard that side of Bill's temperament.

Bill had a temper.

Mom worried about that, so did Nanny, when they saw it in Al.

Didn't want him to shoot somebody.

>>> There was the temper, but Will Simpson had charm too, and influence.

Perhaps because of his own brushes with the law, he used that influence at least once to help a well-known criminal.

>> They knew Butch Cassidy, my grandparents knew him, and my grandmother said -- Nanny -- "He was a nice boy."

Somehow Papoo was a special prosecutor, and he was in the area of the Laramie territorial prison, and they had Cassidy, and he was in the clink.

And he said, I want to see Billy Simpson.

And he told my grandfather, he said, look Will, I got to get out tonight, I have to.

It's critical.

I can't tell you why but I'll be back in at 8:00 in the morning and you just have to trust me.

By gad, he was back by 8:00 in the morning.

Will Simpson was a very persuasive man.

He had the wiles of a cougar and a coyote and a good sense of humor, but he'd get drunk and then just his whole life would change.

He just was a different guy.

When Papoo died in Jackson, in December, Nanny said it was just -- the whole earth was frozen.

And during the day, she could hear the dynamite blasting a hole for him up at the Aspen Creek right behind Snow King.

All the folks remembered because she leaned over the casket and put her hand on him and said, you didn't think I'd stick with you, did you, Billy?

And after the service and everybody had gone, a chunk of the blasted rock had crushed the casket, and some guy who was just getting ready to put the fill in said, well that'll keep old Bill from getting down to the bar tonight.

>>> Milward Simpson, the son of William and Maggie and the father of Alan, was born in Jackson in 1897.

He grew up in Cody where he was a star athlete in basketball and football.

He served in the army and then went to law school.

>> He had worked in the mines in Red Lodge for a summer, and when he was in his 20s, he got to Hot Springs County, he went out to the mines and he said, I'm going to run for the State Legislature, from Hot Springs County, as a Republican.

He went out and campaigned out there, drank beer with them, whiskey, made his own moon.

I mean, they all made moon.

He was elected to the Legislature from Hot Springs County in 1927, the only Republican had ever been to that point.

He was a very attractive guy, loved to dance.

He resisted prohibition completely.

He got to the Legislature and a woman from Hot Springs County said, Milward Simpson, I know your mother, Maggie Simpson, and I know her a woman of rectitude and principle and beautiful, and I want to know about you.

I want to know, are you wet or are you dry?

And he said, lady, I'm so wet if you blew on me I'd ripple.

Well I tell you, she went and told his mother!

>>> But he continued his fun-loving ways, active in sports, goofing around with friends, having fun at parties and a wedding in Sheridan.

>> When he saw this gal he said, I'm going to marry that girl, which was my mother, Lorna Helen Kooi.

♪ >>> Lorna Helen Kooi's family followed a different route west, they came by rail.

Her father grew up in Chicago, came west working for the railroad, and founded a town near Sheridan named Kooi.

There, Lorna was raised before going off to the University of Illinois.

>> She was a beautiful woman and beautifully creative.

She played the piano, the violin, the mandolin, and she was told by her music teacher in Illinois University that she could never amount to anything in music.

Broke her heart, so she came back to Sheridan.

>>> Lorna and Milward were married and moved back to Cody where Alan Simpson's older brother, Pete, was born in 1930.

>> They have one secret that's well-kept in the family, mostly by Alan, but I'm going to -- I'm going to fess up and blow his cover, but he was not born in Wyoming, Jeff, he was born in Denver, Colorado.

Now, he never admitted that.

I, on the other hand, was born in Sheridan, Wyoming, a legitimate, native Wyomingite.

Well, it serves him right, we've caught him.

>> When I was running for office, Ray Whitaker got up, my opponent, and he said, I have something Simpson hadn't told you.

He's not a native.

A native is a guy born here.

I said, no, a native is a person.

Look it up in the dictionary, Ray.

He said he was born in Denver, and I said, I didn't want anyone to know.

And Ray said, you big boob.

♪ >>> The small, friendly community of Cody was a good place for two lively, adventurous boys to grow up.

But a happy childhood was not exempted from the Great Depression.

It threw people out of work all over the country and brought an influx of down-and-out newcomers to Wyoming.

>> They'd come in on the railroad, they were called hobos, you know, but they weren't really hobos, they were intelligent people who had lost their job and it was the Depression.

They'd walk from the depot across the bridge, come to our house, every house, say, you got anything that needs to be done?

My mother'd say, well, I can have you do the hedge or something.

But I remember -- I remember sitting around the fire with them while they were cooking stew in the pot, you know, and telling stories, not just stories of bumming the railroads, stories of what they had done before and how tough it was.

If you lived in Cody, you bought your melons over in Powell and you had food, and dad practiced law, and you know, traded a divorce for a cow I guess, barter system was in good order.

>>> And Milward Simpson still had the political bug.

In 1940, he ran for the U.S. Senate against Democratic incumbent Joseph C. O'Mahoney.

He lost that race and he lost his father, Bill Simpson.

Some say the old man's heart was broken by his son's defeat.

Milward moved the family to the Jackson area to close his father's law practice and it was a time of healing.

♪ >> So we fished the Snake.

The Snake was just a few hundred yards through the woods, caught toads and frogs, and I mean, it was just absolutely -- and then when Fall came, we all went to a one-room school at Moose.

>>> The parents were happy, too... ♪ >> They'd say, now, we're going into the Wort Hotel tonight with some friends for dinner.

Now here's your dinner, you go to bed and we'll be home later tonight.

One morning, they came in at 6:00!

You hear them sitting out in the car, it's like, God, this is -- what is this going on?

Well anyway, it was a great summer all around, and they loved it, we loved it, because they were -- they were healing and in love themselves, and Pete and I were just in the wash of it.

>>> Then in late October, around Halloween, just before the road through Yellowstone Park closed for the winter, the Simpsons returned to Cody.

And that December, the nation suffered another shock, the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The Simpson boys were too young to enlist, but Cody, like every town in Wyoming, made a heart-rending contribution to the war.

>> The war changed everything in this community, because young people -- you go to a basketball game because you loved basketball or football, and see the Cody Broncs playing the Powell Panthers in 1941, and then you would read six months later that the star center had died in Iwo Jima.

I get very emotional about that.

♪ And you think, these sons of bitches are killing my football idol and my basketball idol, killing them, they're dying.

And then they'd have a service in Cody and everybody would come, little town, and the passions ran high.

Suddenly in the midst of '42, any guy that could swing a hammer between 20 and 70 was out here in the middle of the prairie, between Powell and Cody, putting up the Jap camp, and it went up in several weeks: tar paper shacks, all the same, one light bulb, one socket, so you couldn't get out, two things.

>>> It was an internment center for Japanese Americans -- barbed wire, tar paper shacks, searchlights, and guards with guns.

>> And then you'd go into a restaurant in Cody, one right down there, oddly enough, right where the Japanese restaurant is today, it's a sushi place.

On the door said, "No Japs allowed, you sons of bitches killed my kid."

Now that is pretty real.

We were told there were 11,000 people there.

Well, there were only two cities larger than that in Wyoming, and that was Cheyenne and Casper.

Powell was about 2500, Cody, probably 3500, and so people thought, now if those people escape, we'll all be killed.

11,000 of them there and they're going to break out, and they'll come to town and we'll be dead.

>>> But there was compassion as well as fear in Cody.

The Episcopal priest held services at the relocation center with the Simpson boys often serving as acolytes.

And the boy scouts from Cody learned that there was a scout troop at the camp, too... >> We said, "Whato they look like?"

They look like Americans, except they're Japanese and they have the same merit badges and troop number so-and-so.

And I ran into this little guy from San Jose -- Norm Mineta -- well, he was a devil and so was I.

>> So this kid and I built the moat around the tent, and so then he said, you know, there's a kid from my troop who I really don't care for just below us here.

Would you mind if we cut the water to exit that way?

It was really no skin off my nose, so I said, sure.

So we built a beautiful moat, and then we had the water exiting that way.

Well, as luck would have it, it started raining that afternoon and our moat worked perfectly and the water drained off down that way, and not too much later, the tent pegs pulled on that tent below us, came down, and this kid in my tent's going, (laughing) And I kept saying, Alan, would you shut up so we can do what we were supposed to be doing -- our assigned tasks in our pup tents.

>> And we just thought that was the funniest thing.

He howled and shrieked and Mineta and I tied something to his leg, I don't remember, but we had a fiendish laughter, I remembered that.

>>> The boys who met in a pup tent at Heart Mountain would be reunited years later in Washington, D.C., when Mineta became a Congressman, and Simpson, a U.S.

Senator.

And after 65 years of friendship, the two of them are still cracking each other up, even as they work together to raise money for an interpretive center at the site.

♪ But in the 1940s, Pete and Alan charted the progress of the war on maps on their bedroom wall until Alan Simpson's 14th birthday.

>> In our bedroom at night, you listened to Walter Winchell, and you'd take a pin and put it in there, that today they crossed the Rhine.

And then D-Day, June 6, 1944, they invaded Europe.

And then of course it was all signed on my birthday, on the Battleship Missouri, September 2, 1945... War was over and my parents were thrilled because their little boys weren't going to go to war.

♪ >>> Pete and Alan Simpson had entered high school with the usual push and pull of good and bad influences.

One of the best influences was Winona Thompson, a Cody English teacher.

>> She would bring in the Decca Record collection of "Othello," with the original voices of Paul Robeson as Othello, Uta Hagen as Desdemona, and Jose Ferrer as Iago.

Shakespeare is still current, because it's 400-plus years old.

It's about love, hate, lust, destruction, caring -- every human emotion is in Shakespeare somewhere, and every humor.

So all these things rattle in your head, and then when you're about to do something, and you know damn well it ain't the thing to do, that marvelous phrase, "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.

And the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard often go awry and lose the name of action."

Now those things stick in your head.

>>> In high school, as throughout their childhood, older brother Pete had always been Alan Simpson's anchor.

So when Pete went off for a year at a private school in Detroit, his brother was adrift.

>> That was 1948 and a bunch of us, about five of us, got together and we were crackshots.

We shot all the time -- shoot 500 rounds a day.

You can get pretty good.

We got -- we went out and we shot up a mailbox, and just put about 72 holes in this one and in the course of the melee, somebody killed a cow over in the field because these rounds were landing, you know, where we didn't know where they were, landing on some old boy's porch.

They found out what day that had happened, you know, there were holes in the mail and who was driving around, and man oh man, here they came, the Feds, and U.S. Treasury.

And we were on Federal probation for two years -- stupid, idiotic, foolish, ignorant, dumb -- and they'd say, how can you explain this?

You'd say, I'll never do it again.

Now that would usually work.

>>> But it didn't work on his parents...Milward and Lorna knew their son was lying.

>> I'd seen Mom cry.

I could -- I could almost get her to cry.

The cop car would drive up, but I'd never seen the old man cry about me, but at the dinner table one night, and Pete was gone, just the three of us, he cried.

He gave the eternal parental lament, which is, where have we failed, and I said, I don't know, you didn't fail.

I think I was very stoic as I watched that, but boy, I went to my room and I thought, man, to see the old man cry about me...

Athletics saved me.

Became captain of the Cody Bronc basketball team in '49, played football.

>>> Family and sports kept Alan Simpson on track, but barely... Friends remember him as big, funny, and mischievous.

He made it to the University of Wyoming.

>> I weighed 260, had hair and thought beer was food.

That is not a funny statement, it was real.

I played ball.

I went out for freshman ball and I made the team.

And then I played, you know, finally made first string in my junior year and played -- was elected the outstanding lineman of the game against Houston University.

>>> But Alan still liked to party, and that led to trouble along the way... Summers, Simpson earned money on a road crew, working as a tamper.

He began visiting some clubs on the other side of the tracks in Laramie, and one night, he got in a fight outside a bar with a fellow who was talking down the black patrons.

>> I threw him in the bushes, and just as a searchlight from the cop car came on, said, A-ha!

What have you done to this guy?

I said, nothing.

He said, nothing?

What do you mean, nothing?

We just saw you throw him in the hedge, look at him.

I said, I didn't do a thing to this guy.

And he said, you did, we saw you, and I said -- and then when he kept throwing the fuel on it, I just turned and slugged the cop.

>>> Alan Simpson got off easy, charged with breach of the peace, and his name was stripped from "Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities."

This time, it was politics, campus politics, that pulled him back in line, and a student named Ann Schroll... >> And then I ran for the student senate, because I saw Ann was on the student senate and I wanted to get as close to her as I could, so I won that, I won that, and that made me a little bit more responsible.

♪ >>> The relationship with Ann was a steadying influence, but there were difficult decisions to make... >> We were riding around smooching one night, and she said, well I got a job -- She was a year ahead of me -- She says, I've got a job!

I've got two offers: Cheyenne at Ebert or California.

I said, California?

You wouldn't go teach in California, would you?

She said yes, it's a good job.

I said, if you stuck around here maybe we could get married, if you went to Cheyenne.

She said, is that a proposal?

I said, I don't know, I've never done that before.

I was about 20, and I was big, and I drank beer day and night, and Ann even waited a year.

I said, why did we wait that one year after I said we ought to get married?

>> When we were dating, my big concern was he might have a drinking problem, and that was not part of my life, and so I waited that out a little while and decided that he was salvageable, and he has proved thus.

But he was a wild young man.

>> But nice.

>> Very nice and kind.

(giggling) ♪ >> So we were married on a Monday morning at 10:00, a Monday morning, hoping nobody would come.

At St. Andrew's church, in that little tiny church, hottest day of the year.

I was the closest I've ever come in public life to passing out.

And Pete had been on one side and Ann on the other -- a hot day, and I just said, "I'm going down."

And Pete -- I felt Pete's arm and then Ann's arm and the priest got all jazzed up and skipped two pages of the ceremony and it was just a ghastly day.

But of course, it was your marriage day.

But then we went out on the road, because we didn't go to the army until November.

>> First time I was in an airplane was when Al and I flew to Germany when he was in the army.

We lived there for two years, which was a fabulous experience.

♪ >>> Alan Simpson was married and in the army.

His father, meanwhile, was not finished with politics.

Milward Simpson would run again in 1954 for governor, successfully.

>> Al has a great phrase which I quote when I'm teaching some of my -- one of my classes down there, which is -- "Once you get politics in your blood, the only way to get it out is with embalming fluid."

And to a great extent, that was the case.

We heard about it at breakfast and that was a foregone conclusion and part of the living code of the family was, you should serve.

If you have advantages and opportunities to do so, you should do that.

>>> The Governor's mansion in Wyoming was not a place you could hide from the controversies of the day.

Alan Simpson was in law school when his father faced a tough decision about capital punishment.

>> We'd all read about Tricky Riggle -- He walked into a diner and blew three people off the stool with a gun.

I mean, he killed them.

There wasn't any question about what he'd done.

He was an old rodeo rider, they called him Tricky Riggle.

And Dad said, I'm not going to take that responsibility.

I mean, I don't care who said he ought to be dead, they were hiding.

There were several on the court and there's 12 jurors, but there's only one me, and I'm not going to -- I'm going to commute his sentence.

Well that was very unpopular.

>>> Milward Simpson though would folw his own path...

Even when a powerful group from Sheridan, the area where his mother was raised, came in asking him to use his influence to route the new Federal freeway, Interstate 90, through Sheridan instead of Buffalo.

>> The old man called me one day and he said, come on over.

He said, I got a little area in the back of my office and I think you'll want to learn a little about politics.

So I go over and I'm hiding behind this -- sitting behind this partition, big office, governor of Wyoming, here comes seven guys from the Sheridan County Legislative Delegation.

It took 'em 20 minutes to say it that, if you can't do this for us, Sheridan, your second home, we gave you 2,500 vote majority the last time you ran, and then they just sat.

And Pop said, look, could you say that again so that I'm sure that I got the wax out of my ears?

Well, Governor, we'll just say that it's so critical to us that we feel that if you can't do this, it would be very detrimental to you in your reelection, maybe probably defeat you.

He said, I want you sons of bitches to get up and get your ass out of here, every one of you bastards, and don't ever show around here, you slimeballs!

Well God, and then he went even worse than that...

He had lyrical profanity which I inherited.

They stormed out.

It was just foul, and God, I stepped out behind that screen and just hugged the old man, I said, God, Dad, I loved that!

He said, they're going to come at me like the hounds of Hell, like the Harpies from the cliffs.

>>> Come at him they did, and in 1958, Democrat Joe Hickey ousted him from the Governor's mansion.

>> And they told Pop, now don't respond to that.

That's where I learned my lesson that an attack unanswered is an attack agreed to.

But I do remember sitting in the Parker Cafe with Ann about a day after the election, hiding, and a couple of cowboys in the booth next to us said, hey, we got rid of that bastard Simpson, didn't we?

And the other guy said, yeah, who'd we get?

And the other one said, who cares?

And that's Wyoming politics.

♪ >>> Politics for the Simpson family was on the shelf for awhile... Milward and Alan Simpson practiced law together, joined by Charles Kepler.

>> Pop's taking on these big cases, you know, and then dumping them on Kep and me, but that kept us eating.

>>> Simpson liked people, and people liked him, and they brought him work.

But he had little appetite for criminal law and he often handed the courtroom work off to friends like Jerry Spence.

The practice did well and developed some lucrative specialties.

>> Wyoming was the second divorce capital of America.

You see, in Nevada, it was six weeks, and you got a divorce.

In Wyoming, it was 60 days.

In every other jurisdiction, it was a year.

So who wanted to go to the desert of Las Vegas -- Las Vegas was just a desert in the '50s, '60s -- and then Wyoming, come and stay in Meeteetse for 60 days or up the river, so yeah... And they charged $250 for a divorce, and people would come from New York and the property settlement would be done in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, or somewhere, and then you just got the decree here.

Anyway, but I tell you, after doing 1500 divorces, it made my relationship a lot more solid.

I'd come home, I'd say, let me tell you, Annie, what two people can do to each other.

And they'd say never get emotionally involved with your clients -- Bullshit!

Jerry Spence and I would talk about that, we were successful because we were emotionally involved with our clients.

>> I can remember one particular case in which I was the attorney who had been the top man in my class, and the judge was the lawyer -- or the judge was the judge who was the low man in his class, and both of us failed the Bar, both the judge and I failed the Bar.

So here we were, the first time around, the top man and the bottom man, the judge and the attorney, and I'm representing Al's client.

And I can remember Al whispering to my ear -- I was just raising hell with the judge about something, and Al whispered to me, says, are you the lawyer?

I said yes, of course.

He says, well, are you really the lawyer?

I said yes.

He said, well, is the judge -- is the judge the judge?

"Yes."

He says, well then, why don't you let the judge be the judge?

I thought, you know, that's a very bright thing he said, and I never forgot that.

I have taught that lesson hundreds of times, to young lawyers afterwards -- let the judge be the judge.

>>> The Simpsons were growing a family...

Son, Bill, was born in 1957; son, Colin, in 1959; daughter, Susie, in 1962.

Life in Cody was Rotary Club, Little League, and Chamber of Commerce.

>> I was enjoying the practice of law, loved being in Cody.

We had a little house on 23rd Street.

Ann and I were busy.

She was taking a very active interest in the community, as she did everywhere we went.

>>> In 1961, Keith Thompson was elected to the U.S. Senate from Wyoming, but died before taking office.

Governor Joe Hickey appointed himself to finish the Senate term.

Well, Milward Simpson couldn't resist another swing at politics, with Alan Simpson at his side.

>> He said, I think I'll run against the instant senator.

He said, I haven't told your mother, haven't told Pete.

What do you think?

I said, I think only one thing.

If you're going to do this, I want to be your campaign manager, because I refuse to see you go down the tubes like you did the last time.

The ads were, did Joe Hickey represent you when, and then he had the Congressional record, the date, the time, when he voted this way, which was a vote totally opposed to Wyoming because he was new and was following the party line, like all new guys do, and that party line didn't sit with Wyoming at all.

>>> Milward Simpson beat Joe Hickey and was elected to the U.S. Senate, and in Washington, D.C., the Simpsons made a family connection that would extend to the next generation... >> So then the old man went to Washington and I went with him for awhile, but never to be permanent, because we knew that would be a disaster.

You could do that then, you could hire -- Pop said, you know, this would be the end of your political career and certainly the end of mine.

So I turned him over to Prescott Bush, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut was just retiring, and his son was there kind of helping him wind up, a fella named George Herbert Walker Bush, who I met in 1962.

♪ >>> Alan Simpson was ready, finally, to begin his own political career.

>> I knew that maybe someday I'd run for the Legislature, but I knew too that I would never violate rule number 84B, which was to run against an incumbent in a primary, and any time it ever happened, at any level, in any state, it destroyed the party.

So the Speaker of the House in '62 or '63 was Marlin Kurtz of Cody, Wyoming.

And in compliance with history and tradition, he said I will not run again.

>>> Alan Simpson was on the Republican ticket in the 1964 primary and won a seat in the Wyoming House of Representatives.

But he knew enough from his family's experience to have no illusions about politics.

It was otherwise a bad year for Republicans... >> We picked up people and took them to the polls.

They said, well, we sure like your man, Goldwater, he's got a lot of soul and he's firm and fair, and 78 percent of the people in his precinct voted for Lyndon Johnson.

(laughing) ♪ >>> Wyoming Legislature was part-time work, a citizen's legislature that met only a month or two a year, with low pay and no personal staff for legislators.

>> The best thing that ever happened to me in public life, I went to the Legislature and I was in the minority.

Now that's an important place to start.

I hadn't the slightest idea, I didn't have an issue in my back pocket, nothing, and to me, I think it was a great help.

And then I'd read the bills, and that's -- you know, then I thought, God, this is crazy, there are hundreds of these things and I don't know which ones are going to come up.

I didn't know exactly what the system was, but then as they began to come through the committees, then I'd really pay attention.

>>> And Representative Simpson quickly got himself in hot water over a cold brew...

He brought an amendment to a controlled substances bill, allowing law enforcement to check drivers for intoxication.

>> I saw all these guys sitting on the floor smoking cigarettes, and then they'd go in the back room and have a drink.

So I put alcohol into Section 2 of the controlled substances.

I'll tell you, first they just sat there and said, now this is a smart aleck trick, and I said no, this is the most abused drug in America.

Now I'll tell you, the guys who knew me came at me and said, you hypocrite, you been driving around with a cool beer between your legs for 20 years, sucking it up, and now this -- Give your consent, implied the cop asked you to breathe?

I said, yeah.

"Well why?"

I says, 'cause Shank died and Joe died and Ed died, and I named all these buddies of mine, died -- Jack -- I could name them all.

I remember their faces in my eye of the mind, and I just said, that's a waste, they were great guys -- so I passed that.

And so they would watch me, and then the thing that helped was the Democrats who didn't know what to do with a certain thing, I'd see them come over to my desk, and they'd say, you know, you know anything about this?

You're a lawyer...

I'd say, yeah, I do.

Well, could you help me redraft this?

I said, sure, I'll help you do that.

And they knew there wouldn't be tricks in it.

>> Getting people to do what you want them to do -- it's the art of persuasion, and heavens knows Al has that in spades, and you could see it in the Legislature; you could certainly see it in the Senate.

But it all comes down to one human being trying to get another to do what he wants them to do.

He was a legislative craftsman, and his issues would come to him and he would take a hold of them.

He loved to work the process.

>>> And Simpson made a lifetime ally on the other side of the aisle when he worked on a land use planning bill with Democrat Ed Herschler, later to be Governor Herschler.

>> Herschler knew I'd been on the Park County Zoning and Planning.

He said, come in here and look at this bill.

Now you look at it.

I said, not only look at it, give it to me.

Let me work it over and I'll bring it back to you, and if you agree, then I'll do it.

I'll be the Principal Sponsor.

The grand communist design, when one of these guys gets up and starts to cut this thing to bits, he said, I've got an idea.

I'll send a message by page to put right on the podium while we're speaking that says, the Governor wants to see you in his office immediately.

And when he leaves, you just dismiss the amendment and move on with the bill.

And that's what we did.

And it worked, and it went on the books, and it said that every county had to have a planning and zoning commission for at least one year.

>>> Herschler and Simpson understood the theater of legislative debate, and as a Democrat and Republican, they often took opposite sides.

>> Here's how Ed and I worked: Ed and I met before the debate, and he said, I'm going to really have to punch you around.

I said, I'll be doing the same to you, pal.

And he said, well, let's make it look Shakespearean.

And man -- and there were students up there, I remember, they were up in the gallery and they were watching with awe.

I said, my friend from, you know, Lincoln County is so off the rails, so twisted in his logic, and then Ed would just scissor me.

When it was over, we met at the water cooler and these kids were standing around.

Ed said, how was it?

I said, perfect, and these kids, their jaws were just hanging.

They said, you two guys didn't mean all that?

We said, we meant it.

We had to do the argument and the argument we meant deeply, but we're old pals.

This is the way we do our business.

And we vote, and his side may win or mine, but it's over, and then you move on.

I said, and let this be your civic lesson.

>>> There were some powerful corporate interests in Wyoming that often got their way in the State Legislature.

One of them was Union Pacific.

It had been given a checkerboard of property sections across Wyoming by the Federal Government in exchange for building the transcontinental railroad.

Now, it was trying to charge mineral owners huge fees for crossing U.P.

land to reach trona deposits.

>> And I went to Cheyenne with this little five or six-line bill to get introduced, and we happened upon Al Simpson and Ed Herschler and Bob Johnson from Rock Springs.

They signed up on the bill because it made sense.

It allowed corner-crossing underground in the section corners, and they put it in and then all hell broke loose!

Because it was adverse to the interests of Union Pacific and ultimately became probably the most controversial and most expensive bill that had been wrestled in the Legislature up to that time, and maybe even since.

>> We said, where the hell did this law come from, that you can't cross a corner?

Union Pacific, through the history of Wyoming, always had their staff or an employee or their attorney as a member of the Legislature.

Anyway, make a long story short, we put in one paragraph bill, said you have the right to condemn underground easements across and have a jury trial, and set the value.

And Union Pacific went crazy, and they flew in their lawyers from L.A. and New York.

The skies were filled with jets, filled with button-down suits.

>> And the first guy out of the chute was Alan -- great big, tall guy, hunched over, you know, exactly -- he hadn't changed much in looks.

He stood up from his seat and he said, what's happened here is the Union Pacific is getting greedy.

They want it all for themselves.

He said, I was here last time when they passed that bill.

He said, I'll tell you what they did, they slipped the green weenie to the state of Wyoming, and he took his fingers up in a very interesting gesture.

>> Well, we got it through the House.

I think we won by one vote, but anyway, we had a big party, you know, typical Wyoming -- at the Hitch, and all the New York lawyers were there, and the L.A., and the booze was flowing.

And this one guy got up, he had a smooth voice -- "I want to tell you something.

I'm so sick and tired of hearing about country lawyers, little old country lawyers."

He said, "You bastards cleaned our clock and I don't know, I never seen anything like it in my life."

But it was a delightful occasion, because they really, in seriousness, they said, you know, "You guys had passion.

We were just making money."

♪ >>> The Legislature tackled a series of big issues in the 1970s -- mine reclamation laws, power plant siting, the abortion debate, clean air and water legislation, and one that would change the course of Wyoming: mineral severance taxes.

The late Governor Stan Hathaway, a Republican, declared the state was flat-broke and proposed a severance tax on coal, oil, and natural gas that was being extracted from the state.

Al Simpson had friends and constituents in the energy industry.

He told Hathaway he couldn't vote for the tax.

>> Severance tax, oh yeah, and of course I didn't vote with Stanley.

He called me in his office.

He just swore, he said, you son of a bitch, what in the hell?

You know these people.

If the oil and gas isn't there, they're not going to be here.

They don't give a rat's ass about us, they just -- they're in it for money.

I said, you're talking about Husky Oil Company in Park County, Wyoming!

Glenn Nielson, my father on the founding Board of Directors, you are burying -- you're rubbing them out!

Anyway, he said, God, you're not going to vote?

I said, I can't.

Well he said, you could.

I said, I can't, and of course I didn't, but he had the votes anyway, and I don't think I could have ever changed.

But anyway, I knew that at some future time, I would redeem myself, and that's when Warren Norton came to my rental Sunday afternoon, he said, I've got a great idea.

I'm in the oil and gas business, here's what we're going to do.

Permanent mineral trust fund, constitutional amendment.

I said, well, keep talking.

So we put that thing together, got a two-thirds vote out of each House -- and what have we got in the kitty now?

Four billion bucks.

And that was Warren Morton, he should have all the credit.

And to think of a guy in the industry -- he said, Al, when it's gone, it's gone... and they won't be here, and we will be left here.

And then Stroock picked up the ball, and I mean, here's Stroock in the oil and gas business.

It was pretty hazardous for them.

Of course, Hathaway was playing the violin in the background, and so that was -- that was the sweeper, that was the -- really, that was the most pleasing thing, and seeing the way the Wyoming public embraced it, and the industry was -- could have been really tough, but they knew if they bitched about this one that they would lose a lot of credibility, so they kind of laid in the weeds.

They did do that little bumper sticker that said that oil and gas is your bread and butter.

We said, yeah, and we're going to put jam on it.

>>> In many ways, the Wyoming Legislature was the one-room schoolhouse of Al Simpson's early political education.

>> The lobbyists were right there, eight feet from your head, I always sat in the back, always sat in the back, furthest in the back where you could watch the byplay, and if you're doing a bill and suddenly you see so-and-so get up from their chair and walk over to somebody else and you know that both of the are opposed, you know they're cooking something.

With lobbyists, I'd listen to them, but then too, I would usually say I'm with you or I'm not with you, and you don't need to come back.

>>> He learned his lessons in the minority, and then after Republicans won more seats, as majority leader, and he never forgot to do his homework... >> Staying up late at night, that's the only way I could do it.

That's why I had an apartment.

I didn't do it to -- I had a rule in life, the only reason I ever worked hard was so I wouldn't make an ass out of myself.

It was very simple, and I'm not a quick thinker, I'm not brilliant.

I'm a plodder, but if I can wrap my head around something, I know I can explain it in a way the average Joe will understand.

We laughed together, drank together, legislated together, never got into anything that was -- didn't have anything to do with Wyoming and doing something right.

>>> And during these busy years, Milward Simpson was in the U.S. Senate, enjoying the work but showing early signs of Parkinson's Disease.

>> Those were just years I didn't really know what Pop did, except I knew he loved it.

Then the Parkinson's began to cut in, and you could see it, and he'd speak around Wyoming, and he'd get up and when he was excited, this thing would go, and he'd say, now look, you're looking at my hand.

He said, now he said, don't feel sorry for me.

He said, because that's my drinking hand and I'm spilling more than I drink and I feel sorry for myself.

>>> But the rigors of travel back and forth to Washington, D.C., were taking their toll.

>> He said, I'm not going to run again, I can't do it.

I'm hurting, I got Rheumatoid Arthritis and Parkinson's.

So they sold their home in Washington on a handshake to a couple who had just been elected to Congress, to the newly elected Congressman from Texas, George Bush and Barbara.

So then I met him again.

>> And he set the price, and we said, okay, we'll take it -- no haggling, no negotiation, and no contract, no escrow agreements, but I knew his word was good and he trusted me, a new Congressman, and it was a good deal.

I lost money on the house, but that's all right.

>> Dad came home and lived out many more years, from '66 to '95... in a decreasing health condition, but... >>> So Milward Simpson was done with Washington, D.C., and the political life, but Alan Simpson was just beginning.

He was fully formed now with a firm sense of himself and his heritage -- the good and the bad of it -- embedded in the landscape of Wyoming.

>> I remember one day in a campaign, it was late at night and I flew from Gillette to Cody.

It was dark and the moon was out, but it was a glorious night and as I passed this crest of like a -- like a cross, not a religious cross, like maybe the Southern Cross in the sky, here on one side, I see the lights of Shell and Grable; and the other side I see the lights of Story and Fort Phil Kearny; and then straight ahead, Cody; and over the mountain, Jackson.

I thought, man, this is deep root.

This is a taproot.

>>> No one might have predicted that the young man who shot up mailboxes and punched a Laramie policeman was destined to walk the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., but he had grown into a formidable politician in Wyoming.

What next?

Al and Ann Simpson were on vacation in Paris.

>> Get a wire from the old man, from Dad, says, Cliff Hanson announced today at the Wyoming Stock Growers Convention -- this was in June, it's always in June -- that he's not running for the U.S. Senate again.

I thought -- I looked at Ann, she looked at me, and I went down, got a bottle of wine and a baguette and some goat cheese and came back and said, here we go, because this is the time.

I said, what do you think?

She said, well if you're going to do it, this is it.

>>> Well this was it... Alan Simpson was coming to the United States Senate where his legislative skill, his wit, and his appetite for a good scrap would earn him immediate respect and controversy.

While here, he would become an advisor and good friend to some of the most powerful people in the world.

He worked side-by-side with Dick Cheney, Ted Kennedy, Jim Baker, and President George Herbert Walker Bush.

We'll get his perspective, and theirs, on some of the most interesting historic issues of the late 20th century.

♪ >> I thought about running for the Senate, and I went down and talked to Stan Hathaway who had retired by then as Governor, but I talked to Stan.

He said, what are you going to do, Dick, and I said, well I'm thinking about the Senate seat.

He said, well you can do that, but he said, of course Al Simpson's going to kick your butt.

Which was pretty good advice.

I never admitted that to Al until after he'd left the Senate many years later, but that's when I decided to be a Congressman instead of a Senator.

>> He had a delightful way of sort of pulling my chain on frequent.

Sometimes when I'd get excited on the floor of the United States Senate, he'd just lean over and whisper to me, now Ted, calm down a little bit.

Somebody else did that, you'd turn around and -- might take a different action on it.

But I just couldn't resist smiling and laughing and enjoying it.

>> It's something that's very much missed around here, because for all of his Mercurial swings, there was a real human being behind them, and so much of Washington now is Simonized, sanitized, airbrushed, all the rough edges are burnished away.

>> He has been a wonderful husband, except when he hasn't been.

and he was funny, and very quotable -- the press loved him.

But he took on unlovable issues.

He raised questions about Social Security benefits.

He tried again and again to tackle the thorny issue of immigration.

He was an old guard Republican when it came to spending and entitlements and a tough foreign policy, but there were other issues, like a woman's right to choose on abortion, where he broke with the social conservatives.

He was intensely loyal to his family, to his constituents, to his colleagues, and in the fickle world of politics and government, he became a cherished friend to people on both sides of the aisle, people as different as Senator Ted Kennedy and President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Well that loyalty and his uncensored outspokenness would eventually get him in trouble, even with the press that had once adored him.

This is the story of Senator Alan Simpson's extraordinary adventure in Washington and his return at the end of the day to Cody, Wyoming.

A Republican senator from Wyoming arrives in Washington, D.C. with some advantages.

The state he represents has a small population, mostly Republican, and doesn't ask its Washington representatives to do much but keep the Feds at bay.

And Senator Cliff Hansen retired early to give Simpson seniority over other freshman senators.

But Alan Simpson faced some challenges from the get-go in 1979, beginning with his committee assignments.

>> And I got assigned to the Immigration and Refugee Subcommittee, which was Ted Kennedy as chair.

I got assigned to the Nuclear Regulations subcommittee and Gary Hart was the chair.

I got assigned to the Committee of Veterans' Affairs and Alan Cranston was the chair.

Everybody I work with is running for President.

I've been there six weeks, get a call from Hart's office.

He doesn't know me, I mean, here I am his ranking member, he's the chairman.

Said, we need to go to Three Mile Island, Harrisburg, because there's been a trenchant.

But the real issue was the plume.

The valve had opened and then closed.

The plume was about the size of a sparrow fart drifting, and the headline was, plume drifting toward Washington.

I said, well, that's interesting.

So I got in the helicopter -- and I've been in a lot of helicopters in the army, but I never seen a crappier helicopter in my life.

You could see through the floorboards and it was just a mess.

Gary used to say that's how Simpson lost his hair.

What were we doing flying around the reactor in a helicopter with hardly any floorboards is beyond comprehension.

And I said to Hart, you know, are you going to make political hay out of this?

He said, what do you mean?

He bristled.

I said, you know, I understand that nuclear power isn't exactly your bag, you being a greenie or whatever I said.

He said, who told you this stuff?

I said, well, a member of my staff said... Well, watch me.

I never saw more media.

There were cables, there were people pushing each other, and they wanted to know from Gary, and from me -- and of course I'm just standing there like a lump, I don't know zirconium clouding from a Zippo lighter.

>>> But after days and days of hearings, Simpson, from a uranium-producing state, and Hart, the greenie, produced a subcommittee report that cut through the hysteria.

It identified regulatory shortfalls and calmed concerns about the plume, and the press got its first taste of Simpson's turn of phrase.

>> The Dirksen Building in the sunlight gave off more radiation on the marble than was at Three Mile Island.

>>> And he could work with Democrats, even when they had White House ambitions and personal flaws.

>> It also gave me a better view of Gary Hart, who I enjoy very much.

I never judge people on their personal habits.

>>> Then an old political foe, who had once campaigned against Simpson's father, Representative Teno Roncalio, lent a hand in the House and the White House.

>> He said, I'm going to take you to meet Carter, and then we're going to go over to the House, I'm going to introduce you to the leadership.

You're going to meet Tip O'Neill.

You'll meet all the Senate leadership; you're part of it now.

>>> And when controversy wasn't thrust upon Simpson, well, he went and found it.

>> I'm green as grass, and it's the Corps of Engineers' budget.

If ever there's a group connected to the Congress in ways that are absolutely devious but legal, it's the Corps of Engineers.

And so I put in an amendment to cut their budget by 20 percent, across the board.

These guys are allergic to the sound of running water, they will erect a dam at any water course known to the history.

They will call every river in America, including the South Fork and Ishwa Creek innavigable, and I'm tired of them.

And God, they just tore a hole in me, just blew me out of the water.

But this time, they called for the vote, and it was 12 to two, just sticking it up my nose.

I got in the elevator and old Muskie, he said, Simpson, I say, yes Senator.

He said, you know, to make it around here you've got to be about half a son of a bitch.

And I see you are.

>>> Unlike some of his politically cautious colleagues, Simpson was energized when he took on sacred cows and difficult issues.

As ranking minority and later chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, he went after benefits for non-combatant veterans.

>> Veterans?

Yeah, show me the combat veteran and I say write the ticket, just write the check.

Combat theater, anybody, but don't tell me to write the check for some guy, served six months and never left Camp Beetle Bailey and doesn't know a mortar tube from either end, forget it.

>>> Then there was the Social Security system.

Simpson saw it headed toward insolvency, but politically, messing with Social Security was poison, which didn't faze Simpson.

>> There's only two ways that you save Social Security.

The rest of it is B.S.

of the first order.

You either increase the payroll tax or reduce the benefits.

That's it.

There's no other way, and then you should affluence test the benefits.

>>> With both veterans and Social Security reform, Simpson couldn't overcome powerful lobbies like veterans groups or the American Association of Retired Persons.

>> 38 million Americans bound together by a common love of airline discounts or RV discounts and insurance discounts.

>> This was getting thrown into the briar patch, and he knew that he was going to get roughed up a little bit, because there were some powerful interest groups involved.

And to his credit, he grabbed these issues, took the bit in his teeth, and never let go.

>>> And the issue that would best illustrate Simpson's appetite for controversy, his tenacity, and his bipartisan legislative skill?

Immigration.

>> Well, that was the tough -- because that was truly emotion, fear, guilt, and racism.

The Statue of Liberty, the huddled masses -- you can't cut through that, which is a great part of America, but there is a reality to the fact that the first duty of every nation is to control its borders.

>>> Immigration reform offers a decade-long dance lesson in the complex steps of legislating and Simpson's mastery of the art.

Among the controversial issues in immigration reform were a proposed national identity card to weed out illegal workers, a route to citizenship for some of them, and legal penalties for employers who hired illegals.

It was expensive, too, and Simpson, the first time around, tried to hold the line.

>> And I came back in, I said, the President says he will veto anything over $4 billion.

And they said, no, come on Al, you know Reagan, you're his buddy.

Go get another $2 billion.

And I said, well, I'm going to close the conference.

And I was chair.

I had a lump in my throat like burying your own baby.

And I said, I'll get it next time.

>>> In 1986 with Reagan's backing, he brought another bill, wheeling and dealing to get it passed, with Kennedy, with Representative Ron Mazzoli in the House, and with powerful House committee chair, Peter Rodino.

>> I said, now what do you have to have?

He said, I got to have something for Tip O'Neill about those Salvadorians.

I said, you can have that, there are not that many.

And then I'd say, I got to take care of the sheep guys, and the cattle guys out here.

>> He wanted a provision that said that if a person came on in here and created some ten jobs, invested a million dollars, that they could get passage on into the United States.

They'd be able to get green cards to be able to come in and get on the road to citizenship.

And I said I differed with that, because I said, we should not be permitting individuals to buy their way into the United States, that it ought to be done on the basis of merit.

The next year, after this bill failed, the next year, we were working out the compromise, and he said, hey Ted, I need that provision in the bill.

And I said, the one I'm against?

He said, I need that provision.

Get this thing I'm supporting from some of the things you want.

I got to get that provision.

So I supported the provisions, and up gets Paul Sarbanes, and he said, now Kennedy, last year you said it would be on merits, and I said, I'm going to let Al Simpson handle this response.

>>> When Reagan's attorney general, Ed Meese, said the bill might get vetoed the second time around, Simpson fired back.

>> I said every point where I needed the President's help I called him, and he said go, and he'll do the same thing here, so I don't want to hear any of this crap, because I'll tell you, if you do this to me, at this point, with what I've done, you'll never see one shred of legislation come out of the U.S. Senate, has a goddamn thing to do with the justice department.

>> Well, there were some things he did that were incredibly valuable.

I mean, Simpson-Mazzoli, the immigration bill that bears his name is one of the most famous.

When he was doing -- making the sausage that's legislation, and really working at it, he was a very valuable ally to have, for anybody.

>>> The Simpson-Mazzoli immigration law that the President signed in 1986 was a breakthrough, but nevertheless, a disappointment to Simpson.

>> And the reason we never got it done, we were never able to get a more secure identifier, because the cry went up from the right and the left that this was a national I.D.

>>> Simpson would take another shot at immigration reform in the 1990s, in league with Barbara Jordan, the silver-tongued former representative from Texas who chaired a Congressional commission on immigration.

>> And she talked about limiting legal immigration, clearing the backlog, and it was called the Barbara Jordan report.

It was about assimilation.

You could have your private culture, you could worship the great eel, but there is a public culture and a public flag, and a common flag, and a common language, and when she died, every bit of my reform died, and I remember then I was going to bring the bill up.

They said, you're going to lose.

I said, I know, but I'm going to do it for Barbara Jordan, and I don't give a damn if I lose or not.

>>> And lose he did.

The issue remains in many ways unresolved today, except that -- >> Every one of these new bills has in it some of the most restrictive identifying language you can imagine -- retina scans and fingerprints, and nobody's written a single damned article about the slippery slope for the national I.D.

I mean, what -- because of, you know, 9/11.

>>> In those early years, Simpson was a popular figure in Washington.

The press loved him for his outspokenness, his honesty, his humor.

>> He was a free spirit when it came to how he conducted himself with people, and with the press, particularly.

He was always good value, you might say, for them though, because you could get a statement out of him, on whatever the question, and he wouldn't run for cover.

He'd say, here's what I think.

>>> But he was new and fresh.

Senator Bill Cohen, a Republican friend from Maine, warned him it wouldn't last.

>> He was the guy who was counseling me, said you know, they love you here, and they're raising you up, they've lost their objectivity with you, and when it disappears, you're going to be like Icarus and fall into the sea.

>>> The affection and respect of his colleagues in the Senate would be more enduring.

In 1985, just beginning his second term, Simpson ran for the whip job, the number two leadership position among Senate Republicans, behind majority leader Bob Dole.

>> And there were, you know, four or five guys, senior to me.

I just thought, well, I'm going to do this.

I went around and I got Dick Lugar to -- and Nancy Kassebaum was always on my side, and Thad Cochran, and I had my seconders, and the final vote, I think I had 33 to 17 or something, and so here I am in my -- beginning of my first -- my second term, junior of juniors, as assistant majority leader.

>>> Simpson would hold the position for a decade, both in the minority and the majority.

That meant, for a time, serving the larger goals of a Republican president.

>> I really got to know him better after I became Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan, and his number one domestic priority was the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

Alan was a majority whip, Republican whip at the time, and he worked with us to accomplish that, first time the tax code had been substantially reformed in 100 years, and we reduced the top marginal tax rate from, at that time, I think 50 percent down to 28 percent.

>>> Working with Wyoming's senior senator, Malcolm Wallop, a friend from childhood, and Representative Dick Cheney, Simpson could use his powerful position to influence bills that mattered to Wyoming, too, like the Clean Air Act.

>> He had worked on clean air legislation in the Wying legislature, and in 1990 he shaped clean air amendments on the national stage.

That included steps to reduce the acid rain problem affecting the Rockies, but it also fixed a sulfur reduction requirement in coal burning power plants that had handicapped Wyoming's relatively low-sulfur coal.

>> We have to reduce 15 percent of sulfur content, and so does Ohio, and ours is lower than Ohio to start with.

And I said, it's a rotten thing, and I said it's totally offensive to me.

Well, you can imagine I got -- the greenies just blew me out of the water.

Hell, they thought -- they called me a soot-covered slob.

>> The Wyoming Wilderness Act, for example, in 1984, that was a major piece of legislation for the state.

It was one we had to coordinate on, it had to get passed both at the House and the Senate.

As I recall in those days, we Republicans controlled the Senate, so my colleagues in the Senate had a little bit easier time than I did in the House, where we were in the minority, but we managed to get it done.

>>> Generally, Wyoming doesn't send its delegation to Washington with a lengthy list of things to do, so Al Simpson had some leeway to take on issues like immigration.

But he was attentive to the state.

His trips back home were lively.

>> They let me get away with a lot of things, because I had town meetings.

I'd say to my staff, where are they after my ass?

Well, the veterans really want a piece of you in Cheyenne.

Well, Gillette, they think you're part of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, and you're history up there.

I said, great.

Dick Major's looking for you.

He said you're a skunk in the middle of the highway with a yellow stripe.

I said, well, bring him in, too.

>> He would come back to the state and get savaged sometimes, by people who thought he was wrong on immigration, changing the immigration law, people who thought he was terribly wrong on veterans' benefits.

>>> His directness and his willingness to face his detractors made Simpson a very popular figure in his home state, with voters, if not with all the media.

He and Anne were a strong team on the campaign trail.

>> You know, Al -- Al and Anne had their hands in everything, and as Al always ran his Senate offices, he really stayed in control of things and he didn't want anything to get too far away from him.

He didn't want staff to be taking over, making too many key choices.

>> Actually, we went in almost like training, like a prize fight in the campaign, we never had a drop, either one of us, for six months.

Go to bed at night, try to get seven, eight hours.

>>> They had young support staff, like Bruce McCormick, in the first race, and often they teamed with Dick and Lynn Cheney.

>> Traveling with someone is the best way to test a relationship, and many of them don't survive it, and Cheney and Simpson were on the road a lot together, and they loved every minute of it.

They enjoyed each other's company, it was on a very personal level, but I think it was also on a very professional level that they both got a lot out of each other.

>> We foed a lifelong friendship.

We campaigned together.

It was like a gong show.

>> I was running for reelection, maybe after my first or second term.

I was headed from Lander over to Riverton to be on the morning talk show at a local radio station, and on the way over we turned on the radio in the car, and they were complaining because I hadn't shown up yet.

Said didn't know where Cheney was, he was due here 20 minutes ago.

So we stepped on it and got over there and pulled down where the radio station was there on the south side of town, pulled up in the gravel parking lot.

I jumped out and ran in the radio station, and as I went through their front door I noticed there was somebody standing over here to my left.

Didn't really see who it was, and I could look through and see the bedroom off over to the right here, and then a baby crawling around on the floor in diapers.

Didn't look like a radio station.

I turned around and the person I'd passed as I came in was the woman of the house who was vacuuming the carpet at 9:00 in the morning in her nightgown.

And she said, I'll bet you're looking for the radio station, aren't you?

And I said yes, ma'am, I am.

She said, well they moved last week and they in fact had new facilities uptown.

She and her husband had bought this, and this was now their home.

It still had the call sign up on the end of the house.

I was embarrassed, obviously, and had to say something to her as I left, so on my way out I introduced myself to her as her United States Senator, Alan Simpson, and Al's never forgiven me for that.

And I told that story all across the state, usually when he was with me.

>> And one day we couldn't fly from Casper to Cheyenne so the four of us got in a car, and Dick and I described our youth to our wives.

They sat in the back and they were just silent, and they said, you people wouldn't be anywhere without us.

We said, well, that's why we told you those tales.

But it was ribald and not something you'd want to share with children.

>> We got so you'd get on the road, and I can remember one night I told all of his jokes before he had an opportunity, and of course anybody in Wyoming had heard Al Simpson's jokes, but the amazing thing was nobody laughed.

They weren't funny unless it was Al who was telling them.

>> There's no such thing as repetition in politics.

You can say the same thing ten times to the same group, and on the tenth time, the guy'll say -- turn to someone else, I didn't know he felt like that about that.

>>> Relationships between politicians often wax and wane with the rise and fall of influence.

Take away the power and the cameras, and the camaraderie may go, too.

Al Simpson would know the sting of betrayal, particularly later in his career when his leadership post was at stake, but his true friends in Washington were many, and lasting.

>> He has these extraordinary range of different qualities that are appealing, I think.

You're struck, probably, although he probably doesn't want to hear it, but his humor and his sense of life and fun.

And as someone who, as the ninth member of a large Irish Catholic family, I'm always -- had to rely upon humor in order to be able to survive in that large family.

I think we sort of cooked right really from the beginning.

Very, very different political philosophies.

What I found out very, very quickly was that Al Simpson was interested in getting things done for Wyoming, and he was interested in getting things done for the country.

>> It's easy to say he gets along with all kinds of people, and he does, and that he has the gift of talk and camaraderie and prerequisites for people in political life.

But it's much more than that, I think, because he holds no grudges.

He -- 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.

There are no hard feelings about it afterward.

I speak from experience because we've often differed sharply in our judgment of political questions or other politicians that he knows, and it's never personal.

He is, in that way it seems to me, emblematic of a kind of civility that has alas eroded in American political life.

>>> It's surprising how many senators will say, when asked who their closest friends were in the Senate, Al Simpson.

But one of Simpson's most cherished friends in Washington was not in the Senate.

He lived at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, first as Vice President, then as President.

>> When you're in White House, I don't agree with Truman, it was Harry Truman, you want a friend, get a dog.

I mean, I had good friends who were there through bad times and good.

It's the loneliest job in the world, these people would write.

Well, you know, the buck does stop there in terms of making decisions.

For me it wasn't lonely, because the main thing was family, and then close friends, and Al Simpson was one of them.

>>> They had met first when their fathers served in the Senate.

Now each on his own had found power and fame in Washington, and they became trusted friends.

In 1988, with President Ronald Reagan retiring, and George H.W.

Bush running to succeed him, there was talk of putting Simpson on the ticket for Vice-President.

>> Alan was on George Bush's short list, I know that for a fact since I was the chairman of the campaign.

I think if George Bush had really been given his druthers, and if political positions and things like that had not entered in, he might well have picked Alan Simpson because they were so simpatico and they were such really good friends, and Alan was very effective.

>> And one of the reasons why Alan Simpson might be a good choice to be Bush's running mate -- he's not famous; Wyoming has only three electoral votes, but he's smart, funny, irreverent, and tough.

>> Anne and I sat one evening and then I was having a glass of wine, and I said, Anne, this has reached absurdity.

That's me they're talking about, and I said, let's just make a list here -- advantages and disadvantages of being Vice President of the United States, and being a very practical, agreeable girl, said a bigger house and somebody to do the laundry.

I said, is that your offering?

Well she said, that's the advantage.

I said, well, what are the disadvantages?

She said, everything else.

So I waited till the next day, and I called Bush, and I said, George, I don't want to be on the list.

But then, you know, at New Orleans, the signs were out there, Simpson/Bush.

And I didn't say anything.

I said, well, I'm babbling into the vapors.

And three delegations said they'd walk out of the convention if I were the Vice Presidential candidate because of my position on abortion.

>>> Dan Quayle was nominated for Vice President on the Bush ticket.

In some ways, this may have made the Simpson/Bush friendship even closer.

As majority and minority whip, Simpson could help the chief executive in the Senate and when he stopped by Bush's house, it was simply as a friend.

>> When things were going tough, this big lug would come down to the White House for his friend.

Well, enough of that, but because he's -- he's just one of the dearest people in my life.

But -- >> President Bush was sufficiently older than Al to be a kind of hero for him, and I think he remained that the rest of his life.

They're both very good men.

They're both liberal Republicans.

They are the old style Republican which is a diminishing breed, alas, for our country, and many ways, in some respects, more liberal than the liberal Democrat, but in other ways, conservative where a Democrat isn't.

So I think they had that in common.

They had a love of the outdoors in common.

They had a love of their families in common, and a love of humor and music and horsing around.

>> Oh, we're just fiddling around one night and there was this soft snow, you know, one of those moist soft snows, and George said, you know, if you off -- there was a room up there.

It wasn't any secret room or anything, I mean, it was off of a playroom or something.

He said, God, wouldn't you like to feel some snow in your hands again?

I said, yeah, I was good at that.

He said, we could go out the front door, but you know, that's too exciting.

So he called the Secret Service, and we stepped out on this little porch and hurled a couple snowballs.

>> Yes, that was a great historic moment.

We'd go up there and explore around, look around.

That was a rare moment because there wasn't that much snow around there, but we had fun stuff like that.

I mean, he'd come and spend the night and then he'd get up at night and walk down all the different rooms and look at all the paintings and look at -- he just had this curious attention to history.

>>> And he became a witness to history.

Al and Anne Simpson were at the White House when Bush deliberated about sending troops to repel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

>> There were protestors all over Lafayette Square.

Bush is a killer, Bush a warmonger.

Got up, he pulled the curtain there in the dining room -- small dining room.

He said, lookit, look at that.

He said, that tears me to bits.

I've been in war.

I know war better than any of those people.

I know war better than all of those people.

He says, because if I do this, he said, it won't be because I'm a warmonger, it's because we won't let this son of a bitch get away with stealing a whole country, of Kuwait.

That's what it was about.

And Anne and George then were visiting over by the window.

Barbara and I, I think, went and walked the dog with Lud Ashley, and then after a couple hours we drove out the door and the coach turned back into a pumpkin, which it always was.

You know, when you're there and you're in the White House, and then you drive out and you're on E Street, and you're headed to your house.

And Anne said, he's going to do it.

I said, what?

He's going to do it very soon.

I said, how do you know?

She said, just because I know him so well, and it's on his -- heavy, heavy on his heart.

>>> In the next Presidential campaign, in 1992, Bush got in trouble for signing into law a small tax increase, after his Read My Lips pledge not to raise taxes.

As the campaign faltered, Simpson was there.

>> And I went up to George's office and I said, you know, this may be the end of our friendship.

I said, I have to tell you these things, and I've written them down, about the campaign, and you know, what my affection for you, and it may really rupture that.

Now when you do that with George, he takes his glasses -- wiggles them like, okay, what the hell you got on your mind?

I said, don't be defensive, it is unbecoming.

It's not like you.

You've never been petty -- not you, and you've never been ensnarled in self-pity, never.

You want them to remember you, and if you couldn't win.

It all came to me in the anguish of Clarence Thomas.

What am I doing to myself?

I'm not myself.

Something you would never compromise on.

Share it.

Let your decent self come forward, say this is who I am.

I'm going to do whatever I deeply believe.

I'm going to stop strategizing.

Say what you know.

Damn well is right.

Don't give a damn if you lose, don't think of losing the job, think of doing the job.

Slip into the old campaign mode.

You know how to do that so well, easily, with that easy grace and grin.

>>> And in the end, George H.W.

Bush lost the White House.

On the last evening there, dinner with the Simpsons.

>> You didn't want to let your emotions overcome you in that situation, and so she -- we took the dogs, and George has a way of, you know, when he's ready to go to bed, why he just gets ready to go to bed.

Like you people can go home now, I'm going to bed.

We said, boy, it's been a great run for us.

>> Very emotional time, but he was great.

>>> Like George H.W.

Bush, like every politician, Alan Simpson would suffer losses.

First, with the media.

Despite the adulation he enjoyed when he first got to Washington, he was actually wary and distrustful of the press.

>> And if anyone could believe that you're going to go on the Supreme Court and not do it all differently -- >>> He had watched the media, and the Democrats, dismantle the nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

>> They went through Bork's -- Thomas' garage, Bork's video store, and praising the right of privacy.

Whatever happened to the right of privacy?

Editorials and all that crap, and the biggest intrusive people who abuse that are the media.

>>> The media, that had fawned over Simpson when he first arrived in Washington.

>> I was the toast.

They wrote pieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times, the Denver Post.

>>> His warmth and humor charmed journalists and world leaders alike, and his uncensored honesty made good copy when he went after the AARP for political fundraising.

But back in Wyoming, he engaged in a long war of words, often in the Letters column, with the statewide newspaper, the Casper Star Tribune.

When the paper printed an ugly cartoon about Simpson and the immigration bill, he wrote a 17 page diatribe to the editor, and in Washington, there were some outbursts, like his defense of Ronald Reagan over funds from the Contras in El Salvador going to the Middle East.

>> I'm making an ass of myself in front of the White House, saying you people are after the President, Reagan.

You know he's off-balance.

There is an Iran-Contra commission, and he's answering the questions, and so why don't you just give up?

And all you do is stand out here and go, Mr. President, Mr. President, in your whiny little voices, and this guy stuck a recorder under my mouth, and I started to bite it like a mouth organ.

I said, get serious, for God's sake.

I said, you people are too serious.

Just go somewhere, get out.

>>> And when he went after journalists like Peter Arnett, or advised a dictator like Saddam Hussein on how to deal with the press, the headlines were no longer kind.

But Simpson's temper reached new heights when another Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, was accused of inappropriate conduct by a lawyer and colleague, Anita Hill.

>> Here's Thomas and he's moving through the system, and then Biden, the chairman, is getting this call from this woman.

And she said, I have some things to tell you about him.

And Joe said, well then, come before the committee, or come before my office and talk.

Well no, I don't want to do that.

>> Why in God's name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life?

>> That's a very good question, and I'm sure that I can not answer that to your satisfaction.

>> I think he also has a very great problem with the whole realm of the unnamed source, and he's talked and written a lot about it, and he feels very strongly that's just an unfair, cheap technique.

>> It was the issue of Bush saying I need you, I need your help.

This is going to be tough, because I picked a guy who's just a lightning rod.

>>> Reluctantly, Anita Hill went public, but Simpson's attacks got even harsher.

He described stuff over the transom, statements from unnamed people, saying, watch out for this woman.

His sympathy was reserved for Clarence Thomas.

>> And I said, you have had your good name stripped from you, and he said yeah.

He said, I can't believe what's happened.

Good name, and man and woman dear my lord, is the universal jewel of their souls.

He who steals my purse steals trash.

'Twas mine, 'twas his, and now it's been slave to thousands, but he who filches from me my good name robs me of something that not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.

>> But I really didn't get it, with Simpson, who was so vituperative towards Anita Hill, towards me, towards anybody that possibly presented another view than the view he wanted to hear, and to this day, I'm not sure I know the entire reason, and maybe he doesn't, because he went down that path, and if you know Al Simpson at all, you know once he commits to a road like that, it's almost impossible for him to retreat.

>>> Nina Totenberg had broken the story of Anita Hill's accusations, and Simpson accused her of unethical journalism.

They had a particularly heated exchange on television's Nightline, and Simpson confronted her again in the parking lot.

>> And the next thing I know, Al Simpson comes running out, waving something at me and yelling at me, and jerks open the door, or pulls the door open further -- I think I was getting in -- and starts yelling at me about how I had violated some sort of rules of ethics of some journalism code he had, and he's going on and on, and I finally lost my temper too, and I got up, and I looked up at him -- he's a lot taller than I am -- and probably with a combination of fear and fury, I used a four-letter word and told him he was a blankety-blank bully.

Got back in the car, pulled the door shut, and said to the driver, get out of here.

The driver turned around and he says, lady, you better get a gun!

>> I said, you know, unbiased journalism, what a bunch of hogwash.

She named me with a couple of marvelous expletives.

She said, you're a bully.

People hate you.

You don't know that this whole town hates you, and I said, well, you ain't exactly the Rose of Picardy.

>> That was one of the great exchanges of all time, and I keep reminding him of it, because she told him -- she used a dirty word, a bad, naughty F-word, talking to Simpson, telling him what he could do.

And he hadn't done it, he just went right on, rolling over her and making his point.

>>> Simpson often relished a good fight, but he wasn't enjoying this one.

Yet, he couldn't seem to pull back.

>> As I speak of it now I can almost feel my gut tighten, because it was just the worst time of my life, and Anne said to me one morning -- she came back, and I started out the door, and she said, come back here, back here right now.

I said, I'm busy, I got to go, they're waiting for me.

I had a driver then, assistant leader.

She said, I want to tell you something.

I love you, other people love you.

You keep doing this, you're going to ruin yourself, and I'm just telling you, shut up.

I said, shut up?

You've never said shut up to me before in our whole 30, 40 years it was then.

She said, I'm telling you now, just knock it off, you're just losing yourself.

>> The great thing is Al does hear things.

>> It only takes his wife Anne or his daughter Susan to sort of step in and say, honey, dad, stop for a second, and he's capable of hearing that from them, and when he does that, there is nobody better to have as a friend, nobody more decent, nobody with better and more humane instincts vis-à-vis the human condition and who wants to do the right thing.

>> He's not perfect, thank goodness, and he's -- he cares deeply and sometimes that can run away with him.

>> I think the people unrstood with Al, you take the whole package, and you know, I think all of us have our limitations in one way or the other and probably run at times against the grain, and I think that's part of the human -- the human condition.

But he had that -- he had that temper and it bothered people.

>>> If the press is notoriously fickle, senators are reputedly loyal and collegial, especially to someone like Al Simpson, who so many lawmakers described as a true friend.

So it was a surprise when he lost the assistant leadership position in 1995 to Trent Lott, a Mississippi senator who had been part of Newt Gingrich's take-no-prisoners Republican revolution in the House of Representatives.

>> I went over to Trent's desk and I said, are you running for Assistant Leader?

No, I would never do that.

You're a great Assistant Leader.

So I'm fast asleep, like the engineer at the switch.

>> I had been the whip in the House during the Reagan years, and I really enjoyed that work.

I like counting votes.

I kind of viewed the whip organization as the cavalry always out there, probing and trying to see where the other side is, and what they're up to.

>> But he waited till the election took place to see how many of his House colleagues got elected to the Senate, because he had gone to every one of them while he was in the House, and said, if I go to the Senate and you ever get to the Senate and I run for leadership post, will you help me?

Will you commit now?

>> Al was actually, I felt, more into substance and took some issues that cut both ways and I really felt that as we were moving in those years toward the culmination of the Republican revolution, which led to us having the majority throughout the '90s and into this century, that a more classic whip was what was called for.

I guess I was a little young and a little bit of an upstart.

>> And I grabbed old Trent the minute I lost that by one vote.

I said -- I just got up in the caucus.

I said, come on out here, pal, we're going to go up to the print media right now.

We're going to go up to the television, I'm going to tell him you're the new guy.

>> And yet, if you had looked ten years later, Trent Lott was to some of the barnburners in his own party too moderate, too accommodating, too willing to make a deal.

Each generation of leadership, that is, has a greater edge than the previous generation, and that would have been true for Al Simpson, too.

>>> The Simpson who went out to to meet the press with Trent Lott was the one beloved of colleagues and friends.

The battle behind him, no grudges carried forward, his pattern was to seek reconciliation, even after the worst hostilities, whether it was with Trent Lott, Anita Hill, the Democrats across the aisle, or the media he demonized.

But the Senate he loved was becoming a different place.

>> When I first went to Washington under President Ford back in 1975, people were able to disagree agreeably.

You know, the fact that you were a political adversary back in those days didn't necessarily mean you were also a political enemy.

That's changed.

Today it's ugly up there, very, very ugly, and politics is thought of as a zero-sum game.

It's not just in the Senate or Congress, both Houses.

The same thing is true pretty much throughout the system.

>> I think we will return to the Al Simpson kind of civility and willingness to not let political differences jeopardize respect for one's fellow member of Congress, one's fellow human being.

I think we're going to come back to that.

In the meantime, someone like Simpson or Chafee or George Bush, Senior, seem an anachronism.

They seem a holdover from another era, another time.

>>> Three terms, 18 years in the U.S. Senate -- that was enough for Al Simpson.

>> I said to Anne, you know, you can come to the well once too often here, and I've pissed off the deadbeat veterans, and I've got the AARP after me, and I've got the -- you know, I've got guys after me in every segment of Wyoming society.

So I said, I'll never have that again.

You never have that with whoever is the President.

So I could see myself that last two years looking for the exit, not knowing what I was going to do.

It began to come into my head, of course, when I lost the assistant leader post by one vote.

I wanted to make some money.

I never made any money in the law practice.

>>> Corporate boards beckoned, lucrative speaking engagements, and the Bobcat Ranch was waiting on the south fork of the Shoshone River, east of Yellowstone.

But Al and Anne Simpson would first enjoy an interlude in the northeast, at Harvard, teaching at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and running the university's Institute of Politics.

>> I couldn't have got into Harvard if I'd picked the locks, and they asked me to come and teach.

I said, hell, I can't -- I've never taught anything.

They says, yeah, but you have something to teach.

So I gave a course for four spring semesters called the Creating of Legislation, Congress and the Press.

>> At the Institute of Politics at Harvard is to try to sort of reach out to young people, Republicans and Democrats alike, and to attract them to a life of some form of public service, perhaps elective office, perhaps appointive office, but to take an interest in what was happening and what was going on in the country.

And then Al ran that institute, and was a beloved figure up there.

He knew more about the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots and the Celtics and the Boston Bruins -- a great sports fan.

>> But then we'd go up to New York, we'd boogied around, we'd had the run of Boston.

I took a course in Shakespeare from a master teacher.

I took a course from the wonderful Sandel, I took opera; courses I'd never taken at the university while I was drinking beer at the Buffalo day and night -- day and night.

And Annie took courses in British history.

Her two great-grandfathers were in the British army in India.

We had a ball.

>> He's much more sophisticated than people know.

He loves to go to Europe.

He loves to go to great museums and art galleries.

He loves being with sophisticated people and listening to them, and learning.

>>> In fact, from his earliest days in Washington, Simpson got involved in the arts, pushing with Senator Bill Bradley to bring stronger, more varied theater productions to Washington's Kennedy Center.

>> And here were these English plays, just these English tea cookie plays.

They were pleasant, but you know, not satisfying.

Didn't have any meat.

There's never been a minority production in the Kennedy Center.

The Washington Post editorial -- what is a freshman cowboy from the backwoods of Wyoming telling us what to do with the beloved Kennedy Center?

>> He and I used to be -- serve as co-chairs of sort of cultural committee here in the Senate, and sponsored a lot of different kinds of activities on these events.

And we had the opportunity to do it.

If you put on a little effort and a little energy, and then the nature of our positions, we could get wonderful responses.

>> Well, Anne and I, you know, we love music, art, books -- those are the softening agents of life.

If you don't have music, music or art, it doesn't matter what kind, or books, or things that are -- that civilize you, politics is barbaric.

If that's all you're interested in, it's barbaric.

>>> The job at Harvard didn't pay a lot, but Simpson's speaking engagements did.

>> I was making speeches all over the country with Brasch, with Bradley, with Jim Carville.

They lined me up with all sorts of people.

I think what we did finally exhausted all the organizations that have an annual meeting.

I had plenty coming in, and used it all for the benefit of the future -- the ranch, this place, the kids, trust funds, and I was blessed.

>>> Now that Simpson no longer had to raise money for his own political campaigns, a task he'd loathed, he has become a prolific fundraiser for Wyoming institutions, like the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody and the Hart Mountain Interpretive Center.

>> We had trouble raising funds for our own campaigns, even though we know we had to do it, but it's not something we come by naturally, but it's something that we're both doing, because of the importance of having this interpretive center built at Hart Mountain.

We keep banging our tin cups everywhere to try to get more money for the Hart Mountain Wyoming Foundation.

>>> And the University of Wyoming, for which Simpson chaired a $200 million fundraising drive which concluded in 2005.

>> The Energy School, the envy of the earth and back to petroleum engineering, environmental, the Ruckelshaus thing.

The library is going to be the master communications center of this part of the Rocky Mountains, a $46 million library communication center, plus this computer sitting right out at Cheyenne -- we're on fire.

>>> And his life as a public servant and a public voice continues.

He serves on the Commission on Presidential Debates.

He campaigns for public funding of Senate and House elections, and Simpson was part of the bipartisan Iraq study group -- elder statesmen advising President George W. Bush on the war in the Middle East.

>> I asked Alan to join us as a member of the Iraq Study Group because of his willingness to be upfront and honest, to say what he thinks, and I knew he didn't have any preconceived notions.

>> We got hell from the left that we were a bunch of old farts, friends of George I who were trying to protect his son.

And the right-wingers saying we were the surrender monkeys.

>>> And the White House chose another direction.

>> What does it solve when you don't talk to Syria or Iran or North Korea, when -- and you give up nothing -- you don't go in there say, we're here to kiss your feet and give you this if you'll talk to us?

You just say, got an idea: how about talking?

Meet at this place.

About what?

About, you know, fruitcakes or flowers or costumes at Halloween, but start talking.

>> You know, they gave us their recommendation as they saw fit.

The President didn't follow that particular path.

He decided instead on a surge in policy and sent in more troops into Iraq, but it was very helpful because it was an effort to -- honest effort to try to put together some bipartisan support for a common policy, common point of view.

>>> Busy though the Simpsons are, there was never any doubt that they would return to Wyoming, to their home in Cody, and the Bobcat Ranch up the south fork of the Shoshone River.

>> We always knew we would come back here, and of course the ranch has been a big pull for all of us.

The children love it, and come bring their friends here, and this is the place of our heart.

>> A lot of people might come home to a town and, you know, find the town's changed or they've changed or, oh, the town feels like, oh, here's the uppity kind of big shots come home, and the relationships and the dynamics might not be as nice.

But for Al and Anne coming home, I tell you, it's been pretty much an extended honeymoon.

>> Truman said I tried never to forget who I was, where I came from, and where I'd go back to.

That's a perfect description of Al Simpson.

>>> Politicians who rise to the pinnacle of power often want to stay there.

You'll find them around the nation's capital after they've left office -- lobbying, working in a think tank, maybe waiting for an appointment to a cabinet position.

Well Al Simpson loved legislating in Washington, D.C., and he enjoyed the performances at the Kennedy Center and the bright lights of Broadway and the big thinkers at Harvard.

But he was, and is, always most at home in Wyoming, in the country where ancestor Finn Burnett came in the 19th century, where his father was once governor, and where grandfather Bill Simpson shot a Meeteetsee banker in the ear.

So he and Anne came right back to Cody, Wyoming, and jumped into community life.

And, if you go to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center or stop in at the little Italian restaurant downtown, you might just run into them and say hello.

He's got some interesting stories to tell.

>> I thought about running for the Senate.

And I went down and talked to Stan Hathaway who had retired by then as governor, but I talked to Stan, he said, what are you going to do, Dick?

And I said, well, I'm thinking about that Senate seat.

And he said, well you could do that, but he said, of course, Al Simpson's going to kick your butt.

Which was pretty good advice.

I never admitted that to Al until after he left the Senate many years later, but that's when I decided to be a Congressman instead of a Senator.

>> He had a delightful way of sort of pulling my chain on frequent.

Sometimes when I'd get excited on the floor of the United States Senate, he'd just lean over and whisper to me, now Ted, calm down a little bit.

If somebody else did that, you'd turn around, might take a different action on it, but I just couldn't resist smiling and laughing and enjoying it.

>> It's something that's very much missed around here, because for all his mercurial swings, there was a real human being behind them, and so much of Washington now is Simonized, sanitized, airbrushed -- all the rough edges are burnished away.

>> He has been a wonderful husband, except when he hasn't been.