In Remembrance of Sen. Alan K. Simpson by John C. Danforth

My service in the U.S. Senate with Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who died last week, overlapped for 14 years.

Toward the end of my career there, just before I went home to Missouri, we were standing on a corner near the Capitol promising that we would stay in touch. Then Al hugged me and said, “Everyone says that, let’s really do it.”

And so we did. In the 30 years since, Al and Ann Simpson and Sally and Jack Danforth spent a lot of time together, on the phone when not in person. We made a two-day trip through Yellowstone Park, visited the Missouri Botanical Garden and played Rummikub around a kitchen table in Cody, Wyo., Al’s hometown.

Al and I had a lot in common: long and good marriages, beloved children and grandchildren, joy in each other’s presence.

We were also both Republicans, but only a minuscule amount of our time together was spent talking politics — just enough to share regret about the recent turn of our party.

While our relationship was personal, most people of course knew Al for his three terms in the Senate. There he was highly respected and enormously successful. Reflecting his ability and personality, Republican colleagues elected him to 10 years as their assistant leader, or whip.

This was in spite of Al’s pro-choice record; these were the days before there was a litmus test for being a Republican. In today’s Washington, the main objective of senators is not taking on difficult issues, it’s appearing on cable news shows and posting on social media.

But Al was a legislator when a senator’s job was to legislate. He addressed the very difficult subject of immigration, for example, head-on. With a Democratic representative from Kentucky, he authored the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which reduced illegal immigration while creating a path toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Thinking about what we might learn from Al Simpson’s life that we might carry into this fractured time, three thoughts come to my mind.

First, he had his priorities straight. There was no doubt that politics was never first in Al’s mind. Al’s priority was always Ann. Everything else was at most secondary.

So for Al, politics was important, but it wasn’t all-important. It wasn’t an existential, cosmic warfare of good versus evil. Rather it was choices among valued and respected alternatives. Such a lesson for today, when we have allowed politics to dominate our lives, when family dinners turn into raucous arguments, when lifelong friends can barely speak to each other.

Politics should be kept in its proper place. That’s the first legacy of Al Simpson.

The second is humor. Al loved to tell stories. He collected them, kept them in a shoebox, told them every chance he had.

I remember many of them, none of which could pass muster with the editors of this newspaper. All of them were very funny, none of them was mean or cutting. People loved to laugh with Al, and partisan differences meant nothing.

Six-foot seven inch Al Simpson had a TV show with Robert Reich, the diminutive and quite progressive former secretary of labor. They called the show, “The Long and The Short of It.”

A recent member of the Senate told me that nobody there laughs anymore. In photographs, I’ve noticed, they all look so mean. Rage is now the order of the day.

The third legacy is Al’s decency toward all kinds of people.

Once Al took me to a detention center outside of Cody, now a museum. It was used during one of the dark episodes of American history: to detain Japanese Americans during World War II.

There Al met and became lifelong friends with Japanese American Norman Mineta, a future Democratic congressman from California and future U.S. Secretary of Commerce. I recall how moved Al was remembering the conditions of the Japanese Americans who had been detained.

Al had no place in his soul for the culture wars of our time. For him, all people were God’s children and identity politics was his opposite. He would never countenance making sport of trans people or gay people.

Last spring, Sally and I received a card, I’m sure widely distributed, announcing a 70th anniversary celebration for Al and Ann. It was an ice cream social to be held in the Cody city park on the afternoon of June 21.

So we decided to show up. We flew to Cody and waited in line with hundreds of others who were there for the occasion, Sally in a wheelchair, I hobbling along on a cane. Al and Ann were seated under an awning greeting well-wishers, and when it was our turn it was to their complete surprise. We cherish the photos we have of our greeting.

With the presence of so many people, we were able to spend but a few minutes with our dear friends at that ice cream social. As a practical matter, it made no sense to fly from St. Louis to Cody for maybe 10 minutes with Al and Ann. But, of course, practicality had nothing to do with it.

We are so happy we went there because it was such a dramatic way to express what we felt, that we loved Al and Ann Simpson. Did and always will.

This text originally appeared in the March 18, 2025 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.(https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/column/article_3b2d680e-0354-11f0-9c7d-f715e815879c.html)