My complicated friend Al Simpson

I keep an old phone message from Al Simpson on my cell. Not one of his louder or more profane ones, just a check-in call from 2014 about an upcoming visit where he plotted to serve me some “watery gruel.” The message wandered — not unusual — and grazed over a slow-healing schism between Simpson and Dick Cheney’s family, which he summarized with a quote from his abundant miscellany, “If you can’t forgive ‘em, you’re letting them live in your head rent-free.”

So let’s begin with a little forgiveness. Not that politicians should be forgiven as easily as most others, because they can do a lot more lasting damage. I still wince when I listen to Simpson’s berating of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and there are many who will not forget his attempts to cut veterans benefits and fiscally rein in Social Security. Others, from a different planet, still find it hard to get over his defense of gay marriage and abortion rights.

When I first began occasionally covering Simpson for newspapers, my attitude toward politicians was already firm. I knew I didn’t want them for friends, not just because that was an ethic in the journalism I practiced, but because I’d determined politicians to be the most compromised souls, who crave holding office so much that they’ll short-sheet and sometimes betray principles that should matter more than votes. 

Simpson was no exception, except when he was. He would fight against limits on sulfur emissions from power plants to protect the Wyoming coal industry, but he’d work with Ted Kennedy on immigration reform that offered a path to citizenship. He’d fly over the damaged nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island and declare the radioactive plume “no bigger than a sparrow fart,” but battle in the Wyoming Legislature to rebuff a Union Pacific Railroad land grab. He relished a fight, and did it with such colorful language that you became an ally or an enemy, or both, almost instantly. 

When I interviewed Ted Kennedy for a documentary about Simpson in 2011, he said with a chuckle, “With Al, you take the whole package.”

It took time, but Al kept delivering that package, in emails, in phone messages, in visits and conversations, and gradually, he infected my view of politicians with some nuance. Their principles may often bend to the wind of polling, but it is the nature, even a requirement, of a diverse democracy to elect deal-makers who will compromise; what we have to hope and search for are those rare politicians who will make those deals with deep empathy, even for those they oppose and disagree with.

And so it came to pass that once I was finished writing or making documentaries about him, maybe even a little bit before, we became friends. So much for my journalistic principles. He could be insistent about friendship, as many others will attest. 

And there was much more to commune about than just government and politics, though he never tired of talking about that. There were art and theater, which he and Ann loved — throw him a pretentious quote from “Othello”, as I confess I once did, and he’d come right back with “thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”, and go on from there. There was the Bobcat Ranch on the South Fork, which relaxed and quieted him, and may have been his heart’s home.

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In today’s fractured political world, with government an armed camp at war with itself, Al Simpson’s ability to make Ted Kennedy laugh from across the aisle — and then work with him on a centrist immigration bill — evokes an easy nostalgia. 

But this is not his time. Al Simpson would not be welcome in the U.S. Senate today, and, anyway, he is not there. His emails are not landing in my box, and he is not prowling the Bobcat Ranch.

But there he is, in our heads, living, rent-free.