Alan Kooi Simpson (born September 2, 1931) is an American politician who served from 1979 to 1997 as a United States Senator from Wyoming as a member of the Republican Party. His father, Milward L. Simpson, was also a member of the U.S. Senate from Wyoming (1962–1967) and a former Wyoming governor (1955–1959) as well. Simpson was appointed in 2010 to co-chair President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with Democratic co-chair Erskine Bowles of North Carolina. Simpson was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of the former Lorna Kooi and Milward Lee Simpson. His middle name, "Kooi", comes from his maternal grandfather, whose parents were Dutch immigrants.[2] In his youth, Simpson was a Boy Scout. He visited Japanese American Boy Scouts who, along with their families, had been interned near Ralston, Wyoming, during World War II. There, he developed a friendship with Norman Mineta, who later became a Democratic U.S. representative from California and the United States Secretary of Transportation in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. They served together in Congress and on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution and remain close friends.[3] Simpson has an older brother, Peter K. Simpson of Cody, a historian and a former administrator at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, who served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1981 to 1984, having represented Sheridan County, while he was then an administrator at Sheridan College. Pete Simpson was the 1986 Republican gubernatorial nominee, having sought the office while his younger brother was serving in the U.S. Senate. One of the Simpsons' babysitters as a young boy was the future Lieutenant Governor and Education Superintendent of Louisiana, Bill Dodd, who played baseball for a time as a young man in Cody with teammate Milward Simpson. In a recent brief in support of the claimant in the Supreme Court case, Graham v. Florida, Simpson admitted that as a juvenile he was on federal probation for shooting mailboxes and punching a cop and—in his own words—"was a monster".[4] Alan Simpson graduated from Cody High School in Cody, Wyoming, in 1949 and attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1950 for a postgraduate year. He graduated in 1954 from the University of Wyoming with a Bachelor of Science degree and in 1958 with a Juris Doctor. In 1954 he married the former Susan Ann Schroll, who was a fellow UW student from Greybull, Wyoming. He served in the United States Army in Germany from 1955 to 1956 with the 10th Infantry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division and with the 12th Armored Infantry Battalion, Second Armored Division. Like his brother, he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at the University of Wyoming. Simpson was elected to the U.S. Senate on November 7, 1978, but was appointed to the post early on January 1, 1979, following the resignation of Clifford P. Hansen. From 1985 to 1995, Simpson was the Republican whip, Assistant Republican Leader in the Senate, having served with then Republican Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. He was chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee from 1981 to 1985 and again from 1995 to 1997 when Republicans regained control of the Senate. He also chaired the Immigration and Refugee Subcommittee of Judiciary; the Nuclear Regulation Subcommittee; the Social Security Subcommittee and the Committee on Aging. In 1995, he lost the whip's job to Trent Lott of Mississippi, and he did not seek reelection to the Senate in 1996. From 1997 to 2000, Simpson taught at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and served for two years as the Director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School. Simpson returned to his home of Cody and practices law there with his two lawyer sons (William and Colin) in the firm of Simpson, Kepler and Edwards. The three are also partners in the firm of Burg Simpson Eldredge Hersh and Jardine of Englewood, Colorado. Colin M. Simpson, the third generation of his family in Wyoming politics, is a Republican former member of the Wyoming House of Representatives who served as Speaker of the House for the 59th session of the Legislature, 2008 to March 2010. He was a candidate for governor, having finished fourth in the primary in 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_K._Simpson

• published: 07 Dec 2014
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