Alan Simpson Oral History

How are you?

We’re doing fine.

I see.

I read your book.

Well, that took a labor of love.

No, it didn’t. It was a pleasure to read. I really enjoyed it. I particularly liked the early sections on your Wyoming background and how you got into politics—and your wife, which I thought was really nice.

You’d like her. I like her.

I’m sure, yes. I got a sense through the book that you kind of liked her.

She’s the gyroscope, she is indeed. They asked me to write it. They came to me. I don’t have an agent. Then I hired an agent who did nothing. He sat on his butt, but offered to take me to dinner one night!

And took a cut of your money, I’m sure.

I don’t know what he took, but I never saw any of the fifty grand, not a penny.

Oh, you didn’t?

No, because I think his was 10 percent, but then I didn’t know they deducted the New York trip for the Today Show and the jaunt to Los Angeles. They deducted the airfare. I asked Ann [Simpson] to come with me and I did the West Coast caper and the East Coast caper, promoting the book. Then I finished and they said they had to hire a person to tighten the manuscript and I said, Well, aren’t those people called your editors? They don’t really have editors because all they do is publish thousands of books and they look for the ones that will make them a ton of money and the rest of them they just let sink. And this was William Morrow and the guy there was a great guy. 

Anyway, I shortened that all up and I said, How much does that cost me? They said, About $25,000. The guy tightened it and I said, How about my days at Cranbrook [School for Boys]? How about the art? He said, It’s too much. Throw it out. He just pitched stuff overboard right and left. Nice guy, and very professional, you know, from the St. Petersburg Times. I mention him in the book. I said to the guys at William Morrow, You guys run a scam. You have editors who don’t edit. You take money you shouldn’t take. They don’t care.

You should have had my agent because my agent sold my second book in three weeks, and I had a great editor who really edited. Of course, if you give an editor a really good manuscript then they won’t screw around with it and that’s the real key thing.

It was my first attempt, but my first editor was the one who does Barbara Bush’s books, and she was my gal, and then she got busy with other things.

You didn’t have Nan Talese, did you?

No, but you’d know the name. Anyway, there were 20,000 copies and it was on the market for three years, which is interesting that they didn’t jerk it. Then they called and they said there are a thousand left. I said, What are you doing with them? Well, they’re going to go on remainder, for three-and-a-half bucks. I said, How much if I buy them? For a buck, they said. A buck? So I bought ’em all and gave them all to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. You can get the book for $25.00 and they keep all the money! Of course I sign it!

I really enjoyed it and I thought your voice came through very well. You never met an adjective that you didn’t like. You always had at least three.

I’m an adjective man. I gave the graduation talk at Cranbrook where I went to school for a year, and the English teacher I had, as I walked down the aisle of Christ Church, said, Don’t use any split infinitives, Alan. I said, I don’t know what the hell they are. I had—and have—no idea what a split infinitive is or ever was!

Cranbrook was [Eliel S.] Saarinen’s.

That’s right. Not only Saarinen, but the great Swedish sculptor—Saarinen the architect, and then, good Lord, in Stockholm that marvelous garden of Carl Milles, of his works, Jonah and Europa and sculpture of all the myths are there. For a kid from Cody it was just a feast.

Pardon my ignorance, but where is Cranbrook?

It’s north of Detroit. It was a boys’ school started in the ’30s. It was Cranbrook School for Boys and largely populated by the Fishers and the Fords and all the people out in Bloomfield Hills who were in the automobile business and were pretty well off. I went as a post grad for a year. There were Asians and blacks there in 1950, which is interesting. Then it went into total decline and then they later made it a co-ed school. There was also a Kingswood [School for Girls], and if you noticed, both of those were General Motors car names, the Cranbrook vehicle and the Kingswood vehicle. Kingswood and now Cranbrook are both co-educational and beautiful. Saarinen—

He was the architect?

Oh, yes.

His father, Eliel. Did Eero [Saarinen] do some of it too?

I don’t know. The [George Gough] Booth family created the school. They had a large interest in the Detroit News and when the Detroit News went into merger Cranbrook held the stock and there were 65 million dollars that went to Cranbrook. They really juiced the place up and it’s just beautiful, and a very good school. In class they made me read Of Human Bondage, which was the driest book I’d ever read and ever will read in my whole life—about that wretched, pale-faced Philip [Carey] and his sad girlfriend.

Bette Davis.

Not really—but God, what kind of people are these? We didn’t have a lot of people like that in Cody. 

All right, anything, shoot.

Well, we’re here to talk about Kennedy. A couple of things just to give you an overview. There are two big issues that I want to cover today. One is the length of time that you worked with him on immigration reform because that’s a big issue. You were on the same side sometimes and on opposite sides sometimes. The other one is the Judiciary Committee and the Supreme Court nominations, particularly [Robert] Bork and [Clarence] Thomas. But first, why don’t you tell us about your experience working with him on Face Off.

I saw what you sent me and you asked me when I first met him.

OK, fine. We can start with question number one. When did you first meet him?

Well, my father went to the U.S. Senate in ’62 and Kennedy was also elected in ’62, and Dad was one ahead of him in seniority. Ted always defers to older people. He’s respectful of his elders. Now that he is an elder, I don’t know what he’s doing. 

I do know that I talked to him just the other day. I called him about Patrick [Kennedy]. I said, How are you doing, pal? He said, Well, we’ll work through this too. We had a good visit. We talked about immigration. This was just two days ago. I didn’t do it because of this. We just keep track of each other. 

Anyway, Dad knew him. He said, I like the kid; he’s a good kid. When I got elected to the Senate in ’78, Dad said, Al, get to know Kennedy. We don’t vote alike and he caused his parents as much pain as you’ve caused your mother and me! I said, Oh, OK, Pop! So the minute I got here I looked him up. He knew Milward [Simpson] well and he said, How’s your dad? I said, He’s got Parkinson’s. He said, Oh, I know all about that. 

He didn’t say anything more but when I brought Dad and Mom out here in ’79 for a reception, everybody came—all the Senators. It was lovely. Ted was the first guy there, and he said, Milward, many people never knew Jack [John Fitzgerald Kennedy] may have had Parkinson’s. That’s what he said. I think he [JFK] had some kind of Parkinsonian syndrome, but whatever it was, it sure cheered the old man up because Ted said, I know what you’re going through because Jack had something akin to it! They’ve always said that he had something. I don’t know what that was.

Addison’s disease.

Addison’s. Well, it’s like [Robert] Byrd, the way he holds the microphone. He’s a dear and special man, but if he holds that mike right here (close to chest) you don’t notice anything, but do you notice when he puts his hand down on the podium. Anyway, Pop always enjoyed Ted and so we hit it right off. We’re the same age. Different lifestyles but the same jokes—bad jokes, horrible jokes that people just get up and leave when we’re telling them—but what the hell, they don’t have to listen.

Face Off (Mutual Radio program) came and he and [Robert] Dole were doing it, and when Dole ran for President the Face Off people said, We can’t do this with Dole running for President, and so they asked Kennedy who he wanted. He said, Let’s do Simpson. They had someone else in mind. So they asked me to do it, and they paid us then. We were paid $40,000 a year and man-oh-man I jumped right into that. The law changed before they finished the program, where you couldn’t earn anything—even in the law business. That was always the case, that’s what I had done, but the rule said you could do books and radio—something like that—which is all changed now. They’ve really tightened it all up. Then Dole came back and Kennedy said, I would rather not do it with Dole again. I want to do it with Simpson. Bob was a little taken aback, but I didn’t have anything to do with that. I said, Bob, you’re back, you can take over again, and Ted said no. 

Every weekday for eight years we did Face Off. I don’t know where those tapes are, but there was one we did when our mothers died within five days of each other that was the most beautiful two minutes each you may have ever heard…about our mothers and what they meant to two rambunctious boys…who still are boys in many ways! I don’t know where they are. We were on Mutual Radio, 350 stations. It came on at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, or maybe it was 6:00 out in the farm country. They gathered all the affiliates together one day and invited Ted and me to come. We said, What time does our program come on in Spokane? The guy said 5:00 A.M. We said, Anybody ever hear it at 9:00? No, they’re all 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, and at six o’clock A.M. were the farm programs and the grain reports. 

Anyway, we had a lot of fun doing it. Sometimes he’d come up on the Senate floor and he’d say, You bastard, you really threw a harpoon, didn’t you? I said, Well, you deserved it. You nailed me last week and I think you needed that. That’s the way we did our business, with affection. We’ve never really gone at each other but we have—I told him when he did the floor speech about Bork, I said, Ted, that was savage. That was really rat crap—abortions, back alley stuff. This is a Yale professor, for God’s sake, and not some jerk with a knife. When you get him, when you nail Ted, he gets his head down to the side and cocks it. I’ve seen that many a time. I said, Don’t you cock your head and give me that crap. But he was passionate. He felt very strongly and driven on that one. 

Anyway, that’s where we met. He said, What committee do you want to be on? I said, I want to be on Judiciary. I was a Chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Wyoming House of Representatives. I loved it. That’s where all the action is. Many other committees just stagger around in junk. The Judiciary Committee gets the toughest issues and that’s what I always enjoyed, and they’re usually issues filled with emotion, fear, guilt or racism, and it’s always good to get into finding the real issue where they try to pass or kill a bill using a deft blend of emotion, fear, guilt or racism, because then you take on those bastards who use that and you run them into the wall with facts and homework and preparation, and they don’t like that.

You talked in your book about doing that, using facts, the research, the preparation, and it worked there. Did it work as well in the U.S. Senate?

Sure, because they get up and say, Well, this poor soul or that, and all of this stuff. I testified—about six months ago—with [Michael G.] Oxley, who is leaving Congress. He is another guy leaving who is a good man. You get tired of the guff. I didn’t retire of the guff. I just knew I didn’t want to be 70 when I got out. 

So here I am at that hearing with Barbara Kennelly. You know her; she’s the head of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, with about three million members. She just gets them all juiced up. I said, Barbara— And remember, not one thing had been proposed in the Social Security Reform package that affected anyone over 55, under anybody’s plan, and everybody knew it. Yet her whole pitch to her members was about an interview with Jane, a former airline attendant, a 75-year-old apparently eating out of a garbage can and skinning cats for food. I said, That is just babble. How the hell can you say that? She started to laugh. She said, That’s what we do. I said, But it’s so phony. 

Veterans’ organizations—there’s another group. I’m a veteran. There are about 24 million of us. Only three million ever were in combat or a combat theater and the rest of them often just bitch. They come to the meetings with their caps on, and cry, How about us veterans? They’re breaking the bedpans down there at the VA [Veterans Affairs] Hospital. God almighty, you’ve got crippled people. I said, How much money do you get? In tiny, tiny letters the DAV, Disabled American Veterans say in their propaganda, If you want a copy of our financial report… And you get it and you can’t read it with an electron microscope. Ask for it and you’ll find that the vast amount of their budget goes to their own staff, and to their retirement, and to their healthcare. And they’re out there selling poppies. They’re passing out poppies. 

But to get a buck for a really poor veteran? Let me tell you, these professional veteran guys are monstrous. I used to take them on. It was great fun but everybody else would run from the building. I said, If a guy never left Camp Beetle Bailey and doesn’t know a mortar tube from either end, why the hell should I give him the same money as a combat vet from the Federal Treasury? They went crazy. I then clearly said, Just show me the combat veteran, or a guy from the combat theater, and we’ll just write the checks. We won’t even ask any questions, but this other stuff is babble. 

Of course it may be babble, but who’s going to take on the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] and the American Legion and the Order of Purple Heart or prisoners of war, Catholic war veterans, Jewish war veterans and more! They all know how to raise money. That’s what they do. They try to get their membership up and they can’t. Young people aren’t joining because they don’t care to. It used to be some would join because you could get booze on Sunday but now you can get booze on Sunday anywhere so you don’t need to join the VFW or the Legion or any of those. But anyway, I enjoyed that, it was fun.

Then I dragged the AARP [American Association for Retired Persons] in for a hearing. They were furious, and all my colleagues came in to the hearing room and said, Senator Simpson, I think this is a wonderful thing you are doing. I so wish I could stay for the hearings. Sure! I had a mole in their outfit to find out how they fleeced their members and I said—well, to hell with all that, because it doesn’t have anything to do with Ted. 

Back to Kennedy. We worked together and got to know each other. I went to his staff. I had just been here a month, and he said, These people of mine are here, they’re professionals. They can help you; you’re brand new. Here was Ken Feinberg, a brilliant guy. Here’s Steve [Stephen] Breyer, now Supreme Court Justice Breyer. Michael Myers was there. He’s still there. Larry  Horowitz. I just wandered over one day. I also did it with [Alan] Cranston’s guy, Jon [Jonathan] Steinberg. I said, Here I am. What do you do? What are do you do for this committee? I don’t want to know partisan crap or anything. I just need to know what makes this work! 

The Kennedy staff—I could just pick up the phone and they would get back to me, and they would get back to my staff. Of course when you just come out of an election and you have staff, they’re very partisan. That’s what’s wrong with the White House. It doesn’t matter what White House. They have all just come off the campaign trail and their first item of business is to hate Democrats or to hate Republicans. That is obligatory because you’ve been in the campaign and you said you’d stick it to them. Boy, we’re going to hammer their ass, and now we’ve won. We’ll get drunk for a week and then we’ll figure how to screw them some more. That’s what young staff do—eat pizza, drink beer, and figure how to screw the other side—up there in the Exec Office Building sitting around like you’re having a vision. 

Anyway, his staff was very good and they would bring me up to speed and then I’d watch Ted have these hearings. He had a hearing in the basement of the Capitol once. The vaulted ceiling looked like the sewers of Paris. I said to him, Why are you meeting down here? He said, Watch, because those hordes can’t all get in. It wasn’t big enough for all the public to come in and bitch and protest. The Sergeant at Arms said, I’m sorry folks, there’s no more room. And they’d say, What’s this hearing taking place down here we want in? And the Sergeant at Arms would say, Well, it’s the only room they could get. 

I learned a lot of things from Kennedy. There was a markup. I can’t remember what it was about. There were howling people out in the hall, and he just called it—he already had the votes, you know. We were in the minority and he banged the gavel and it was nine to six or whatever, and water dripping from the cavern walls. I thought, Man, this guy—he’s a master, a master of legislating. The reason is not only his own native cunning; it’s his staff. He has the most brilliant people around him. Now, some are not on the federal payroll. They’re on his personal payroll or the Kennedy Foundation, and there is nothing wrong with that. 

He also had a parliamentarian. I can’t remember his name but he may still be there. But I’d get in a box—Dole left for 18 weeks to give a good run for President so I was the leader of my party for 18 weeks. I was Bob’s Assistant Leader and Byrd had me in a parliamentary knot one day as only Byrd can do! He tried to invoke cloture and I prevented him eight times from doing it. It was on campaign reform or something—I don’t remember what it was. I was using Kennedy’s parliamentarian to give me info—I said, How do I get out of this box? I’d then go to the floor and everybody who knew me knew I didn’t know the way out because I’m not much into that kind of stuff. I got up and I said something like, Under Rule 35-D under the ancient precedent of the Senate authorized by Harvey Moglantz, who wrote in 1932— Then I’d quote from so-and-so. The guys who knew who sit in the back would say, God, look at this. Byrd would just be puzzled and the parliamentarian and the chair would say—paraphrasing: That is true, Senator. That is correct. You have invoked the correct procedure to duck the bomb coming your way. 

Byrd finally came to me. He said, Alan— I love the guy, I really do. I admire him so, and to think he’s running again and dear Erma [Byrd] died. She was the light of his life. And Billy died—his dog. 

Here’s another Kennedy trick, and he loved this one. [Charles] Schumer—we all know Chuck. He became a nice friend. But if a TV light came on out there right now, an orb, he would rise from this desk like a moth, like Dracula flying, and he would go toward the light and he would be in it. And the camera would crank. I’d say, Schumer, for God’s sake. It must drive Hillary [Rodham Clinton] insane. I know her and like her. She must just go goofy because always there’s Schumer. 

Schumer came up to Ted one day and said, Ted, I heard that Byrd’s dog died. I know he cared about that dog. I’ve heard him speak about him. What was the dog’s name? Ted smiled and said, Fido. So Schumer starts down the aisle toward Byrd and he stopped halfway, came back to Kennedy and said, You son of a bitch. I know it isn’t ‘Fido.’ What is it? That’s Ted. It’s just typical of Ted and typical of Schumer. 

Anyway, Byrd came to me and he said, Alan, there must be some way to extricate us all from this. I knew that his pride was on the line right there and I didn’t want to do stop cloture again because I was waking guys up all night. I said, Don’t go to sleep, because we’ll talk all night, and Byrd knew that they would for me because I told them, I don’t want this job but you’ve got to stick with me. Whatever I ask you to do in this 18 weeks, by God, do it—until Dole gets back and then you can go your own way. 

Byrd had the Sergeant at Arms go pick up—literally—[Robert] Packwood out of his office. He had a busted leg and the Sergeant at Arms carried Packwood into the chamber. They then went into Lowell Weicker’s office and said, Senator Weicker, you’re to be on the floor for a line quorum, and he said, Get out of here. He’s 6′7″ and weighed 240 pounds. The officer says, Yes, sir. We won’t bother you again. 

Byrd came. He wanted out and he said, I suggest that maybe I talk for another 20 hours, you could talk for 20, and then we’ll just say that it’s an impasse. I said, Whatever you want. You call it. He was very gracious because he knew what he wanted would never happen. Then he didn’t lose any luster and nobody knew why the hell we stopped. Of course, he didn’t know that I was using Ted’s parliamentarian, a brilliant man. Anyway, that was fun.

Tell us about immigration reform. You got involved in it very early when you came to the Senate. Why did you get involved in it?

Well, I didn’t want any part of it. I was the newest freshman and Howard Baker was the leader of our party and he said that immigration hadn’t been dealt with for 30 years and he felt it was necessary. The Congress had created the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy and I would be a member. I said, That had nothing to do with me. I don’t care about it a wit, don’t know a thing about it, and he said, That’s too bad. You’re the newest member and you’re it. He put [Charles] Mathias on there. I love that guy. He’s still going, and he has Parkinson’s.

We just interviewed him a couple months ago.

Really? Wonderful, bright still?

Oh, yes, absolutely.

He knows a lot of limericks and that’s why he and Ted—you know. Oh well, there were wonderful limericks there. Then [Dennis] DeConcini and Kennedy and I guess that was the four of us, and then the House members: [Hamilton] Ham Fish and [Romano L.] Mazzoli—I don’t remember them all—Jack Brooks. So we started. The Governor of Florida was the first Executive Director, [Reuben] Askew. He lasted about six months and he quit. I don’t know what happened to him. He just was like a comet and he went across the sky and disappeared. He was supposed to be Presidential material.

He ran in ’76 briefly, I believe.

Well, he stepped out and here came Father Ted Hesberg. That was a good stroke because Kennedy, a good Catholic, knew Father Ted, and Mazzoli had gone to Notre Dame. Hesberg, I talked to him every few weeks. He was earthy, magnificent. He can’t see well now, he’s losing his sight, but boy, he kept us working. Rob Portman (former Congressman and now head of OMB) was also a member of the staff. It was a wonderful staff. 

We began to craft things about legal and illegal immigration. We talked a lot and had hearings around the country. I got to know Ted and the issue and Ted had a great staff person who learned the issue. Jerry Tinker was Ted’s guy. He died too young. Ted and I gave the eulogy at his service; that was a gut wrenching one of all kinds. Both of us were asked by the family to speak and both of us barely made it through it. I don’t think we did. Jerry died of booze, just died of booze. The docs told him, You drink any more, Jerry, and you’re going to be dead. He died, and it was so sad, a brilliant guy. 

Jerry and my wonderful friend and counsel and Staff Director, Dick Day, traveled together. Dick and Jerry went overseas, and would come back and tell us about the situation in refugee camps in Thailand or the Philippines or Europe. They really did their work. They would come back and then Ted and I would have a hearing or—well, there were lots of them. Then I was in the majority. But when I was Chairman, he’d ask me if he could have a hearing on something—he always had some passion. That’s who he is. Al, Al, I’ve got to have a hearing on—we went over there to so-and-so and it’s the saddest, terrible thing. 

Displaced persons, that was it, in Vietnam. Some of them were even selling people over there, or using phony papers to get here. And many people weren’t displaced at all but just wanted to get to the U.S. I said, Sort the phonies out from the originals and I’ll go along with it. It’s like marriage fraud—get married, become a permanent alien and then later a U.S. citizen. Come over and kick the crap out of your spouse and get a divorce, and you’ve still got a green card. Senator [Paul] Simon got interested in that. He was in the minority party. I said, Have a hearing and I’ll pass your bill. Give him the hammer. Folks said, You’re going to let Senator Simon have a hearing on marriage fraud? I said, Yes, he’s right on track. And so he did and he got a bill. We put it on the statute books and the President signed it. Jennings Randolph let me do hearings when I was in the minority. They don’t do any of that now. They wouldn’t allow it. 

Finally, after the Select Commission, we put together two bills, one about legal and one about illegal immigration. Mazzoli was chair of the Committee over there (U.S. House) and I was chair over here (Senate), and we sat down and we said, Why the hell should you have a hearing in the House for sanctions and two weeks later I have one over there? Let’s have joint hearings, which would save us a lot of time. Nobody had ever heard of that, especially with a Democrat and a Republican. I went to Ted and he said, You had better talk to Tip [Thomas Phillip O’Neill], Speaker of the House. So we went to Tip and he said, What the hell are you guys cooking now? I said, We want to have joint hearings—instead of me doing it and then Ron doing it, and Tip said, Well, go ahead if you think you can get any progress. I said, It would be better than nothing. 

I think we had about five of those joint hearings. Ted and I would come to a loggerhead and I’d say, I can’t go for that. Can you do this or this? He’d say, Let me get back to you Monday. What Ted had to do, and I did understand it—it didn’t bother me but it was curious. He had to run it through two shops. He had to run it through his legislative shop and his political shop. His political shop was tough to get through. The legislative shop I could get through because I had the contact there with Dick and Jerry. One time he said, I’ll go for this, this is great, but don’t do anything until Monday. Then he came back and he said, I can’t do this politically. I’ve got—I don’t know—maybe 80 percent in one of these towns is Portuguese and I can’t do it. Which was honest enough, but, you know, a political shop and a legislative shop? You don’t see that often.

Who were his political?

I don’t know. They were all—most of them—in Massachusetts. And it wasn’t Barbara.

Barbara Souliotis?

She’s classic. I was in Boston for three-and-a-half years, four full spring semesters. Every time they had something at the Kennedy Center, Ann and I were there—kings, princes, potentates, black tie. I said, We never get charged for any of this, Ted, and he says, Just clam up! The King of Spain and the King of Jordan and other dinners—we had a ball. And he does it so well because he gives the toast and all before dinner. By the time the evening is coming to an end we’re all toasting each other and having fun. Champagne is flowing and the music is playing. Vicki [Victoria Reggie Kennedy] and Ann are saying, We’ve got to get you boys out of here! Anyway, he was very generous to us. We had a wonderful time.

So your sense from the beginning is that there was a bipartisan approach even though you differed on some issues. There was a lot of collaboration between the two sides, both between House and Senate and within the Commission and ultimately on the subcommittee on Judiciary Committee. That’s unusual.

Yes, but it was an issue that was all national. It wasn’t about party. No one even talked about a Democrat bill or a Republican bill. When I left the Senate they were talking about a Republican immigration bill. I could say, Well, don’t talk to me about it because I won’t have any part of it. There’s no such thing as a Republican immigration bill. It’s a national interest bill. Now they don’t even know what they’re doing. They’re just clawing each others eyes out. But there is something they can do and Ted and I both agree that if it gets done, the media won’t ever pick it up. They’re too dull-witted and they don’t do their homework. You see, what screwed us was the phrase, National ID. You even used it in your remarks there. You said the national identifier.

It’s what appears in all the—

It was not in the original bill and it was not in the second bill. It’s almost as if people can’t read and write. It said that we would have a more secure identifier system. We didn’t say what it would be. We talked about a slide card or maybe revising the Social Security system that would maybe have the maiden name of the person’s mother on it. It would not be used for law enforcement. It would not be carried on the person and it would be used only twice in life: When you went to get a job you had to present it—or, when you went to receive benefits from any federal, state or local government—you presented this document. It would be possessed by people who looked foreign and by bald, emaciated bastards like me, too. They missed it all. It was so phony—because in the emotion of the national ID, it was totally distorted. 

I think they’re going to get something like that. Not only that, they’re now talking about retina scans. If I had talked about that they’d have burned my house down. And they’re talking about fingerprinting. I said to a group the other day, I think they’re talking now about what they have at Disney World where you put your card in and you put two fingers in the slot. God, it was the most disgusting son-of-a-bitching thing I’ve ever— And so we didn’t get it. 

Grover Norquist, you saw that dizzy dupe. Now, of course, the heat is on him and it’s so fun to watch. He’s so close to [Jack] Abramoff that the heat is just beginning to melt the wax on his shoes, and it will be good to see something happen, too, because that was Jack’s bosom buddy. He’s the one who passed out the little water-soluble barcodes that you would soak and put on your wrist, and said, Simpson, Mazzoli, you’ll need this because then they’ll know where you are. This is your barcode. You’ll have an eternal barcode under the national ID, and then he would give his Nazi Germany speech—that was a beautiful speech! He could give that too and so could [Edward] Roybal, the Congressman from L.A., the old Nazi Germany speech—and tattoos—it was a marvelous speech! So there it was!

Where was Kennedy on the whole issue of an identifier?

He was with me on having a more secure identifier—not carried on the person, not used for law enforcement.

When the attacks came and it blew up into a national identity card, where was he in terms of—did he stand there and argue against this distortion of what was actually in the bill?

I don’t remember that he ever rose up. He never used the phrase national ID. He just said we needed to have a more secure identifier. His pitch always was that he thought employer sanctions would discriminate against the Hispanics. But the employers weren’t going to do a lick of a thing unless they had a more secure identifier. They just said—through the U.S. Chamber— We’re not the policemen of the world. Why the hell should we be doing this? So they just sat on their butt. I said to Kennedy, If you want to protect the Hispanics against exploitation, have this more secure identifier. Right now, if they don’t, employers are just going to continue to hire illegals and they will have no rights. It’s a zoo. 

They would say, Well, let’s be sure to take care of these 11 million people who are here. I said, How? They’re exploited, they’re used every day. They’re expendable. The Wall Street Journal theory of immigration is to have open borders, pay them a buck-and-a-half an hour, and when payday comes, call the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] and have them hauled away. It’s good for the economy! Bill Gates is paying Indian guys a third less than the guy from Rensselaer and playing the old violin that in America, We need these people. Well, there are plenty of professionals out of work in Boston and New York who are from Rensselaer Polytechnic or MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] but if old Gates can get them from India and Germany and everywhere else for a quarter less and have the American people believe that he’s doing God’s work—Kennedy and I used to fight that one and boy we got hammered on that one, hammered flat. We stuck together on that one—it’s so phony.

You got hammered by the Chamber of Commerce and groups like that? The business roundtable?

Yes, the business groups. You know, we were stultifying America. That America would stagnate if Gates and company—and I like Bill Gates. I think he’s changed the world for the better and should receive all the accord for that—but this business of not being able to get good people—I said, That would work if you told me they were getting the same salary. If I knew that the guy from MIT was getting the same sum as the Indian guy—but when you’re paying them 30 percent less, there’s something phony about that. 

We tried that together, but I never heard Ted speak against the ID. It was tough for him as a civil libertarian—known to be the great civil libertarian. Then when he saw Grover Norquist do that kick from the far right and then another group said we were imposing the mark of Cain, Yes, I know that Cain killed Abel and hit him over the head with the leg of a table, but I don’t know anything about the mark of Cain. Well, they said, Obviously you don’t. Then they warned me of, the four sixes. I said, That’s a poker hand. I knew that then I was doomed to death about IDs. 

That’s the kind of rock-headedness that we got to play with, and Kennedy also saw that and was offended by that. He knew that if he saw the right-wing cuckoos going like that, that he didn’t want to be any part of that. When he realized that he couldn’t protect the Hispanic and tell the foreigner he had a document that would enable them to legally work and then receive all of the benefits of a person in our society legally instead of illegally—yes, there were tough times for him on all that stuff because he was getting pushed, pushed, pushed continually. Antonia Hernandez was on his staff once and MALDEF [Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund] and LULAC [League of United Latin American Citizens] and the Council of La Raza—Raul Yzaguirre, a wonderful guy. He and I just did a shtick together at Susquehanna College just a month ago. Do you know who I mean? Raul?

I don’t.

He invited me to the National Convention. I went to Council of La Raza and they booed. He got up and he said, Be quiet. I invited Simpson here. You may not like what he says but you’re going to just listen to him anyway because he’s saying some things that are very important, whether you like it or not. 

They didn’t boo afterwards. I just said, Here’s what we’re trying to do. Who are you people talking about helping? Poor bastards who have no right in America to do anything? And so you’re going to prevent this bill from going through? Well, tell that to all the people out there protesting today who are all illegal, that without my bill they’ll still be illegal for the next goddamned century. Boy, you could feel the tension in the room. Tell that silly bastard out in the street who’s got the placard reviling me that without my bill there will be no legalization. Then they’d look at the guy next to them and say, Is that right? Yes, that’s right. Well, no it isn’t. They’d say, No that’s not true.

Three million people came forward legally under that bill and I still see them in work places and restaurants, and they still come up to me and I love it. They’re legal and they wouldn’t have been without a bill. I mean, the madness of it all, and now it’s caught them all. None of them know what to do because they don’t know the issue. They know that it’s Republican versus Democrat, which is very sad.

Did the ’86 bill do what you hoped it would do?

No, because the employer sanctions couldn’t possibly work because we didn’t get the more secure identifier. We had it in the Senate bill. It went to the House and Roybal got up and gave his Nazi Germany speech. This was at midnight the last night of the session. They called me and they said, Roybal has just removed that important section. I went to Kennedy and I said, What the hell are we going to do now? He said, Put in some language that we’ll do a study. That’s always a good shunt. He said, You know [John Joseph] Moakley and he trusts you, and you’re the Chairman. 

I called Moakley at 1:00 that same night and I said, Joe, I’ve got some language here. Roybal did his Nazi Germany speech—with the tattoos. The House went right along with it in the passion of the moment and here’s some new language. If you could have the Rules Committee meet, stick that in the bill and pass the bill with that in it. He did, in the middle of the night. I mean, it was so like Joe; and he called the Rules Committee together and said, Here’s what Simpson and Kennedy say will work because Roybal pulled the guts out of the bill. Of course it was small potatoes, but at least the bill came out. That’s the kind of stuff we had to work with: emotion, fear, guilt and racism.

Whose idea was it to alter the family preference and put in the tiered family preferences?

Well, that was in the law long before I got there.

The six tiers, the family preference was in there?

Yes. Oh, yes.

You altered it in terms of the numbers?

Well, we messed around with it. We tried to clear up the backlog to get that out of there. Nobody understood the preference system anyway. Then we tried to reunify families of those who had green cards; nobody understood that either. Barbara Jordan was doing such a magnificent job and her commission report was just the freshest, most wonderful thing, and then she died. When she died, it all died with her. I went to the floor anyway and I said, Out of respect for that glorious woman, I’m going to put this bill out for debate on the floor. I had the horses to do it and I said, We’ll lose, but I want them to hear this debate about what we need to do in America to freeze the numbers and get a breathing space. 

[Mr. Simpson takes phone call.] 

Very particular people there on Talk of the Nation. The best interviews are when you don’t know what the hell they’re going to ask you. Then your answers are more pure. Now, what were we talking about?

Let’s just talk for a minute about the 1990 bill because Kennedy voted against the ’86 bill.

He told me he would do that. But he said, I think you’ve done a great job, and he made remarks after the bill passed. There were a lot of remarks made. It passed the Senate 83 to 17, I think. His remarks are in the Congressional Record. It was gracious. He knew what I had done and he told me honestly, I can’t vote for it. God, they’ll tear me to bits.

But then when you got to the 1990 bill, on everything leading up to that you worked very closely with him and you both did vote for it. What made the difference? That was a very different bill.

Well, it was—and that’s where we hung together, and Jack Brooks (Congressman and Chairman of House Judiciary Committee) was over there waiting for us with his cigar! What he didn’t know was that Ted and I had made a pact, and that we were going to stick, and that the House could never take this away from us in the conference. Old Jack’s sitting there tapping his cigar, Well, Teddy, we’re here for you. We’re going to help you all we can! Boy, he could take you through the coals. He was bragging and telling Texas stories. He was a fun and tough Democrat. 

He said, Well, we’re not going to have any of that part right there, and we said, Oh yes, we are. We’re going to have all that. Oh no, he said. I know you and Kennedy don’t agree on that. We said, Oh yes, we do, and his jaw flew open and then we put it all in—stuck right with it. It was terrible in one way because he got beat in the next election because his constituents felt he had sold out or something. He was holding on for the Texas proviso kind of thing, which meant it was legal to hire an illegal but illegal for the illegal to work. That was the Texas proviso and that was originally the work of Brooks and company! 

Let’s switch to the Supreme Court nominations. Let’s talk about the Bork one. What was your reaction to Kennedy having gone to the floor on Bork so quickly?

I thought that whole thing was just monstrous. They were waiting for Bork. I’ll tell you, and I’ll name names here. Ralph Neas is a monster. He’s vicious. I’ve been called a lot of things, but I don’t think vicious would be one of them. Ralph Neas organized. They were ready. They knew there were only so many people that [Ronald] Reagan would put up and one of them was Bork. Here’s a professor of law at Yale, a professor who went on the Federal District Court. And here’s the one that just left us all in tatters! He was approved one hundred to nothing when he went on that Court and while he was on that Court, he did 104 opinions. None of them were ever reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court and six of his dissents became majority opinions of the United States Supreme Court. Now if that isn’t a Justice and one with a fine a judicial temperament, I don't know what the hell is. 

They turned him into a gargoyle before my eyes: a racist, sexist, invader of the bedroom, defiler of women, poisoner of women, poll taxer. Gregory Peck on television, crumbling columns of the Supreme Court. Then Ted’s talk—the minute the nomination came out, he was on the floor. He spoke of back-alley abortions, you know—and I’m pro-choice so it isn’t about that. In fact, I was also selected by Advocate Magazine as the coolest straight guy in America. I said to my wife, What do you think of that? She chuckled. I work closely with that community and I love it.

Did you talk to Kennedy after the speech?

Yes, I did. He didn’t even cock his head. He said, No, this guy is a son of a bitch and this is what he’ll do. He’ll overturn Roe v. Wade, and he’ll do this and that. I said, You voted— I think he voted for him for the District Court.

He did.

The signal first went up for me in the Judiciary Committee when [Howard] Metzenbaum said, Judge [Clarence] Thomas—what was he then? (At the Federal District Judge hearing) Mr. Thomas, I’m going to vote for you to go on this Court but if you aspire to anything perhaps higher, I don’t know that I’ll be as genial, or something to that effect. I thought, Aha, if this guy ever gets nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court old Metz isn’t going to go for him, and of course he didn’t. It was sad. I asked a bunch of women in New York afterwards—two or three weeks after he went down in flames I was talking to a group, all women, and they wanted to tear my hair and my clothing off.

This was Thomas?

No, Bork. I said, How many of you women were offended by his moustache and his goatee? Half of the audience went up with their hands. Now what do you think of that? Brilliant, isn’t it? I said, How many of you were offended by this little thing (the goatee) here? And without any smiling they put their hands up. It was a perfect storm for him. Then I had asked him the question, not dreaming what the answer would be, How would it be if you were on the Supreme Court? What did he say? It would be a feast.

Intellectual feast.

An intellectual feast.

So you asked that question?

I did. I had forgotten that I had until somebody told me. But then his reputation was gone. His wife was a former novitiate or was going into the orders—[Mary] Ellen [Bork]. She was so hurt. We could see we weren’t going to get him on. Ralph Neas was on television day and night savaging him. The one that surprised me was John Buchanan, of People for the American Way. He was a Congressman, a Democrat from Alabama. He’s dead now. A wonderful guy to work with. I said John, what are you doing? This isn’t you. This Connecticut case about contraception is just a goddamned trick by a bunch of law professors who strung together this attack. I can’t remember—that you couldn’t use a contraceptive in the marriage bedroom. A bunch of law guys at Yale strung it together and got it into the court system, and it happened to be Bork who said, This is nuts. Anyway, they used that against him. 

Then the other one was those women who went to work at the chemical factory and the employer handed them all a sheet of paper that said, This could ruin your pregnancy. You might have disease. Your eyeballs might fall out, your lips fall off and if you want to sign this waiver and go to work you can. And they did. Bork upheld that as a right of an individual to recognize the full risk of a situation and get a good paying job. They just cremated him on that—that he was a poisoner of women.

Besides the speech on the floor, how did Kennedy fit into the attack on Bork?

He was part of the movement. They were all sitting in a basement somewhere waiting for that to happen and then when it happened, they galvanized in the most amazing way. They were ready. Mike Pertschuk, Neas, Buchanan, Wade Henderson. They were all ready. The scenario was prepared. Bring him down. Bring this man down. They did a beautiful job and Kennedy felt very strongly. He didn’t cock his head on that one; he was full bore. He was going to get this guy out of there, by God, and he did. He was never more passionate and never more stubborn. In the hearings he was as close as you could get to punching the guy’s lights out.

We kept going and we could see that he was never going to get the votes, and into my office one morning came Bork and his wonderful wife Ellen. She was crying. She said, I’ve never seen anything like this, how they can tear a person to bits. This is nothing in my life that I understand. I don’t understand it. Then she said, What would you do? Should we go to a vote knowing we’d lose? Or should we just withdraw right now, just pull our names out and step away? I looked at him and said, What do you want to do? And he said, I don’t know. I’m puzzled. What would you do? 

I said, I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go into that floor, put your name up before the Senate and have people speak in full debate, and about 35 of the people in there, Democrat and Republican, will tell what an amazing man you are as their professor and friend. People like Lloyd Bentsen and others will talk about you and it will all be in the Congressional Record. You can show your grandchildren that you got screwed and that you were an amazing man. And that’s what he did. People should look at the debate on that, the people that got up and spoke for Robert Bork, Democrat and Republican alike who said, This was my professor at Yale and you’ve turned him into a monster. This was the man who enabled me to practice law. 

That may be small potatoes, and now of course he seems to be a bitter man. He writes about Sodom and Gomorrah, and America’s decline. I haven’t heard him speak, but in that sepulchral tone he’ seems to be damning everything, and it must be bitter gall still for him.

Kennedy opposed David Souter’s nomination as well and voted against him.

I don’t remember any great voices on that one. What did he say?

It was interesting because in some ways it was along the same lines that it was with Bork. He was concerned about decisions.

Abortion?

He was concerned about abortion because at this point he was very concerned that this could swing the balance at least towards restriction if not overturning. He was concerned about a poll tax that New Hampshire had had that Souter had defended when it was challenged. There were a number of things that he was concerned about, but he was afraid that he was going to turn the Court to the right. The difference was in the outcome. The outcome was 90 to 9 with Souter and it was 42–58 on Bork.

Was it 42 we got?

What do you think made the difference? Since he raised, in essence, many of the same issues of concern about a rightward turn on the Court, what made the difference in terms of the ability to halt the Bork nomination and the inability to halt the Souter nomination?

I’ll tell you, we can’t get too deeply into things. There’s no reference for that all in that committee. I voted for seven of the nine people on the Supreme Court and supported every one of them. Did I give a damn about Ruth [Bader] Ginsberg being a liberal? Hell no. Bright lady, creative. What the hell do I care? She was put up by her President. I voted for Steve Breyer, who’s one of the great guys of the earth. Sandra Day O’Connor came before us and her son and my son were frat brothers at Colorado College, so I said, Who do I have to kill? What do I need to do for you? Nobody asked her any questions. One member asked her about abortion and she said, For heaven’s sakes, I can’t answer that. It may come up when I’m on the Court. Well, how about so-and-so? Oh I’m not going to answer that. 

Then [Antonin] Scalia comes up and some member asked him the tough question, Do you really sing and play the piano? Do you do that? Yes I do, I love that. [Dennis] DeConcini and Scalia—a couple of good Italianos. I mean, for God’s sake, it was just a piece of cake. Then along comes a Bork and everybody just loses their marbles. The next guy up was [Anthony M.] Kennedy and his was just a piece of cake; or Souter, a piece of cake; Ginsberg, a piece of cake. 

And then Clarence Thomas, not a piece of cake at all. 

[Robert] Packwood, ah, there’s the example. Packwood was destroyed by the backlash. Packwood’s adversaries came from 26 years back—24 women, some from 26 years back. The statute of limitations in every jurisdiction in America is two years, and the worst offense of all was that one of them said that he had stuck his tongue in her mouth as he kissed her. That’s it! That’s offensive enough but there was nothing else. Then up comes Bill Clinton and where are those women? Nowhere. 

Get right to the nub of life in D.C. Gloria Steinem was Bob Packwood’s best pal and when he went down in flames, she was there to cremate him. When they asked her about Clinton, she wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times that is best described as irrational babble. I watched all that. I’ve watched a lot of things. Packwood had told us in caucus: I’ll be destroyed in this because of the backlash, and he was, and he was one of the best of Senators. He was more for women’s rights than any Republican who ever sat in the chamber and they just sat and watched him go down in flames. That’s an aside, but I’ve watched these cruel things. 

Then Thomas came along. Obviously, they were ready for him. The professor (Anita Hill) kept calling Chairman, Senator, Joe Biden and would not give the staff her name. I just want you to be aware of his behavior. Joe was the chairman and he did a hell of a good job in that hearing, a tough job. I was there, totally. 

And then here came Nina Totenberg, who came to participate in my class every year at Harvard. I was invited to her wedding. She’s a wonderful woman. Her father is the Chair of the strings department, still playing the violin at Boston University at the age of 94. She’s married to David, a wonderful surgeon at Tufts. Every year she came to my class and I’d say, You tell them your version of the Thomas hearings. It’s so distorted and twisted, it doesn’t match any reality. And then I’ll tell the class the Committee version. Well, the class loved it. I said, Don’t forget, anyone enamored of political correctness in my class, get out. We’re going to talk about everything: homosexuality, abortion, screwballs, Armenian genocide, Irish troubles—you name it, we’re going to rat around in the whole goddamned stack in here. And I don’t want any professors coming in trying to stop the action. Nobody left. 

I had 100 students in that class and boy did I have fun. I’d bring Kennedy, brought him in once and I said, This is my friend Ted Kennedy. He and I worked together on a lot of things, and didn’t always agree, but Ted, if you could just describe our relationship and do it in a way without mentioning the veterans or the oppressed or the tragically uninformed and the powerless, and I went through the whole list. He got up and he said, You bastard! Then the class could see the fun we had, what we did together, how we did our work. 

Now back to Thomas.

Given how active Kennedy had been against the Bork nomination, and he had opposed the Souter nomination, why did he take the stance that he did on Thomas?

This had better be off the record.

You can put whatever restrictions on the transcript you want. He will not see this.

It wouldn’t matter. What else could he do? That’s the answer to your question. Just forget all the nuances of it. What else could he have done in his situation in life, and what he had been through? The horrors and the fires and the buffeting of life. 

I did go up to him at—I don’t know what part. I said, What the hell did these two people do? How does all this get here to this? For me, I had a wife and a mother and a daughter, one of them who had been subjected to about 8,000 degrees more shit than the professor and that’s why I lost my marbles. I said to her, What did he do to you? She replied, What do you mean? I said, Did he touch you? No. Did he grab you? No. What did he do physically to you? Nothing. What did he say to you? Well, he talked about a movie called Long Dong Silver and about pubic hair in Coke cans. I said, Well, I never saw anything about all that in the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] report that you gave to the FBI. She said, No, but what I’m talking about is I wanted you to be aware of his behavior. Well, what is his behavior that offended? Well, he talked to me about these movies. 

Now, that was offensive to her and it surely set a whole new tone in American for sexual harassment. But go read her own book. She said the issue wasn’t about sexual harassment! That’s in her book, her words, hers not mine. It was about his behavior. My students wanted her to come to Harvard and she asked, Is Simpson still there? They said, Yes, he’s here. She said, Oh. She was then at Brandeis and [Robert] Reich (former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton) kept trying to get us together for dinner. Bob’s a dear friend, Bob Reich and Claire [Reich]. I said, That’s great. I’d love it. So I called her and on her answering machine I said, If you will come, I’ll defer to you. I will be in Gloucester that day fixing fishing nets or something! I do want you to come. I never heard anything. 

Three weeks later the phone rings. It’s Professor Hill. I said, Hi, I haven’t seen you for a while, and she said, No, that’s true, and then she started to talk. She said, Why did Jack Danforth—I mean, he was a priest, a lawyer—why was he like that? I said, Clarence Thomas was his Assistant Attorney General. It was like a son–father relationship when he was in Missouri. You knew that. She said, I did know that but he was so out of character. I said, He wrote later about his own book that he was out of character and I never should have written it. She said, How about my friend who was never able to testify?

Angela Wright.

I said, Don’t you know that Angela’s lawyer gave an affidavit that he would not allow her to testify and that he gave that to Joe Biden? She said, No. I said, Well, then you need to get the full record, because we asked her to testify. I was sitting in the room; the whole committee was in the room. We weren’t a partisan committee. We were just all stunned by it all. Somebody said— [Patrick] Leahy or someone—We want to hear from this woman. She has something to say. So Joe said, OK. Well, she’s got an attorney and I’ll call him. We’ll put him on the speakerphone. He called that attorney and said, Your client, Angela—we want her to testify and we want to clear that through you. He said, Under no circumstances will she testify. Joe said, Give me an affidavit to that effect. He said, I will, I’ll fax it to you, and he did. 

In the middle of the night at the end of the hearings—at 1:30 in the morning 12 women came forward to testify that all of them had worked with Thomas in various capacities and had never seen one single strain of all this alleged stuff, not one. Not a gesture, not a comment, and the reason he had fired Angela was because she had called somebody a fag in the office and Thomas said, Get yourself out of here. So I said, I can’t wait to cross-examine Angela. I just can’t wait. I think that was part of it. I mean, you talk about being a royal horse’s ass. I was loaded for bear. I was so sick of it all, and then to know what happened in my own family, you know, and have seen real shit going on. I got worked up.

Anyway, I went to Ted and said, What did these two people do? I know that you can’t get in this game. This is vicious crap. He said, I think they had a hot romance and I think it all went to hell and boy— He didn’t lay any real blame on Professor Hill or Thomas. He said, I think they both had a crush or a romance and something happened, and this was the result. I said, Well, that’s as good as I can figure. Because, you know, after the alleged offense, she continued to see him. She once said, Look at my new car, and she drove him to the airport.

 Clarence was sitting in the back room with Danforth looking so down. I went in and I said, Look, did you do any of this? He said, I’m sick to my stomach. I can’t even breathe. I said, You had better start breathing, because if you’re just going to sit there and take this shit and not do something, you’re doomed. 

That was the night he went back to his office and scribbled on a yellow legal pad and came back the next morning and called it all a high-tech lynching and stuck it in Metzenbaum’s ear and he looked like a man possessed. Nobody touched him that day. The whole committee was watching him like this as he was talking and turning the pages, This is nothing but a high-tech black lynching. It was the worst thing I have ever seen in my entire life and I lost my marbles—and I looked like it. Vicious would be hardly the word. And nobody was watching his women supporters at 1:30 in the morning. 

Anyway, the Professor is talking to me, and she didn’t know about the affidavit of her friend. I said, That’s all in the files. She asked a few more questions, almost like she was an onlooker, and then she said, I have it all figured out, don’t you? I said, I’ll never figure it out. I’ll go to my grave never having figured it out. She said, I was manipulated and you were manipulated. I said, Yours first, and she said, I was manipulated by the abortion forces. They created me to be the one to be assured that this defiler of Roe v Wade would not get on the Court. She didn’t use a negative word. I was their force. I was manipulated by those people. They manipulated me and they made me the figure, and she embellished that a bit.

Senator, could I just clarify when this conversation occurred?

While I was at Boston in 2000. I was there four spring semesters: ’97, ’98, ’99, and 2000. Three-and-a-half years. We lived in Elliot House, second floor, not in a master’s apartment, lived with the kids. We never had more fun in our whole lives like that—and Kennedy was part of it, and Vicki. We did everything. Our conversation was probably in the spring of 2000 or maybe ’99. I think she was then at Brandeis. She’s still there, I think. 

So, I said, And us? (The Committee) How about it? She said, You were manipulated by the media. You knew that every day that went by, you were losing another vote. When Byrd jumped ship, you knew you had better get there quick or you would be gone.  I said, We were nearly gone anyway because [Warren B.] Rudman and [William S.] Cohen said, I’m doing this for you, Jack. The vote was 52 to 48. 

So we were cordial to each other. I said, It’s good to talk to you, and maybe we can have dinner with Claire and Bob if you want to do that. She said, I hope we can. The most pleasing thing to me was in Oprah Magazine about three months ago when there was a big piece on her and she said the most charitable remarks about me. She said, I’ve seen Simpson since the hearings. She didn’t say we’d met or we’d talked, but, I’ve seen him on television and I see that’s just who he is. I had him nailed as something else— I don’t know how she said it. Maybe she said we had a phone visit. But she said, I realized that that’s just who he is. It was very charitable. In our phone visit I also had told her, Well, I hope that people will give up hating Clarence Thomas and hating you. That would be a wonderful thing in America. There are people who still hope that Clarence Thomas will drop dead or fall into a pit of snakes and that you will also do the same, and the sons of bitches ought to get new work. Maybe that’s what she liked.

When he was nominated, did his low ABA [American Bar Association] rating give you any pause? Because all the other ones—Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsberg, and recently John Roberts and [Samuel] Alito—so it’s not political—have all gotten the highly-qualified rating, and he came in with one of the—he had 12 ratings of qualified, two not-qualified, and one abstained. This was the lowest of any candidate who had been nominated.

But what’s the top one though?

Highly-qualified.

Is there a well-qualified?

Well-qualified, yes.

And then qualified.

And then not-qualified.

That was when Senator [Charles] Grassley demanded to know who voted how, and what their political affiliation was of those on the American Bar Committee. If you ever saw people covering themselves with a cloak of secrecy they said, That’s impossible. Grassley—I wasn’t leading the charge—Grassley said, I want to know the names of those people and I want to know their political affiliation because I think this is a lot of politics—this is a red hot one. They finally divulged it all, and hell, there was the old Cook County Democratic Chairman, head of the League of Progressive Leninites, [laughing] and all sorts of other dazzling people. 

They [ABA] didn’t like it and they said, You’ve destroyed the integrity of the Bar. I said, I’m a member of the Bar. You can’t do this in secret where you do these little character assassinations and hide behind this crap. I joined Grassley. We pretty well defamed some of them—at least we found out who was who in there. They weren’t exactly [Richard Milhouse] Nixon people from the olden days. Thomas may not have been the best solution, or maybe Ginsberg wasn’t the best one either. I’ll never forget, ever, in my life—and I told her I was going to support her—someone on the committee asked, Justice Ginsberg, do you have any minorities on your staff? And she said, I don’t think I do, but I’m certainly going to correct that if I go on the Court. I’ll tell you, if a Republican had given that answer they’d have torn the son of a bitch to bits. 

You can’t play this game one way. That’s why I always love to look out at those who use emotion, fear, guilt, and racism on me—and then I throw my little bomb in after they’ve drilled my teeth. I didn’t say anything that day. I just said about her answer, I know you will, and I know your husband. You’re good people and you’re going to be a good Justice. It’s all in the Record what I said about it. Did I care that she hadn’t hired minorities or was a liberal? Not one damn bit. 

These two men [Bork and Thomas] went through the fire because they were too conservative. Mike Pertschuk wrote the book on Bork. It’s called, The People Rising. I knew Mike well. I was invited to be part of his roast at his retirement. I don’t know how I fit with all this stuff; I’m like an androgynous fish or something! Then he did his book. He was so tickled with it and he said, What do you think of this? He wrote something on it like, You bastard, you probably won’t like this book, but I love you.

 I told him, You have now just written the bible of judicial nominations, and next time they’ll take your book and just change the name and use the same tactics and screw your guy, and the saddest thing for America is that there will never be a Laurence Tribe (respected Harvard Law School professor) or a Robert Bork on the Supreme Court together. Nine of them in a room with yeast, instead of some of them saying, I would have never voted on that. I can’t speak on that issue, it’s too hot. Whatever happened to yeast? That’s what Kennedy and I had—yeast. 

He got on Strom Thurmond one day. He respected Strom greatly. Strom would say, My friend Ted here, he’s a good man, a fine man, a man of integrity and character, but he’s very, very wrong here. He’d put his hand on Ted’s shoulder and Ted would grin. One time he made a little side shot back at Strom. It kind of took Strom aback and he put his head down. Afterwards, I said, You know what our mothers taught us, Ted, do you remember? You can catch more flies with honey than you can vinegar. Oh, he said, God, did your mother tell you that one? I said, Yes. He said, So did mine. So he said, I better go back. I’ll see him.

The next week, I got delivered to my office a flag, an original 44-star flag. You don’t have to remember history but five or six states came into the union within about 12 months. Six, I don’t remember. But Wyoming was number 44 in that pack. Thus there are very few 44-star flags and this one he found in an antique shop. It’s rather tattered. It’s silk and it’s aged. It was used, and there it is. It’s an antique, and on the bottom he wrote, To the kid from Cody. A great friend and a great Senator, even if he still seems to be playing with 44 stars in his flag! It was after the Thurmond thing he went to get that. I asked his staff, Where the hell did he get that? They said, He went shopping for that. He went out and found that. He loves antiques. He’s a collector and he loves history, and they said he personally went and found that.

The whole Thomas matter did not strain your friendship with him at all? Or did it?

No. Why would it? Why would you let some extraneous thing where you both felt passions from both and all sides? He knew mine. I don’t think I ever told him the personal details, but he knew my wife Ann and he knew our daughter Susie [Simpson Gallagher] and he knew my dear mother. His son Ted and my daughter Susie at one time saw each other. That dear daughter is now 43 and having her second child. We’re all watching with great interest, checking it out—excited!

No, we would never let anything interfere. He just couldn’t get in the damn thing. And I had stuff coming over the transom; I really did. I put it all in the Congressional Record because I got beat up so damn bad, and I put the letters in there from the law professors who knew her and said they were watching the hearings, and from these freshman law students who said that she was the dullest teacher they ever had in their lives and knew nothing about the law. I mean, there it all was. I didn’t ask them to send it.

Referring to Anita Hill?

To Anita Hill. I called one woman and I said, You know, I’m taking so much shit that I am going to throw this in the Record. Oh, she said, Don’t do that. She had her name at the top, a lawyer, a woman lawyer. I said, Well, I’m going underground, so I’m going to take a few people down underground with me. Things were really—you know—affidavits that I destroyed in the hallway, with the students saying cruel and sexually oriented things.

If you look back over Kennedy’s career, how do you think the media has treated him?

Well, I remember an interview with Andrea, [Alan] Greenspan’s wife.

Andrea Mitchell?

Andrea. She is a nice friend and she came to Laramie for a lecture. I try to get all these people to come to my University. She called me on the 25th anniversary of Chappaquiddick. They were doing a piece on that. I said, Sure, I’ll be glad to. Cameras and everything all set up and the question posed: It’s been 25 years since Senator Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. What do you have to say about it? I said, Andrea, I think you people all need to get new work. You need to recharge your batteries and get off this stuff! She was friendly and she knew me. After about a minute-and-a-half of that she just clicked it off. I said, This is bullshit, Andrea. What is the purpose of digging up old bones on people? If we did that to you—did any journalist ever think of the phrase, ‘How would you feel if this were happening to you?’ Try that on a journalist. They go into a paroxysm of, Oh, you don’t understand; we’re not into emotion. Ours is just a detailed report. The people’s right to know. All that guff. 

Hell, some of them are plagiarists, bums, adulterers, whores, and we have to pretend that they are above us? I don’t ever get into that at all. I love to hammer them. Here they are digging through old rubbish about Ted Kennedy. I hadn’t been in the Senate two months and I’m in the Senate subway with him, laughing and telling jokes. He gets out and some woman stepped right up to him and in his face said, How do you feel about what you did to that woman in Chappaquiddick? He looked at her steadily, never raised his voice and he said, It’s with me every day of my life. She walked away in a huff. I said, You know, pal, I couldn’t have handled it that way. I would have said, ‘You know, lady, go—’ Anyway, I thought that was tremendous. 

I’ve seen him go through lots of things. Joan [Kennedy], I knew her. Ted [Kennedy Jr.] and his cancer. I was at the funeral of John, [Kennedy] Jr. He was a dear friend of mine. I first met him in Wyoming in ’78 at a ranch working for John Perry Barlow, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Yes, I’ve traveled in evil circles! I said to John Perry, who was my campaign manager, Who are these kids at the table? He said, They’re just friends. I went around the table and I said, And what’s your name? None gave their last name, and finally Ann jabbed me and said, Knock it off, Al. Don’t you know what this ranch is? Well, it was young folks like Pete Rozelle’s son and Jack Kennedy’s son. They were all out riding the range and herding cows in anonymity—a new life for them, a wonderful life with John Perry Barlow, the romanticist of the ages, and original cyberspace dissident. 

John Kennedy later asked me to be the Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard. Ted called and said, You’re here, and they’re loving you here at Harvard—be the Director! I said, Well, I’m loving it too, because Ted would come to the class, and I’d bring John Kenneth Galbraith in very year, a wise, witty, wonderful man. He would get up and say, Simpson and I don’t see eye-to-eye on anything until we stand up. He was 6′8″ and I’m 6′7″. Then he’d just tear into Republicans and dot-com-ers. God, it was fun. I diverted there—what was I talking about?

You were talking about John F. Kennedy, Jr.

Ted called and said the board met—that’s [John] Culver and [Kenneth] Duberstein and young John, and others—and they said, John’s thrown your name in. When you’re at Harvard, you can do both. You can teach your class and still be the Director of the Institute. Then John called and said, Would you do that? I said, Hell, I couldn’t administer my way out of a paper sack. I don’t know anything about that. He said, Well, you’ve got a great deputy, Cathy McLaughlin, and you’ve got an assistant. 

And John would usually come to the governing board meetings. I’ll never forget one night, a beautiful night in Boston. John comes in late. He was wearing a wool cap. He often wore a winter cap so people might not recognize him, because he was so recognizable. Ted said, Where have you been? He said, I got a late start. It was such a beautiful night I just flew the coast. I just came right out of New York and flew the lights of the coast, and here I am. Ted said, I’ve told you not to do that. You’re not an instrument pilot and you know damn well that just irritates me. Ted was the father of all of them and I remember Ted bristled that night. He said, Dammit, John, you can’t do that and you stop it. John responded: Well, I checked the weather and it was clear. It’s beautiful and I loved it—the night, the stars, the moon. 

I’ve thought back on that a hundred times. I was at John’s funeral. I called Ted and I said, Ted, Jesus, this is the sickest tragedy. What do you want me to be saying? I don’t usually do that with Ted. What do you want me to do? They’re calling me; they know of our relationship. He said sadly, Tell them he was just a lovely, lovely man and so was his dear wife and her sister—and they’re gone. 

My brother in-law parked his plane next to John Kennedy’s plane and also flies that same route to Martha’s Vineyard because he had a house in Martha’s Vineyard, and he knew instantly what had happened. He said, I can’t tell you the number of times where you can see the runway coming in and you just drop down and you can’t see anything. You couldn’t even tell that there was fog there.

Senator Warren Rudman is a great friend and pilot. Rudman said, I know what happened here, loss of orientation. 

I’ve never been to a funeral service like that. Did you ever see the program of it? Did you ever hear about it?

Yes, we’ve heard about it.

Ted spoke and he really—he cracked. He talked about how his brother Jack and this beautiful nephew never lived long enough to savor full life. The mother of the two sisters also spoke and her voice never cracked at all. It was beautiful. She spoke in a powerful, modulated tone, which was just so impressive as we thought she would be overcome. Then the full choir sang, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. I tell you, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, not one. It wasn’t like any funeral you will ever go to—or I’ll ever go to—where they go to celebrate the person’s life. There wasn’t any celebration of those three people’s lives. It was so sad and tragic—and yet so moving—from opening choir to ending timpani. 

Ken Galbraith and I were wandering around afterwards like a couple of cranes in the swamp. It’s very hot, and we’ve got to walk from the church to some other place where they had the reception. Galbraith was by then a great chum. We’d go to his house or the I.O.P. [Institute of Politics] and have drinks and just laugh and talk about some of the goofy nut Republicans and some of his socialist bastard friends. As we walked he grabbed my arm and said, God, how hot is it here? I said, I don’t know, it’s pretty hot. He said, Where the hell is the reception? I said, I don’t know. It looks like two blocks or so away. Anyway, they have the route blocked off. He had on a wool suit. He said, I think this damn thing I bought in 1929. I feel a little faint so grab my arm. I said, Let’s sit down on one of those house steps. He said, If you think that I’m going to sit down on a step while these bastards in the media are taking pictures and think I’m dying! 

Here I’ve got John Kenneth on one side and I’m walking, I mean, I’ve got him tight, and he’s 6′8″ and I’m 6′7″. It’s an easy walk but he’s 89 or something then. I said, What’s the first thing you’re thinking of? He said, A glass of wine. We walk in the door and Ted is right there. What does he do? He left everybody else and went right to Ken and me and said, What do you want right now, Ken? He said, Get me a glass of wine, dammit, I’m dying! Ted already had it in his hand, a glass of chilled chardonnay. He said, Here you are, old friend, and Ken said, Thank God, Teddy, I knew you were always there. Typical Ted Kennedy—a lot of thoughtfulness, caring, courtesy, a lot of amazing traits to him that people have never seen. 

That was the most extraordinary day. I have the program, I made some notes. I’ve never been to anything like it. It was just overwhelming. All of us were overwhelmed. It was a great honor to be there and Galbraith of course was a marvelous man. 

He initially disliked Secretary of State Dean Rusk. I’ll throw this one in, you’ll love it. He thought Rusk was an idiot. Many shared that view. So while Ken was Ambassador to India and he often wrote to President Jack Kennedy, his former student. Expecting Kennedy’s visit to India, Ken cabled: Jack, we’re waiting. I’ve got an elephant for you and Jackie to ride. You can kick it like you would a Republican. I’ve seen some of these documents in the Kennedy Library. Kitty [Catherine Galbraith] and I are waiting for you. Rusk then sent a cable. It read: Dear Ambassador Galbraith, You will no longer communicate with POTUS [President of the United States] personally in any way. You will communicate only through the State Department by appropriate cable, signed Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The wire back is in the library. It says, Dear Secretary Rusk, Communicating through the State Department is like fornicating through a mattress, signed Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith. 

So you see I had too much fun in this league. He’d laugh and tell that story. He was earthy. Kitty was dear. I’ve tried to call her. They haven’t had his service yet but they’re going to have something. I was at his 90th birthday and do you know who the speaker was? Well, of course Ted was there too, but the speaker was William Buckley, who was his best pal. They skied together. They traveled the world together, the Buckleys and the Galbraiths. I mean, that’s what life should be about in this place and that’s what happened with them.

This is another one of my horror stories. It’s not exactly self-serving, but boy, I went underground. Ted didn’t have anything to do with the way I’d get my foot in my mouth but I did make the crack in front of Saddam Hussein personally in Iraq before he pulled the trigger on Kuwait (Gulf War). I said, If this is a baby food factory or for insecticides or whatever, then let the world’s journalists and media in here because they all want to win the Pulitzer Prize and they’d be glad to come, and the media really tore me up. 

Then with Peter Arnett, I just said, I think he’s a sympathizer. Thank God I didn’t say it on television. I said it at an off-the-record club lunch. I knew it was all on the record because everything I’ve ever done I’ve always felt should be, but they tore me to bits. They said, How could you do this, to a patriot reporting from Baghdad (while being censored by Hussein)? I also said that his wife’s father was a North Vietnamese and that’s why he had access to the North Vietnamese. I had been told this by a journalist, about this relationship, and so I blabbed it on. His son wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, about how sad he was to think that a U.S. Senator could savage his mother and his grandfather. I’m telling you it was powerful and it stung like a frozen lash with me, not in hostility. I thought, Oh Jesus, my own kid would write such an op-ed for me. 

So I sat down and wrote an apology, which was very difficult for me. My wife says I’m not good at it and I’m not. I will give informative comments but almost never an apology! But I wrote it and it was good and they published it all. This is the part you should hear. That morning it went in the New York Times, Dan Rather called. He said, I wish I was able to do that. Isn’t that interesting that you see how it all played out. I knew him and his wife, Jean [Rather]. He said, That’s all. I wish I were able to do that. I commend you. Those were the little vignettes that you piece together as you observed his last travails. 

Then, of course, Peter Arnett goes down in flames during the war—I mean really down in flames. He was fired and then went to work for a commie paper in London or something, because he said he hoped the American people would read and heed his remarks and rebel against the war. Anyway, NBC or whoever—everybody cut him off. Do you remember? His remarks were, We Americans deserve this, or some such. 

What do I get? I get calls from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media, all of them saying, Did you hear about Peter Arnett? He had to resign his position and he’s moved to a liberal paper or an anti-war sheet over in London. I said, Yes I’ve heard. They then asked: Well, what do you have to say about that? You’ve had a previous big dust-up with him. I said, What did he say himself? Would you give me his quote? They read it back: He said he felt he’d hurt his reputation badly and he felt badly about it and that it had been hard— I said, Just strike his name and put my name in there; that’s all I want to say. They urged: Surely you’ll want to say more. I said, Say, aren’t you the same people who were tearing my ass off when he was the toast of the town  (Gulf War-Desert Storm) and now you want me to stick it in his ear while he’s dying? What kind of bastards are you? The guy from the New York Times hung up. I went on, What kind of bastards are you who would call, trying to get me to say the nastiest things about the guy you had hoisted up on your shoulders in glory ten years ago? You wonder why America is tired of you people? The Washington Post guy stayed on but the New York Times guy—they did have some later fair comment but the guy had hung up. I said, Well, Merry Christmas to you, too! 

I’ve had a lot of those. On the plane after the Thomas hearings, one week later, I’m headed for New York to give a speech. An erudite, very attractive woman with her Louis Vuitton bag and highly-tailored suit stopped me as I got off the plane and said, Are you Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming? I said, Yes, I am. She said, I think you’re a perfect asshole. I said, Well, Merry Christmas to you, too! Ted handles that stuff that way too. Both of us create lightning, but we deflect lightning with humor. We both have lightning rods grounded in humor.

Did you ever take any heat back home in Wyoming from your constituents who may have been aware that you were either a friend of Senator Kennedy’s, or certainly willing to work with him on various pieces of legislation? I can imagine that that was not particularly popular in some quarters of your state. How would you deal with that?

I would just say I liked him—and I didn’t have to agree with him or his lifestyle or what he does. That’s not for me, I’m not the judge. Nobody handed me the God license, so I look on him as a friend and colleague and a person who I work with on legislating. Any time I ever shook hands with a guy on an issue, it came to pass, so why should I not work with Ted Kennedy? Well, you know, Chappaquiddick, and about the nephew and those charges. People catalog it; they know every foible of the family. Ted and I laugh about that. In fact, we were at a forum one night and I said, Think of it. I walk down the street with Kennedy in Massachusetts and people say, ‘God, what are you doing with that guy?’ Or you’re out here in Wyoming and you’re with me and they say something! 

Ted and I first met in Svilars Bar & Dining Room in Hudson, Wyoming, when he was helping his brother run for President. I forgot to tell you that. He rode in the rodeo too. That was 1960, Cheyenne, I think. We were 29 years old, or 28. Mike Svilar and I went to law school together. Svilar is a Democrat and one of my dearest pals. He was head of the Democratic Party in Fremont County and here’s Ted Kennedy campaigning for his brother. We had a couple of drinks. He talked about the rodeo. I think he rode for seven seconds or something. He got bucked off. You have to ride eight seconds and I think he did seven, which is great!

I thought he reached tenderfoot category, whatever the hell that is.

You know, he’s powerfully built and he didn’t have the back problems then. Anyway, I remember that. We’ve laughed about that. I don’t think he remembered me from that but I remember him. I was just a young practicing lawyer. 

Anyway, ask any other poignant questions.

The purpose of this interview is that 50 to 100 years from now somebody could read this transcript and get your take on Senator Kennedy and what kind of Senator he was, what kind of person he was. The last question I’d like to ask you is there’s a lot of this junk that sort of sticks to his reputation, fair or not. In particular, if you were to listen to talk radio for instance and get your impression of Ted Kennedy from talk radio, you’re going to see a very critical picture, to say the least. What would you say to somebody 50 to 100 years from now about this man that sort of cuts through the National Enquirer take on Ted Kennedy?

Well, you would have to say that he was a master legislator. I think he wanted to be President. He really wanted to run for President. Don’t forget that in ’80 in March, he led [Jimmy] Carter by 30 or 40 points in the polls. Does everybody remember that? Then Roger Mudd—they attribute that interview with him to his decline, but I know that the real decline—and I can’t say it in any specificity—was that things had changed so with regard to the intrusiveness of the media, that whatever had happened in Chappaquiddick would have been pried open like a bank vault with an explosive, even though the court records said that this record was forever sealed—even though I don’t know how it reads but I know that it was sealed. Sealed, my fanny! There’s no such thing now if you’re running for the President of the United States, and I think that he just didn’t want to go through all that anguish—and there’s surely nothing wrong with that.

They should have sealed my records. I was on federal probation for two years for shooting mailboxes—and I once slugged a cop in Laramie and they threw me in the clink. I was going with Ann at the time and I called her and I said, Ann, I need $300 bail. She said, I’m working my way through college, you better do jail for the night. I’m not putting up any money. I thought, I think I should marry this woman. This woman has real brains. P.S. I did!

Anyway, with Ted, there was just no need to go through that. When he realized finally that regardless of what happened or what the pollsters said or whether he could have made it, he knew he would never be President of the United States. Once he decided that, he then decided that he would be the best damned legislator that he could be, and he is that today. If you took a blind poll and took the rabid Republicans out of it and the raw partisanship, to ask who is the best legislator on the floor of the U.S. Senate, it would be Ted Kennedy. That’s a legacy. I’m talking about all of the Senators. I’m talking about Robert Byrd too. Byrd is a master parliamentarian and a master of the procedures, but as far as the hearings, amendments, staff, floor management, five or six days on the floor—and this is what he and I did, you know, five-day stuff on the Senate floor. You don’t get a lot of rest and your mind is really working, doing a bill. 

Sometimes he’d get up during one of those debates and a little fatigue would set in. I’d say, Is the Senator of Massachusetts being testy? No, no, the Senator from Wyoming has misread. One time it was terrible. He was out there on the floor and it was eight o’clock at night. I’m presiding in the Chair. I’ve got to go to some thing that evening, and he’s launched, I mean he’s launched. He’s pacing. There’s nobody there, and I said to the Senate Page, Would you please take this to Senator Kennedy and tell him to read it immediately? It’s urgent. The Page went down and handed it to him. The note said, Dear Ted, I’m sitting here on my ass listening to you babble. You’re standing there, but when you’re walking, you don’t realize your fly is open. I think you need to get back to the podium and end all this! He looked up and said, I think the Chair is trying to tell me something. I said, The Chair is trying to tell you something desperately. 

But he mastered it all. He’s helped new members on both sides of the aisle. I don’t know who is on his staff now but I’m sure that it’s probably more partisan than ever before. His passions are unalloyed and will never be dimmed, whatever they may be. He’s had a bit of trouble with [George W.] Bush. He asked me to call Bush and tell how we worked together, and I did. They got together and enjoyed each other and they had hotdogs! I knew it was all happening. Ted said, I like the guy. But then he didn’t get enough money on the No Child Left Behind bill and he said to me, Call him and tell him if he’ll just put in this other—whatever—billion. I did but it didn’t come, and Ted felt that he had not kept his word about the needed money. He kept his word on the basic bill and what they crafted. That really irritated Ted.

Then, George [Herbert Walker Bush] The First gives Ted that nice award down there at Texas A & M and Barbara [Bush] nails him and says, George gives you a beautiful award and you just keep cutting our son to bits. By God, Ted, there’s something twisted about that. Ted cocked his head on that one!

But when you press that certain button on him, there’s a passion that comes over him that is far and away from the stuff the staff has prepared. One time I said, If I ever see you getting off that staff paper and get launched, I’m going to stop you. He did one day and I just rose and said, I ask special privilege that he chair recognize me for the purpose of…. He came over to my desk and said, What the hell are you doing? I said, You’re just getting into bullshit now and, don’t forget, I’m not doing a racist, nativist bill here; this is the immigration bill. You know everything in it because I’ve told you everything in it so don’t start the old huddled masses and the Statue of Liberty speech. That’s when he went right up in the gallery, because he saw Ann up there. He went to her and said, Is Al pissed? And she said, Yes, he is. He cocked his head and came back down to the Senate floor and said, Well, I knew you were irritated, but when I found out Ann was pissed, I decided maybe I don’t have to do that again! Whatta guy! Whatta friend!

Well, thank you Senator, this has been great.