Senator Alan Simpson

Delinquency History: Served two years on probation for destruction of federal property (vandalized mailboxes); shoplifting; arrested for breaching the peace as a young adult.

At the kick-off rally for his 1978 campaign for the U.S. Senate in Jackson, Alan Simpson spied a familiar face in the sea of people near the stage. Simpson waded into the crowd to meet his old friend, J.B. Mosley, and asked him to join his family and campaign workers around the podium. Modestly, Mosley declined the offer. "This is your day," he told the would-be Senator. But Simpson could not let the moment pass. After his introductory remarks, Simpson told the crowd there was someone present who had a great influence in his life and had helped him to make it to this moment: his probation officer, J.B. Mosley. The crowd was surprised, but also quite moved. "I tell you, I think I got every vote in that building," Simpson says with a chuckle.

The ex-Senator and one-time assistant Republican Leader of the upper chamber fondly remembers the caring relationship he shared with Mosley during a time when Simpson describes himself as being "on the edge."

When he was 17, after he pled guilty to charges of destroying federal property by shooting mailboxes, Simpson met Mosley while serving out a two-year term on probation. Today, Simpson says this second chance helped him to become an attorney and to go on to politics, capped off by serving 18 years in the U.S. Senate. At 67, Simpson continues his commitment to public life as Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and also teaching at the graduate level. Discussing America's juvenile justice system, Simpson is as enigmatic as he was in the Senate. While he is disappointed with "do gooders" in the juvenile justice system who are often "snowed" by "cunning juveniles," he is also critical of the demonization of youth by the media, and of the mandatory sentences that are often robbing kids of the kind of second chances he had.

"Anybody in our society—unless they are totally out to lunch—can understand that a guy of 22 or 25 is not the same guy of 17," Simpson says. "I don't know what they [the juvenile justice system] are doing right, but it is sure a lot more right than what they were doing wrong."

Alan Simpson, whose father Milward L. Simpson was governor and U.S. Senator from Wyoming, grew up in a loving, stable home in Cody, Wyoming. His mother, Lorna, once told Time magazine that "Alan did have a temper," and she recalled punishing him for throwing rocks at other kids.

"My mother was near tears half the time while I was growing up, because of my always being on the edge," Simpson says.

He and his friends graduated from throwing rocks to playing with 22 caliber rifles at a nearby ravine: The boys would fire off rounds at each other, bouncing bullets off the rocks, just to see how close they could get without actually hitting each other. The game, Simpson says with remarkable understatement, "is rather hazardous, actually!" To play, Simpson and his friends sometimes stole 22 rifle shells from local hardware stores. Later, when he and his friends were older, Simpson returned money to one of the stores he shoplifted, cutting and pasting a message on the envelope in newspaper letters which read, "we did wrong, here's your bucks."

When he was 17, he and four of his friends loaded into his family's second car, an old Nash and drove off to shoot at mailboxes on a dusty rural road. "I was a crack shot," says Simpson. He hit a number of targets, blasting holes in the mail. But he says one of his less accurate friends killed a cow hidden in a willow patch. They also shot up a road grader.

When the postmaster asked around, he began hearing descriptions of five kids making much noise, exploding fire crackers and firing off shots, all from a vehicle resembling Milward Simpson's car. Alan Simpson soon confessed, and he and the four other boys pled guilty to destroying federal property in the Cheyenne federal court. As it was their first known offense, the judge sentenced them to 2 years probation and ordered them to make restitution for the mailboxes, the road grader and the dead cow. Mosley was assigned to monitor Simpson and the other miscreants.

"Anybody in society, unless they are totally out to lunch, can understand that a guy of 22 or 25 is not the guy of 17."

Simpson remembers the distressing looks his parents gave each other. "They must have thought, 'Where have we failed'," he says. "My mother was looking at my father, my father at my mother. My father cried too, and I do remember that because I hadn't seen him do that before," Simpson says.

For the next two years, J.B. Mosley visited Simpson and his friends whenever he made the trip into Cody, even seeing them at home, in the pool hall, at school and on the basketball court. Simpson remembers Mosley being a wonderful guy who would sit down with him, asking him how he was doing in school, keeping tabs on Simpson's success on the high school basketball team and his scholastic work.

"I didn't know him intimately, but I did know that he cared about me," says Simpson. "He paid attention to me, and I liked him very much. He didn't preach...he listened."

Everyone in town knew about the incident and jokes about it followed him through high school. Kids would call into a local radio station request line to have the old country western song, "There's a hole in my mailbox," dedicated to Simpson. But the attention he and his friends received from his probation officer made a difference in his and his friends' lives. Of the four other mailbox shooters, Simpson says one became a school teacher and principal, another became a school administrator, and one worked in the space industry. "Another died in his youth, but every one of the others went on to a successful life," he says.

"They would call and say, 'I didn't think you had the guts to come back to this town after what you did around here.' And I would say, 'Well, everybody gets a second chance.'"

Simpson was the only one of the group to get into trouble again as an adult. When he was 21, he got into a shoving match with a drunken friend in Laramie, Wyoming. A police officer, who mistook the shoving for a fight, cracked Simpson's head with a billy club and Simpson lashed back. "A real mistake!" Simpson states dryly. The police made him spend the night in jail. He and the friend were charged with breaching the peace, and he was released on a $300 fine. His parents found out, and he again earned the anguish of his father.

"The older you get, the more you realize their disappointment is so real," Simpson says. "But you also come to realize your own attitude is stupefying, and arrogant, and cocky, and a miserable way to live."

From then on, Simpson went straight. He graduated with a bachelors degree in 1954 and married his girlfriend, Ann Schroll, now his wife of 45 years. After a stint in the army in Germany, he attained a law degree from the University of Wyoming in 1958. He worked in his dad's law firm for 18 years in Cody. As he and Ann raised three children (Bill and Colin became lawyers and Susan is a commercial art dealer), Simpson was often appointed by the courts to represent juvenile delinquents and was frequently approached by parents who knew his history with the law. One of the kids whose case he handled was an 18-year-old who stole a car and drove it to Seattle. The man later became Simpson's chief of staff.

"Some were surprised when I was back to Cody to practice," he says. "They would see me and say, 'I didn't think you had the guts to come back to this town after all you did around here.' And I would just smile and say, 'Well, everybody gets a second chance.'"

When he worked juvenile cases, Simpson believed in tough love, and tough talk. "I'd go right for the jugular. 'Look you big baby, I'm going to tell you about the real world, and if you don't like it, you'll end up being as important as someone's spit in the breeze.' Sometimes, the only way to get their attention is to use profanity, whether you are at Harvard University or in the jail with a client in Cody."

After nearly 13 years in the Wyoming legislature rising from majority whip to majority leader to speaker "pro-tem," Simpson took his father's Senate seat in Washington. Over his 18 years in the capitol, he held the second highest leadership position within the Senate GOP, while staking out some rather libertarian positions. He is a strong defender of abortion rights, for sensible immigration policies and supports the "decriminalization" ("not legalization," he says) of marijuana.

His thoughts on the criminal justice system are harder to peg. He strongly believes in giving kids a second chance and that one's youthful crimes should be put in their proper perspective by thoughtful people. But he also supports the court's discretion in making juvenile records widely available.

"I say, expose more of the ornery little law-breakers," he says. "It sure got my attention when I knew people knew about me!"

Still, he acknowledges how that system leads to abuse. He is pained by the stories of people who smoked marijuana as kids, and then, 15 years later, are barred from joining the FBI and law enforcement. In 1991, when Simpson earned the ire of women's groups for his strident, some would say belligerent, questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, the specter of his past delinquency hung over him.

"Remember, she wasn't charging him with sexual harassment—she just wanted us to be aware of his behavior," Simpson says. "So, suddenly, from eight years back comes a guided missile aimed at Thomas' brain," he says.

The ex-Senator seems to have an unwavering sense that most kids will rise past their youthful indiscretions, despite the 'do gooders.'

"I just bristled, because, I thought of the fact that I had been on federal probation for two years—so many years ago," he says. "I thought, this is violently unfair. This reminds me of what could have happened to me."

His stormy relationship with the media also influences his view of the way reporters cover juvenile crime.

"The media will always portray the barbarism and the viciousness of the worst ones," he says. "The 11-year-old who assaults and kills the little girl in a back lot....yes, that's shocking enough but then you find out, well, it might not have been the 11-year-old at all. The high drama of the 24-hour news cycle have many of them portrayed as monsters."

And yet, the ex-Senator seems to have an unwavering sense that most kids will—and do—rise past their youthful indiscretions, despite the "do gooders." He recalls the story of a kid who came before him while he was a city attorney. Along with a group of other children, the boy assaulted a Spanish teacher on the streets of Cody, hurling broken bottles and racial slurs at him. Simpson recalls that the parents of all the boys could not believe that their "little dears" could have committed such a crude and cruel act. Always the iconoclast and believing that brutal honesty is the best policy, Simpson put the teacher up on the stand, "to tell every word and describe every action."

"Oh, God, it was wonderful to look at these doting parents and see them all squirm," he says, again with a chuckle. "They couldn't believe their children would do that. Those boys all went on to various degrees of success. All did well. Now, there was a lot of stuff to their rehabilitation, and I'm not a shrink, but those who do turn it all around with the great help of others—I say God bless 'em!"