A plain-spoken, sometimes cantankerous lawmaker, he balanced his conservative views with moderate stands on abortion rights, gay marriage and immigration reform.
Alan K. Simpson, a plain-spoken former Republican senator from Wyoming who championed immigration reforms and conservative candidates for the Supreme Court, and fought running battles with women’s groups, environmentalists and the press, died on Friday in Cody, Wyo. He was 93.
He had been struggling to recover from a broken hip that he sustained in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a group of museums of which he was a board member for 56 years. The statement said his recovery had been hindered by complications of frostbite to his left foot about five years ago that required the amputation of his left leg below the knee.
Folksy, irreverent and sometimes cantankerous, a gaunt, 6-foot, 7-inch beanpole with a ranch hand’s soft drawl, Mr. Simpson was a three-term senator, from 1979 to 1997, who school children and tourists in the gallery sometimes took for a Mr. Smith-goes-to-Washington oddball, especially during his occasional rants against “bug-eyed zealots” and “super-greenies,” as he liked to call environmental lobbyists.
The son of a former Wyoming governor and United States senator, Mr. Simpson as a teenager had been a hell-raiser. He and some friends shot up mailboxes, killed a cow with rifles and set fire to an abandoned federal property. He punched a police officer who arrested him. While no one had been seriously hurt, he faced prison. But he was put on probation for two years and paid restitution.
“I was a monster,” he acknowledged in a 2009 friend-of-the-court brief for the United States Supreme Court, pleading for a second chance, like the one he had been given six decades earlier, for two juveniles accused of crimes. With the help of a probation officer, he said, he redeemed his life.
Mr. Simpson went on to earn undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Wyoming, served two years in the U.S. Army, was a city attorney in Cody and, entering politics, served 13 years in the State Legislature before being elected to the Senate seat once held by his father. Among his best friends were Dick Cheney and President George H.W. Bush, who considered him to be his vice-presidential running-mate in 1988. (Mr. Bush chose Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana instead.)