Personal History: Is it possible for Democrats and Republicans in Washington to be close friends?

This morning I phoned my old friend Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator.

Alan and I see eye-to-eye on nothing. He’s a conservative Republican, I’m a progressive Democrat. He’s a fiscal hawk, I don’t worry about the national debt. He thinks Biden has gone too far, I don’t think he’s gone far enough.

We don’t see eye-to-eye literally, either. He’s 6 foot 7 and I’m 4 feet 11.

But here’s the thing: I love the guy.

We struck up a friendship during my years as Secretary of Labor. It began at one of those interminable Washington receptions. He introduced himself and began to talk, but the crowd was so noisy -- and he’s so tall -- I couldn’t hear a word. So I stood on a chair, where our heads were about level.

We soon discovered we had one big thing in common: our senses of humor. I found him hilarious. Apparently the feeling was mutual.

We planned to get together for lunch, but my staff at the Labor Department was against it. “You haven’t had lunch with most Democratic senators. If you have lunch with Simpson they’ll be insulted,” they warned.

His staff was against our lunch, too (he later told me). They said it was inappropriate for a senior Republican senator from one of the most conservative states in America to have lunch with the most liberal member of Clinton’s cabinet. “Your constituents in Wyoming will have a fit,” they warned.

So we snuck out for lunch. Neither of our staffs knew where we’d gone.

It was the start of a beautiful relationship.

This morning we talked about our families and traded a few amusing anecdotes, as we usually do.

We also talked about what’s happened to American politics. “They hate each other,” he said, of the current crop of Democrats and Republicans in Washington.

Simpson is 90 years old now, but his mind is as sharp as ever. He reminded me that we briefly did a television show together on WGBH in Boston, where we discussed the issues of the week — mixing humor and politics. The show never got much of a following but we had a wonderful time.

We called it “The Long and the Short of It.”

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