Furious at the media's treatment of Reagan during the Iran-Contra controversy in March of 1987, a fiery Simpson told a group of reporters just before the president's news conference: "You're asking him things because you know he's off-balance and you'd like to stick it in his kazoo!" (Simpson loved using the word 'kazoo' or, as he sometimes pronounced it 'gazoo,' and entitled his memoirs "Right in the Old Gazoo: What I Learned In A Lifetime of Meeting the Press.")
Simpson could also be humble when he was wrong. In 1991, he denounced CNN correspondent Peter Arnett an Iraqi "sympathizer" and charging that during the Vietnam War, the reporter had a brother in-law "who was active in the Viet Cong."