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Page 1 of 4  Rep. Norm Dicks, '63, '68. Photo by Tyler Mallory.
Thirty years of on-the-job training in the United States House of Representatives, serving a large, coastal slice of Washington state, have contributed to Dicks’ knack for commanding attention. But one gets the sense that a good deal of his appeal is innate. Two decades ago, when he was still a relatively junior congressman, Dicks insinuated his way into a role in the arms-control talks between the United States and the Soviet Union, becoming the eyes and ears of the House at the Geneva summit in 1985.
His résumé is impressive in other respects: UW athlete-scholar in the 1960s, a top U.S. Senate aide at age 28, winner of 15 re-election campaigns, a player in some of the major national security debates of the previous century. It’s no wonder that the new speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, calls Dicks “a man of keen intellect and great enthusiasm.”
Dicks and his wife, Suzie, a petite physical contradiction to Dicks, have been close friends of Al and Tipper Gore since the day both men came to Congress in 1977. Gore recently told one reporter that he might have tapped Dicks for secretary of defense if he had prevailed in the 2000 presidential election.
In spite of those milestones, it has, at times, been a frustrating career. The timing for a Senate run was never quite right, and a seemingly perpetual Republican majority over the past dozen years kept him from securing a chairman’s gavel. At age 66, he gave serious thought to retiring.
 Rep. Norm Dicks and President Bill Clinton are all smiles during an October 2006 campaign appearance for Sen. Maria Cantwell. Photo courtesy of the Office of Norm Dicks.
His promotion to the top job on the interior panel presents his best opportunity to shine. Dicks wants to resuscitate national strategy on global warming, boost spending for national parks and put protection of Puget Sound on par with that for the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay.
Dicks is also the second most senior Democrat on the defense spending subcommittee, after powerhouse John P. Murtha. This not only gives him a voice in policy towards Iraq, but also puts him in a position to oversee the state’s substantial military.
Republicans still control the White House, and Democrats have only a one-seat advantage in the Senate, so there are limits to what the new majority party in Congress can accomplish. But with Democrats holding the federal purse strings, Dicks foresees significant changes, with more money going to traditional Democratic priorities—such as health care and the environment—and less to income tax cuts, which has been a focus of the Bush administration.
“Our problem is going to be, we have to be realistic,” Dicks says. “We have a $300 billion deficit. We’re not going to be able to do everything.”
Dicks represents a nature-lover’s paradise—the lush coast of the Olympic Peninsula, the home of primeval evergreen forests, snow-glazed mountains and gorgeous Pacific beaches. But Dicks himself is a product of another side of the 6th Congressional District, one characterized by hard-working, plain-Jane towns dependent on military bases and shipping ports.
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