Washington – Bill Pickle is in charge of guarding one of the top terrorist targets in the world – the U.S. Capitol.
He also runs a hair salon.
And when he goes home, he gets on a plane and flies to Denver, to get to his house near Parker.
Pickle is the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms, a job with a title that traces back centuries to British Parliament, and at first essentially involved fetching firewood to keep the chamber warm.
Now, with 900 people and everything from parking lots and the Senate computer network to counterterrorism under his command, he’s essentially the “chief operating officer” of Congress’ upper chamber.
“The job’s evolved over 200 years,” explained Pickle, 55, a restless man, who looks the part of an executive with well-tailored suits and well-coiffed hair.
“When telephones came about, somebody had to be in charge of them. They put them under the sergeant-at-arms; when television came about, when computers came about …”
And when someone decided the Senate needed a hair salon.
He says he gets back to Denver about one week each month, and his wife, Jeannie, comes to Washington for a week a month. When he’s back, he likes to ski, hunt for American Indian artifacts and spend time on the ranch near Colorado Springs that’s been in his wife’s family for years.
A significant portion of Pickle’s life story shifts back and forth from the Washington area to Colorado and California.
He was born in Roanoke, Va., and served as an infantryman in Vietnam, where he was wounded and earned a Bronze star, seven Air Medals and a Purple Heart. Returning from Vietnam in 1969, he was sent to Fort Carson, where he met Jeannie.
After a year in Colorado, he moved to Washington, worked as a policeman and attended American University. He returned to be a Lakewood policeman for a year and a half before he was hired by the Secret Service in 1975.
He cut his teeth as an agent in Sacramento, Calif., where one of his assignments was to interview Charles Manson every 90 days. Manson often wrote threatening letters to the president, and the service worried he could inspire his followers to make good on the threats.
Pickle worked for 30 years in the Secret Service, protecting Republican and Democratic presidents. One of his last major assignments was running the protection detail for Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election.
Pickle was in the car on election night as Gore prepared to give the concession speech he later scrapped. He says many press and supposedly firsthand accounts have incorrectly described a chaotic ride to the hall where Gore expected to give his speech.
“It was a very quiet ride,” Pickle said. “He never knew the numbers were changing. We were taking no calls.”
And he was standing by later during the notoriously terse exchange between Gore and now-President Bush about the Florida results, in which Gore snapped, “Your little brother (Gov. Jeb Bush) is not the ultimate authority on this.”
After retiring from the Secret Service, he was called on by a fellow Secret Service veteran to help start up the Transportation Security Administration and overhaul airline security in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. He was sent to Denver to oversee the “federalizing” of security at Denver International Airport.
“Anytime you get a chance at a job in Colorado, you jump at it,” he said.
After nearly a year of nailing down security at DIA, he got in the running to be the new head of the Secret Service. As he started to realize he wouldn’t be the top pick, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., called him to see if he wanted to be the Senate sergeant-at-arms.
“I didn’t really know a lot about the job,” Pickle said.
He inherited a Capitol that was steadily being fortified, with access to “The People’s House” eroding. Before Pickle took over, an anthrax mail attack disrupted business at the Capitol for three months. Under Pickle’s watch, a ricin scare in February 2004 shut down Senate office buildings for only a week.
He’s closed a street near Senate office buildings, and installed “bollards” – strong steel poles that keep vehicles away from buildings – around the Capitol and offices.
“We constantly exercise and train for what some people would say is inevitably going to be an attack on this institution,” Pickle said.
The Capitol Hill limelight turned on him last year when he was called on to investigate how Democratic strategy memos on judicial appointments fell into the hands of Republicans and newspapers. Pickle has turned over his findings to federal prosecutors.
In Colorado, his wife’s family has owned the working ranch east of Colorado Springs for years. His children, growing up, spent summers there. And he skis every chance he gets, though his schussing was disrupted by a fall in 2004 that broke his leg in two places and dislocated his ankle.
He figures he’s climbed about half to two-thirds of Colorado’s “fourteeners.”
“It’s a great life we have, because we’re able to be back here in the nation’s capital, which is truly the most powerful city in the world,” he said. “And now I get to go home to the most beautiful state in the country.”
Staff writer Mike Soraghan can be reached at 202-662-8730 or msoraghan@denverpost.com.
