Pocket profile: Robert Dillon

Washington Examiner: What got you interested in energy policy?

Dillon: I was a reporter for 19 years and I covered a lot of different things, but one of the things I started to do at the end was energy because Alaska is an energy production state. Energy is a big issue in Alaska. … Energy was something I lived with every day and I had an interest in covering Alaska’s efforts to build a natural gas pipeline and one of the first things I worked on as a photographer was the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Examiner: How did you end up on Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s staff?

Dillon: I had covered her father when he was governor and, as a reporter for the Tundra Drums, I covered Lisa Murkowski when she ran for re-election. We had spent some time on the campaign trail together, which in rural Alaska means lots of time on boats and airplanes, and we spent quite a bit of time together. When I first came to D.C., it was hard to let go of a lot of Alaskan things, so one of the first things I did was start freelancing for my old paper … with a weekly column for the Fairbanks Daily News. The pool of Alaskan reporters in D.C. was very small, it’s smaller now, but Sen. Ted Stevens would regularly call me and ask me to come over. Inevitably he called me one time to come over when I was in jeans and he said, “You’re an Alaskan! I don’t care, come over.”

When Sen. Murkowski took over the energy committee in 2008, her office reached out and asked if I’d be interested and at first I said no. In my heart, I’m a journalist and being a reporter is a point of pride. We’re a tribe and we understand each other, we all feel a sense of public service. Among the reporters I was close with and came up with, I felt being a reporter was like having the keys to the kingdom and always allowed you to be on the front row of history. … But, then I thought about it for a while and I thought, you know it’s an opportunity to see something that’s important to our country and to history from the other side so I did it.

Examiner: When you lived in Alaska you were a dog musher, how’d you get into that?

Dillon: I was interviewing an Iditarod musher by the name of John Baker and got interested in dog mushing and he took me on a couple runs. I got interested in it and people started giving me their old sled dogs and, like anything I do, I just went overboard. I started buying dogs and pretty soon I had the bloodline of a champion, if not for my skills. Eventually, I had 36 dogs and we ran of bunch of races, middle distance and sprint races.

Examiner: What was the most interesting thing about dog mushing?

Dillon: The most interesting thing was the complete separation from civilization. Finding yourself out in the middle of the wilderness with no sounds but the dogs moving and the wolves howling, no street lights, pitch black in the middle of nowhere and you realize for the first time in your life the only person you have to depend on for survival is yourself. A lot of people would think they’d find themselves coming up short in those moments, but I found out a lot of things about myself and the internal workings of my mind during those experiences. … I was left alone with myself and I had the realization that I could only depend on myself. I don’t think we, in this modern world, have those experiences very often.

This story has been updated to correct where Dillon worked covering Murkowski’s campaign.