The Veterans of Vietnam: A Profile of Jim Nicholson, Secretary of Veterans Affairs

By Paul Rodriguez

Jim Nicholson’s approach to his job as Secretary of Veterans Affairs is one of “holistic care” that some might contend springs not only from advances in medical sciences and therapeutic techniques but, so too, from life’s experiences centered on hard work, studying hard and praying hard.

“This job is one of enormous responsibility and I think about that a lot,” says Nicholson, a former ambassador to the Vatican and head of the Republican National Committee between 1997 and 2000. Nominated in 2005, he’s now in charge of a vast bureaucracy serving nearly 7.5 million veterans with state of the art technology and care.

“The paradigm now is holistic where, for example, we now involve the family immediately in the recovery and sometimes even bring them back to, for example, Walter Reed within a day or less when a member is hurt in the war,” Nicholson notes. “We put them up, detail people to help them in their trauma and they are there to help the service member heal. And this is new!” he proudly smiles.

Without denigrating his predecessors, Nicholson says “I’m so impressed by the genuine compassion and warmth of the care givers now. I visit hospitals all over the country; like in Tampa where we treat multiple traumas and you’d think these service members were [the medical staffs’] own children.”

Indeed, the mission Nicholson brings to the VA is part of a life-long mission to overcome huge obstacles and never giving up – either on one’s self or on the opportunities America provides for all her people. And this strength of conviction can be directly traced to his mother and his rough and tumble upbringing as an itinerant farmer boy growing up in rural Iowa.

“I do think often how lucky I’ve been from humble beginnings, such a miserable alcoholic father and hard times where we lived in a tenant house out on a farm with no electricity or plumbing and didn’t have enough food,” he recalls honestly.

But because of his mother, “who had extraordinary faith and would lead us in prayer and maintain a sense of dignity even though we were rag-a-muffins and people would tend to make fun of us,” he says he learned a lot.

“We didn’t have a Christmas tree when I was growing up,” other than the one the family would take down on Christmas Eve from the one-room schoolhouse he attended along with his six brothers and sisters.

When he was about 10 years old, Nicholson recounts, his family moved to Strubble, Iowa, a town of 99 people and where his father later would be institutionalized for alcoholism at a place called Cherokee when young Jim was a freshman in high school and his older brother was finishing his own freshman year at West Point.

It was at the end of the older brothers’ freshmen year that life began to turn around for the younger Nicholson. “My brother was home and we didn’t have enough money for him to go back,” Nicholson remembers. “And I still remember that Memorial Day weekend when it rained eight inches. That flooded a lot of low lands and bridges used by the Great Northern Railroad.

“I was 15 then and weighed maybe 120 pounds. I knew the railroad had to hire people to rebuild track and so I went over to talk with the boss, a big man named George Kahlonis. [Laughing as he finishes the narrative, Nicholson says] he took a look at me and said, ‘I don’t think so son.’ So I went off and focused and prayed and came back. I said, ‘I need a job’ and he asked me if I had a Social Security number. I told him yes and he agreed to give me a try. Well, I ended up working the whole summer!