WASHINGTON -- Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson was tending to grievously injured military personnel in Iraq when he was summoned to Washington to interview for a job he barely knew existed. He didn't see a way to get there.
"I thought this was it -- this is where the road stops," he told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal this month.
Instead, Jackson managed to catch a ride on a transport plane that steered the Levelland, Texas, native toward some of the loftiest corridors of power.
Jackson's journey has wound through the White House and across the globe, treating the blisters, stomach ailments and more of the past three presidents and their retinues. This week, Jackson is heading toward the Senate for a hearing Wednesday on his nomination to be President Donald Trump's next secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Now it's time for Washington to examine Jackson, widely described as a reassuring presence in the most pressurized of atmospheres. But the 50-year-old apolitical Navy man has no experience leading a massive bureaucracy.
"He's got a great bedside manner you feel comfortable with," said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. "But it doesn't mean he will be a good leader of the VA."
But, in an interview with the Lubbock newspaper, Jackson defended his qualifications for the VA job. "I've been in leadership school for 23 years now. ... I've been confronted on a day-to-day basis with life and death decisions."
Jackson has been an unknown on policy and it's not even clear he voted in the 2016 presidential election.
The only inkling of where he stands came when a few of the Democratic senators who met Jackson this past week reported that the nominee is promising not to privatize the VA. Shulkin's resistance to partial privatization, through expansion of a program letting veterans choose private care at public expense, compounded his lapses in travel spending and may have been the driving force in his dismissal. Where Jackson stands on enlarging the VA Choice program has yet to be teased out.
Jackson at first wanted to be a marine biologist, not a doctor. He graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in marine biology in 1991.
He didn't plan on entering the Navy, either. But Jackson needed money for medical school, and he learned of a program in which he could be a Navy diver and a doctor, according to the newspaper. The White House was another unplanned destination.
Since President George W. Bush hired him in 2006, Jackson has cut a widely admired path among some of the nation's fiercest partisans -- on intimate terms. Everyone who's recently worked in a president's inner circle, it seems, has a Ronny Jackson story.
"At no point was he down or stressed out," said Jen Psaki, who was President Barack Obama's communications director. She recalled Jackson reassuring her when she was pregnant that "if anything happens, we're good. ... I remember telling my husband that there's no safer place I could be than the White House."
Information for this article was contributed by Calvin Woodard, Hope Yen, Stephen Braun, Jake Pearson, Monika Mathur and Randy Herschaft of The Associated Press.
A Section on 04/24/2018