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Email
editor@wesupportthevets.com
Today from the Editor's desk
Tuesday, October 02, 2007 The V.A. Needs another General Omar Bradley, perhaps not Nickleson? When Jim Nickleson steps into the office of Secretary of the V.A. replacing Anthony Principi he will have a big job in front of him. We’re not absolutely convinced that this guy from the planning tables of the RNC and being the Ambassador to the Vatican is the guy for the job. At this time in history we need another General Omar Bradley. The administrator of the Veterans
Administration following the end of WW II was a retired Brigadier
General named Frank Hines. He has been in that capacity an amazing
twenty –two years and perhaps the first governmental example of the
Peter Principle. Not important if you do not know what that is, just
suffice to say that he was a miserable failure and inept in his job.
When General Bradley came to the Veterans
Administration, it was under attack by journalists and politicians. The
assault had been launched just after the end of the war by two
journalists; Albert Deutsch and Al Maisel who worked for a Every politician in the country knew that with the onset of the mobilization, the veteran constituency would swell to four times its pre world war size- nearly 20 million men and women- 43% of the adult male population. In every family, every community-and every congressional district-the voice of the veteran would be a formidable political force and the national veteran’s organizations more powerful than ever. Both Democrats and Republican politicians were gearing up to court the "veteran vote" with unreserved zeal. From July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945, a staggering 2,868 bills pertaining to increased or broadened veterans benefits had been introduced in the Congress. The most important of these, notably the GI Bill of Rights, had vigorously lobbied for by organized veterans group.
By the Time Bradley was sworn in as
administrator, the Veterans Administration, with some 65,000 employees
at the time had grown to be the largest independent agency within the
government. The VA operated some 97 hospital facilities in 45 states
and the District of
The VA was unprepared to cope with this on rushing horde. Owing to the previous Brigadier General's Hines antiquated management policies -control of the VA had been tightly centralized in Washington. Every operation, no matter how large or small, was administered by the Washington staff, which had grown hidebound and old. They were simply overloaded. Bradley remarked in his autobiography that his most vivid memory of his first days in the office of the VA was the site of unopened campus mail bags stacked to the ceiling in the hallways; hundreds of thousands of letters from veterans and dependents unanswered-- many tens of thousands of these letters were not answered for months. Another one of the problems that Bradley faced was communications with the Veteran population. There were many medical problems to solve, but none more pressing than a shortage of VA doctors. The hospitals could not care properly for their existing population of veterans, let alone the oncoming horde of World War II patients who would soon be transferred to them for military hospitals. There were then 2300 full-time doctors in the VA, a phone 1700 were on "loan" from the Army and Navy, almost all of the recent graduates of wartime military college programs. They were obligated to serve out two years of their duty. Since these temporaries would be leaving VA as their duty tour’s expired. In reality, they only had about 500 full-time careers, VA doctors. The realistic fact was that they had an immediate need for over seven times that number-3600 and future years perhaps 7000. These were but a few of the accomplishments, that General Omar Bradley is known for completing and no less than two years. The same two journalists that had been so critical of the administration now, in a "Reader's Digest" article entitled "Veterans medicine; second to none" wrote in two-years General Omar N. Bradley has transformed the medical service of the Veterans Administration from a national scandal to a model establishment ." I wonder if I should send a copy of the General’s autobiography “A general’s Life” to Secretary-appointee Jack Nickleson? Bill Gast USN (RET) DAV Editor, We support the Vets
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