Bush Nominates New Veterans Secretary
President Bush said that retired Army Lt. Gen. James Peake, chosen on Tuesday to head the embattled Veterans Affairs Department, will work to end months-long delays facing hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops trying to get treatment and benefits.
Peake, 63, a medical doctor who has spent 40 years in military medicine, retired from the Army in 2004 after being at the helm in several medical posts, including four years as the U.S. Army surgeon general.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats sent Bush a letter on Monday, complaining about delays.
Bush set up a presidential commission chaired by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and Donna Shalala, former Health and Human Services secretary during the Clinton administration.
The panel urged broad changes to veterans' care that would boost benefits to family members caring for the wounded, establish an easy-to-use Web site for medical records and overhaul the way disability pay is awarded. It also recommended stronger partnerships between the Pentagon and the private sector to boost treatment for traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Anthony Principi, a former veterans affairs secretary, said Peake should not be expected to oversee reforms of an outdated veterans benefits system all by himself. "Clearly, it does need to be reformed," Principi told White House reporters after Bush announced his pick. "It's going to take a lot of consensus building among the veterans groups and the Congress."
Peake currently is chief medical director and chief operating officer of QTC Management Inc., which provides government-outsourced occupational health, injury and disability examination services.
He is the son of a medical services officer and an Army nurse and he graduated in 1966 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He served in Vietnam as a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division and was awarded the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.
Peake was wounded twice in battle and received his acceptance letter to Cornell University Medical College while he was recovering in a hospital. As a medical officer and combat veteran who was wounded in action, Peake understands the view from "both sides of the hospital bed — the doctor's and the patient's," Bush said.
During his decades-long career in military medicine, Peake was surgeon general of the U.S. Army, commanding 50,000 medical personnel and 187 army medical facilities across the world. He also was commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Department Center and School.
From 2004 to 2006, Peake was executive vice president and chief operating officer of Project HOPE, a nonprofit international health foundation. While at HOPE, he helped organize civilian volunteers aboard the Navy hospital ship Mercy as it responded to the tsunami in Indonesia and aboard the hospital ship Comfort during its response to Hurricane Katrina.
