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TOM CARHART: Jim, the Republican Party, of which you are chairman, experienced one of the most unusual presidential elections in history, this past November, but this interview is about you as a West Point graduate, and we will avoid any overt political messages. Fair enough? |
JIM NICHOLSON: Absolutely. |
Let’s talk about your life before West Point. Tell us something about your childhood. |
My childhood included an awful lot of unhappiness because of my father’s alcoholism. It was the source of a lot of personal pain. Later in life, we used to look back and say that our dad was chronically drunk and we were chronically poor. And we were. But we were poor in an environment in which the people around us were not poor, so that meant that we were often embarrassed by our circumstances. |
But when you went to school and so forth, to other kids, weren’t you just another kid? |
I wish it were so, but it wasn’t. During the ’50s, the economy was booming, while we got by on little more than handouts. I can remember going to school with mismatched shoes, and kids can really be mean. |
I know you grew up in rural Iowa. Were you on a family farm? |
When my parents got married, they lived on a big family farm. But then there were consecutive droughts, and my father lost the family farm and everything else. For most of my childhood, we lived in old tenant houses attached to barns, the houses that male migrant farmers lived in before automated machinery took over. There was no electricity and no indoor plumbing. |
