Jackson Eaton (D-PA-15)
Jackson Eaton
Campaign links: Jackson Eaton (D-PA-15)
Joseph Jackson Eaton
Jackson Eaton Congressional Candidate Pennsylvania District 15
Biography of Jackson Eaton from Jackson Eaton for Congress
Jackson Eaton was born and raised here in the Lehigh Valley. He served our country as a captain in the U.S. Army where he was an Airborne and Ranger School graduate. He worked as an attorney in private practice and served on investigations for the House, Senate, and the Presidential Commission on the BP Oil Spill. Jackson Eaton has the energy, experience and integrity to make the changes we need in Congress.
Jackson’s family members have been Lehigh Valley residents for generations and he has lived most of his life in Allentown. Like his father and grandmother, he attended the city’s public schools and graduated from William Allen High School.
At an early age Jackson demonstrated a concern about good government and civic responsibility. He founded a successful student campaign to elect top-flight school board members and was recognized by the Allentown Police Department for helping to chase down and apprehend a purse-snatcher on the city streets.
Following a military tradition in his family—his grandfathers fought in the Second World War and his mother served in Army Intelligence—Jackson decided to enroll in Officer Training as a college student at Princeton University. Jackson was one of only a handful of students in his class to be commissioned as a military officer upon graduation.
Jackson sought out challenging training in the military. He graduated from U.S. Army Airborne School, Air Assault School, and Ranger School. As a scout and tank platoon leader in the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Jackson was responsible for the discipline, training and readiness of his soldiers. More than any tactical lessons, those experiences taught him that the critical factor to success was a will to persevere despite the odds.
After graduating from New York University Law School, Jackson worked in Washington, D.C. for several years, first with a private law firm, then in positions that gave him firsthand insights into the workings of the federal government. He served on the oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, chaired by Sen. Jay D. Rockefeller of West Virginia. There, he investigated nationally-known retailers who used aggressive marketing tactics to take advantage of unsuspecting consumers shopping on the internet. He later served on the bipartisan Surveys & Investigations staff of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations. Most recently he served as Counsel on the bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, which produced the definitive report on the largest oil spill in American History.
Like most law students, Jackson graduated with a significant debt and took a position with a large Washington, D.C. law firm to pay off student loans. He began working in 2007. In 2008, the Great Recession hit. In 2009, along with other attorneys at the law firm, many of his classmates, and many, many other Americans, he was laid off. In some ways, Jackson counted himself fortunate. He was able to continue legal practice and pursue his interest in service with challenging projects undertaken by Congressional Committees and the Presidential Oil Spill Commission. But he never imagined after having worked so hard in high school, college, law school and the military that he would find himself facing an uncertain economy for so long, and that Congress would prove so dysfunctional in addressing the crisis.
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