Word: johnson
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Typical of Louis A. Johnson is the fact that when he was mustered out of the army in 1919, (he was a captain, 80th Infantry Division, A.E.F.), he had the nerve to write a letter to the then Chief of Staff, detailing what was wrong with the army and what to do about it. Fresh out of the University of Virginia (where he was champion wrestler and orator) he hung out his law shingle at Clarksburg, W. Va., in 1912. By 1917, he was Democratic floor leader of the State's House of Delegates, and was thinking of running...
Having entrenched himself with the "King Makers'' of the American Legion he became National Commander in 1932-33. That turned out to be his great piece of fortune. For in 1933 Franklin Roosevelt's Economy Act decreed a cut in veterans' benefits, and temperate Louis Johnson saved the President from insult when he appeared at the Legion convention in Chicago. In 1936, still alive to the main chance, Louis Johnson organized the Veterans' Division of the Democratic National Committee, got his reward within the twelvemonth...
Into the vacant Assistant Secretaryship in June 1937 stepped Legionnaire Johnson. In the newspapers began to appear paragraphs like the following: ". . . It seems . . . that the new Assistant Secretary of War . . . is going to be promoted to Secretary. . . . Another ex-Commander [of the Legion] Paul V. McNutt, will soon be ex-High Commissioner of the Philippines. . . . The other ex-Commander and present War Secretary, Harry Woodring, would not be stepping downward if he stepped into Mr. McNutt's Philippine boots, even if they're pinching the incumbent...
...excellent talking terms at the White House, Louis Johnson had a neat if ambiguous understanding with Franklin Roosevelt. From the day that he took over his pleasant office in the State, War & Navy Building next door to No. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Department's No. 2 Man has virtually been No. 1 because he was promised that he would be very shortly. When army officers stationed in Washington say "The Secretary" they usually mean not Secretary of War Woodring but Assistant Secretary Johnson...
...keeping with his prime tenet-that the General Staff should not find him a pliant Secretary-Louis Johnson takes an impish delight in upsetting army dogma and army officers. Though it is distinctly outside his province as Assistant Secretary, he once decided that too many enlisted men were serving as dog-robbers (officers' servants). A series of telegrams and cables querying every army post confirmed this conclusion, resulted in a marked reduction in the number on dog-duty. At present Mr. Johnson (himself a Lieutenant Colonel of Reserves) is concerned with the army's overgrown list of colonels...