Louis Arthur Johnson (January 10, 1891April 24, 1966) was an American politician and attorney who served as the second United States secretary of defense from 1949 to 1950. He was the assistant secretary of war from 1937 to 1940 and the 15th national commander of the American Legion from 1932 to 1933.
Early life Johnson was born on January 10, 1891, in Roanoke, Virginia, to Marcellus and Catherine (née Arthur) Johnson. He earned a law degree from the University of Virginia. After graduation, he practiced law in Clarksburg, West Virginia; his firm, Steptoe & Johnson eventually opened offices in Charleston, West Virginia, and Washington, DC Elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1916, he served as majority floor leader and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. During World War I, Johnson saw action as an Army captain in France, where he compiled a long report to the War Department on Army management and materiel requisition practices. After the war, he resumed his law practice, was active in veterans' affairs, and served as National Commander of the American Legion.
Assistant Secretary of War, 1937–40 As Assistant Secretary of War from 1937 to 1940, Johnson advocated universal military education and training, rearmament, and expansion of military aviation. He feuded with the isolationist Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring over military aid to Britain. In mid-1940, after Woodring had resigned and the fall of France had revealed the precarious state of the nation's defenses, Franklin D. Roosevelt bypassed Johnson for the position of Secretary of War, instead choosing Henry Stimson.McFarland, Keith D. and Roll, David L., Louis Johnson and the Arming of America: The Roosevelt and Truman Years, Indiana University Press (2005) , "Master of the Pentagon", Time, 6 June 1949 Article
Having aspired to the position of Secretary, which he felt he had earned, Johnson felt betrayed by Roosevelt."Master of the Pentagon", Time, 6 June 1949 During the war, Johnson had no major responsibilities within the government involving military matters, but he agreed to participate in the Roosevelt administration's war mobilization of US industry. Later, he served as Alien Property custodian for the American operations of the German chemical giant I. G. Farben. In 1942, Johnson briefly served as the president's personal representative in India, until an intestinal illness"Master of the Pentagon", Time, 6 June 1949: Reportedly, that was a case of Delhi belly, a common gastrointestinal illness suffered by newcomers to India. caused him to resign his post and return to the United States.
Secretary of Defense
In the 1948 presidential campaign, Johnson was chief fundraiser for President Harry S. Truman's election campaign; the money raised by Johnson proved crucial to Truman's come-from-behind victory in the November elections. As a regular visitor to the White House, Johnson not only continued to express an interest in defense matters, but actively campaigned for the post of secretary of defense. He was also a staunch supporter of Truman's desire to 'hold the line' on defense spending. After a series of conflicts with Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal over defense budget cutbacks, Truman asked for Forrestal's resignation, replacing him with Johnson early in 1949.
Defense budget reductions Secretary Johnson entered office sharing the president's commitment to achieve further military unification and to drastically reduce budget expenditures on defense in favor of other government programs.LaFeber 1993. As one of Truman's staunchest political supporters, Johnson was viewed by Truman as the ideal candidate to push Truman's defense budget economization policy in the face of continued resistance by the Department of Defense and the armed forces.
According to historian Walter LaFeber, Truman was known to approach defense budgetary requests in the abstract, without regard to defense response requirements in the event of conflicts with potential enemies. Truman would begin by subtracting from total receipts the amount needed for domestic needs and recurrent operating costs, with any surplus going to the defense budget for that year. From the beginning, Johnson and Truman assumed that the United States' monopoly on the atomic bomb was adequate protection against any and all external threats. Johnson's unwillingness to budget conventional readiness needs for the Army, Navy or Marine Corps soon caused fierce controversies within the upper ranks of the armed forces.Blair 2003. From fiscal year 1948 onwards, the defense department budget was capped at the amount set in FY 1947 ($14.4 billion), and was progressively reduced in succeeding fiscal years until January 1950, when it was reduced yet again to $13.5 billion.Hofmann, George F., Tanks and the Korean War: A case study of unpreparedness, Armor, Vol. 109 Issue 5 (Sep/Oct 2000), pp. 7-12
Johnson was also an advocate of defense unification, which he saw as a means to further reduce defense spending requirements. At a press conference the day after he took office, Johnson promised a drastic cut in the number of National Military Establishment boards, committees, and commissions, and added, "To the limit the present law allows, I promise you there will be unification as rapidly as the efficiency of the service permits it." Later, in one of his frequent speeches on unification, Johnson stated that "this nation can no longer tolerate the autonomous conduct of any single service ... a waste of the resources of America in spendthrift defense is an invitation to disaster for America."
To ensure congressional approval of proposed DOD budget requests, both Truman and Johnson demanded public acquiescence, if not outright support, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and other military department commanders when making public statements or testifying before Congress.Davis, Vincent, The Post-imperial Presidency, New Brunswick: Transaction Press (1980), p. 102 In 1948, then-Army Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley stated that "the Army of 1948 could not fight its way out of a paper bag."Dunford, J.F. (Lt. Col.) The Strategic Implications of Defensive Operations at the Pusan Perimeter July–September 1950, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College (7 April 1999) p. 6Bradley, Omar, and Blair, Clay, A General's Life: An AutoBiography by General of the Army Omar N. Bradley, p. 474Blair, Clay, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953, Naval Institute Press (2003), p. 290Hofmann, George F., pp. 7-12 Yet the following year, after becoming Chairman of the JCS under Johnson, Bradley reversed course and publicly supported Johnson's decisions, telling Congress that he would be doing a "disservice to the nation" if he asked for a larger military force.Bradley, Omar, and Blair, Clay, A General's Life: An AutoBiography by General of the Army Omar N. Bradley, pp. 486-487Davis, Vincent, p. 102 General J. Lawton Collins went even further when testifying before a House Appropriations committee, stating that Truman administration reductions in Army force levels made it more effective.Davis, Vincent, The Post-imperial Presidency, New Brunswick: Transaction Press (1980), p. 102: In reality, reductions in Army budget requests from 1948 onwards caused not only reductions in troop levels, but also forced an 80 percent reduction in equipment requirements, thus deferring Army equipment modernization plans for the next three years.
Johnson promptly began proposing mothballing or scrapping much of the Navy's conventional surface fleet and amphibious forces. Shortly after his appointment, Johnson had a conversation with Admiral Richard L. Conolly that revealed his attitudes towards the US Navy and US Marine Corps and any need for non-nuclear forces:
Admiral, the Navy is on its way out. There's no reason for having a Navy and a Marine Corps. General Bradley tells me amphibious operations are a thing of the past. We'll never have any more amphibious operations. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the Air Force can do anything the Navy can do, so that does away with the Navy.Krulak 1999.
Both Truman and Johnson extended their opposition to the Navy in their treatment of the US Marine Corps. Truman had a well-known dislike of the Marines from his Army service in World War I and would say in August 1950, "The Marine Corps is the Navy's police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's." Johnson exploited this ill feeling of Truman's to reduce or eliminate many Marine Corps' budget requests. Johnson attempted to eliminate Marine Corps aviation by transferring its air assets to other services and proposed to progressively eliminate the Marine Corps altogether in a series of budget cutbacks and decommissioning of forces. Johnson ordered that the highest-ranking Marine officer, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, be deleted from the official roll of chiefs of service branches authorized a driver and limousine, and for whom a special gun salute was prescribed on ceremonial occasions. He further specified that there would be no future official recognition or celebration of the Marine Corps birthday. More ominously, Johnson barred the Commandant of the Marine Corps from attending JCS meetings in his role of chief of service (including meetings involving Marine readiness or deployments).
Johnson welcomed the passage of the 1949 amendments to the National Security Act of 1947, telling an American Legion convention that he was "happy to report ... that 80 percent of the problems that beset unification immediately disappeared when the President signed the bill increasing the authority and the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense." Believing that the amendments would help him achieve additional budget cuts, Johnson estimated that one year after their passage the Defense Department would be achieving savings at the rate of $1 billion per year (he later claimed that he had attained this goal). One of his slogans was that the taxpayer was going to get "a dollar's worth of defense for every dollar spent" by the Pentagon, an approach that Truman approved.
Johnson did not limit his budget-cutting campaign to the Navy or Marine Corps. Johnson ordered nearly all of the Army inventories of surplus World War II tanks, communications equipment, personnel carriers and small arms be scrapped or sold off to other countries instead of being shipped to ordnance and storage depots for reconditioning and storage. Johnson even resisted budget requests for reserve stockpiles of small arms and anti-tank ammunition, anti-tank weapons, or amphibious infantry training for the Army's newly acquired ex-Navy landing craft, which promptly began to deteriorate from lack of proper maintenance. Though the United States Air Force (USAF) faced fewer program cancellations and cuts, Johnson refused USAF requests for a doubling of active air groups until the invasion of Korea and favored reduction of tactical air force readiness in favor of the strategic nuclear bomber forces.Lane 2003.McFarland, p. 203Summers 1996.Wolk 2000.
Revolt of the Admirals