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His law partner, Philip Steptoe, a shy, scholarly wizard on briefs, was the office legal eagle. Hustling Louis Johnson made friends and drummed up business. Between them, they made an unbeatable combination. The firm of Steptoe & Johnson began branching out—to Charleston and on to Washington.
Exalted Ruler. The junior partner of Steptoe & Johnson, a joiner of joiners, was soon president of the Clarksburg Rotary, Exalted Ruler of the Elks, a rising leader of the American Legion.
Johnson would have liked to run for political office, too, but each time, after casing the situation, he decided that the moment was not quite ripe. The trouble was that the mine workers' union was all-powerful in West Virginia politics, and to the union boys, Louis was just another rich lawyer. "Like a good woman's virtue," one politico explained recently, "Louis' conservatism is taken for granted in West Virginia."
Conservatism in politics never held a man back in the American Legion. And in the Legion, Louis Johnson reached the top in 1932, taking over in the unsettled era after the bonus march on Washington.
Gratitude. Franklin Roosevelt, assuming office as the economy President (a phase that did not last long), ordered a 25% cut in pensions for disabled veterans. When a big Legion rally in Long Beach, Calif, started to threaten a second march on Washington, National Commander Johnson hustled to the scene, talked down the first angry boos which greeted him, and persuaded the Legionnaires not to do it.
Four years later, Franklin Roosevelt remembered helpful Louis Johnson, the loyal Legionnaire, with an appointment as Assistant Secretary of War.
It was a period when a good many Americans resented the Legion's big-stick and big-talk policy. The 75th Congress, faithfully mirroring the mood of the U.S. public, dug itself in behind a bulwark of neutrality legislation and arms embargoes, and hoped that Europe's troubles would disappear if no one noticed them. The Secretary of War, Harry Woodring of Kansas (a "sincere pacifist," Louis Johnson later called him), felt the same way.
Franklin Roosevelt wanted, to the horror of most New Dealers, a bigger Army & Navy.
Armed with Roosevelt's assurance that he would soon be moving into Woodring's job, Assistant Secretary Johnson began acting like the No. 1 man in fact. Isolationist Harry Woodring resisted every move toward U.S. intervention abroad, and Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson fought him at every turn. With the connivance of the President, Johnson tabled important matters that passed through his office until Woodring left town; then he rammed them through "by direction of the Acting Secretary of War." He let it be known openly in the War Department that he was "only in the Assistant Secretary's office temporarily, on the way up."
Of the brash, determined Assistant Secretary, who badgered him so mercilessly through those turbulent years, bewildered, bedeviled Harry Woodring recalled last week: "Many men are overambitious. Louis is overambitious. It is sort of like being oversexed."