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But what Louis Johnson ably accomplished in those years is history: building up the puny Army air arm, sending Army officers on a survey tour of 20,000 factories to prepare for war production, placing "educational" orders for war supplies, stumping the country preaching preparedness in more than 400 speeches.
The Thunderclap. All this time Harry Woodring hung on to his job, helped by Franklin Roosevelt's chronic reluctance to fire anyone. Not until early 1940 did the blowoff finally come. At the President's instructions, Johnson had begun shipping arms and munitions to beleaguered Britain, by arbitrarily declaring them unfit for U.S. use and thus legally available for export. Woodring refused to permit such goings-on. But Roosevelt insisted, and Woodring resigned in a letter so bitter that it has never been published in full.
Acting Secretary Louis Johnson was ready, willing and panting to ascend the vacant throne. One summer afternoon the telephone from the White House rang.
Mr. Roosevelt was sending up Louis Johnson's formal nomination for the job the next week. Everything was set.
Then came the thunderclap. On the eve of the 1940 Republican Convention, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Republican Henry L. Stimson to head the War Department, Republican Frank Knox to be Secretary of the Navy. The move had obvious political advantages to Roosevelt, but he was also mindful of Hitler's sweep through Europe, and wanted the services of Stimson and Knox. It would be hard to tell who was angrier: the Republicans or Johnson. But he was still nursing another ambition: to be Vice President. Two weeks after the first blow fell he was shunted aside again at the Democratic Convention in favor of Henry Wallace. The end had come.
Louis Johnson, the man who had never before known a major setback, poured out his hurt and humiliation in a note of resignation to his "Dear Mr. President." Then he went back to Clarksburg to brood on man's infidelity to man—and to commit his thoughts to paper in a book which still rests in the Johnson safe-deposit box.
The Waiting. Louis Johnson did not sulk for long. He simply learned another lesson: how to wait. He turned down a scattering of minor job offers from a conscience-smitten Franklin Roosevelt, still holding out for the War Department or nothing. Finally he took a wartime lend-lease mission to India, from which he shortly returned with Delhi belly and another manuscript which "can never be published," he says, "as long as Winston Churchill is still alive."
But mostly once-burned Louis Johnson waited his time, and turned back to the law. With the added luster of Johnson's Government service, Steptoe & Johnson was doing better & better. Its list of clients became a sort of Burke's Peerage of the nation's corporations: Consolidated Vultee, Montgomery Ward, New York Life Insurance. Louis Johnson himself became a director of Consolidated and the $50,000-a-year president of the General Dyestuff Corp., the sales agency for General Aniline & Film, which had been seized as a Nazi asset by the Alien Property Custodian.