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He moved into a handsome ten-room mansion in Clarksburg, puttered with a valuable collection of jade in his off-hours and tended two hutches of black & white squirrels. The two Johnson girls grew up and moved away.
He was out of the news, but not out of action. And he was careful to keep in touch with his fellow Legionnaire, Harry Truman. Last fall, when Truman looked around for a man to raise money for his campaign, his eye fell on Louis Johnson.
The Prize. This time there was to be no slip-up when it came to the payoff. Louis Johnson raised the money for the campaign, when the Democratic Party treasury was at its lowest. It was a great political service and Fund Raiser Johnson knew what he wanted. Harry Truman made a few halfhearted attempts to fob him off with offers of the sub-Cabinet Army secretaryship or the Court of St. James's. But Louis Johnson stood fast. The weekend after his inauguration, President Harry Truman let Louis Johnson know that the prize was his at last.
In Johnson's legal mind there seemed to be a slight, nagging doubt about the propriety of a shift from Democratic moneyman to Secretary of Defense. Not long ago he told a few friends of his talk with Harry Truman. "I told the President," Johnson explained, "that I felt I had disqualified myself for any federal appointment." But Forrestal and the President "insisted" and "I had no choice ... I accepted the position, tough as I knew it was going to be."
The Boss. It was-a humble-talking Louis Johnson who moved into Henry Stimson's old office and planted his big feet under a desk once used by Black Jack Pershing. "Golly, we need help," he told his well-wishers. "Please feel free to give me some advice, won't you?"
But Johnson was not a man to wait long, either for help or advice. By last week he had bulldozed his way through stubborn opponents and helpful advisers alike. He had already achieved something approaching mastery of the Pentagon, but it was an uneasy, strife-racked empire that he ruled.
It might yet turn out that his head-on tactics would bring the warring services together where James Forrestal's patient indecision had failed. But an end to service rivalries could never be reached by decree alone. With the Navy in open revolt last week, it was plainer than ever that real unification was also a state of mind: the services had to be convinced, not just told. By that definition, Louis Johnson's job had just begun.