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Conclusion
- Indiana University Press
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359 Conclusion Louis Johnson was an instrumentof confrontation. Playing him with consummate skill, President Roosevelt encouraged Johnson to confront and run roughshod over his isolationist secretary of war. He deployed Johnson to¤ght against and overcome the army’s resistance to sales of the latest warplanes to the Allies. FDR set up his assistant secretary of war to take the heat from the New Dealers and the isolationists while Johnson and selected members of the Roosevelt administration, with the support of their commander in chief, began laying the foundation of the military-industrial complex on the eve of World War II. As President Truman’s secretary of defense, Johnson was not just an instrument of confrontation, he was a battering ram. Lacking Roosevelt’s ¤nesse and talent for evasion, deception, and deniability, Truman used Johnson to help him ram through massive and arguably reckless reductions in the defense budget . Once the austere targets were established, Truman left Johnson with the job of ¤ghting the admirals and the generals to implement the draconian cuts. And perhaps most daunting of all, Truman ordered Johnson to ¤nish and win the battle which had driven his predecessor, quite literally, over the edge— uni¤cation of the army, the air force, the navy, and the marines under the authority and control of the secretary of defense. The ways in which Roosevelt and Truman used Johnson as an instrument to confront and carry out extremely unpopular initiatives add to our understanding about how these two very different presidents thought and acted. But the fact that Johnson allowed himself to be used—to help Roosevelt prepare for war and then to help Truman vastly downsize the military—reveals even more about Louis Johnson. Johnson was driven by politics, power, and personal ambition but rarely by principle. Based on his years as Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of war and as the presidents’ personal representative to India and his entire background from World War I supply of¤cer to American Legion commander, it can be argued 360 louis johnson and the arming of america quite persuasively that Johnson’s bedrock principle, the place where he would always draw the line, was military preparedness. Yet a decade later, when he was ordered by Truman to slash the defense budget and downsize the military, he went at it with a vengeance. In doing so, he used statistics and his skills as a lawyer and orator to convince himself and the American public that the nation’s military preparedness was not being compromised. However, as his generals and admirals had warned him, and as he had to have known in his heart, he sacri¤ced the principle of military preparedness if indeed it ever was one of his core convictions. Undoubtedly, in doing Harry Truman’s bidding, Johnson was acting out of a sense of loyalty to his commander in chief, just as he remained loyal to FDR even after he was “ousted” from his administration. But loyalty to his president could not have been one of Johnson’s unshakeable principles, because there were many occasions during the Truman years when Johnson consorted, if not conspired, with Truman’s adversaries, including Senator Taft, General MacArthur , and members of the China Lobby. With regard to the China Lobby and Johnson’s support of the Chinese Nationalist regime, there is considerable evidence suggesting that Johnson felt deeply and sincerely that the United States should defend and support Formosa . Indeed, the fact that he was willing to risk his reputation and standing with the president on that tense Sunday night at Blair House when he insisted on putting Formosa ahead of the defense of South Korea indicates that support of Formosa was a matter of principle to him. Despite this evidence, however, it would be erroneous to conclude that Louis Johnson would ever allow support of Formosa to take precedence over his political and personal ambitions should they come into con¶ict. In the spring of 1950, with Senator Joseph McCarthy tapping a wellspring of resentment about the “loss of China” and the spread of communism, it was simply good politics for Johnson to advocate support of Formosa, to criticize Dean Acheson’s State Department, and to align himself with General Douglas MacArthur, who regarded Formosa as an unsinkable aircraft carrier. In addition, defense of Formosa would help Johnson achieve his greatest ambition, the presidency, since it would play well to the Red Scare in the United States and would be attractive to moderate Democrats...