Paul Johnson
By Bill Kauffman and Walter Montano

Paul Johnson is the most prolific and best-selling historian of our era. An English Catholic and former editor of the left-wing New Statesman, Johnson’s latest book—and perhaps his most controversial—is A History of the American People. It is every bit as long as previous weighty Johnson works (Modern Times, A History of the Jews, The Birth of the Modern) and filled with admiring portraits of such unlikely heroes as Richard Nixon, Norman Rockwell, and the robber barons. Johnson was interviewed at the American Enterprise Institute by tae’s Bill Kauffman and Walter Montano.

Postscript: Shortly after this interview, Paul Johnson’s name was dragged through the muck of Fleet Street when a 50-year-old female journalist went public with the kinky details of their 11-year sexual affair. The British press reveled in the news, for Johnson had repeatedly denounced adulterous politicians. tae was unable to reach him for his reaction, but the English papers quoted him admitting to "having an affair with an old girl," explaining, "We are all sinners. Well, I am. That’s why I go to church every day."

TAE: Do you worry that the heft of your volumes deters potential readers?

JOHNSON: It must. If anyone can tell me how to write books more shortly on huge subjects like that, I will listen with open ears. I was determined that this particular book should not be more than a thousand pages, and I honestly do not think that it could have been written in less. There’s no fat on this book; it’s all lean meat.

TAE: What advantages and disadvantages does a foreigner have in writing a history of another people?

JOHNSON: You don’t have hang-ups. You don’t have axes to grind. You have a certain freshness and perspective. Tocqueville, for instance, was able to see things which were true and obvious, or you’d think were obvious to everyone’s eyes, but Americans themselves hadn’t spotted because they were too near to it. The disadvantages are you’re liable to make mistakes, slips, and silly solecisms. In my preface, I say if there’s anything you think is wrong in this book, write to me, and I give my home address. I’ve already begun to receive letters. Americans are not slow to respond to every kind of invitation.

TAE: How can you write a history of the American people and never mention baseball?

JOHNSON: I just forgot. I was going to put it in. I can assure you, cross my heart, that by the time the next edition comes out, if it ever does, there will be baseball.

TAE: Schoolchildren learn American history as dates—1492, 1776—and mythical images—Pocahontas, the Boston Tea Party. Are there any overlooked dates or images that every schoolchild should memorize?

JOHNSON: It’s a pity that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are not better known to ordinary Americans. There’s an awful lot going on in those early colonies, like Pennsylvania and Maryland, which are not sufficiently known to Americans generally. Another thing I would like to see revised is the robber baron period. In the book, I endeavor to show that with one or two notorious exceptions, these were not robber barons. They were highly successful, highly intelligent businessmen who were anxious to make a lot of money for themselves but who were also anxious to benefit the American people by making goods which were luxuries into necessities, by bringing new products before the market or by reducing the cost of things that ordinary people needed, like sewing machines. Even in the case of John D. Rockefeller, who was denounced by the muckrakers, the net effect of the temporary quasi-monopoly he created was to reduce the cost of production of oil and its byproducts, particularly petroleum. Oil was one wing of the triptych, the other two being motor cars and rubber, which enabled ordinary Americans in the first two decades of the twentieth century to become owners of motor cars. For the first time in history, ordinary people became masters of their own transport and could really get around. The benefits of that revolution were absolutely colossal, and the way that the epoch between 1870 and the First World War is treated in American textbooks and in the general American consciousness does not do justice to these great entrepreneurs.

TAE: The robber barons seemed much larger than the politicians of their age. Are we seeing the same thing today, with the exaltation of people like Bill Gates or Ted Turner?

JOHNSON: I doubt it. Bill Gates doesn’t strike me. I saw him not long ago in one of the Italian lakes. A funny little man got out of a boat and came up the hotel steps and into the hotel. I said, "Who’s that?" and somebody said, "That’s Bill Gates." When you get a really great man, like the present Pope, when he comes into a room he fills it. You’re aware that there’s this big presence.

TAE: Which figures in our history never got enough recognition?

JOHNSON: There are two types. There is the kind of President who is not sufficiently recognized as a great man. My favorite is Theodore Roosevelt. You may say, well, he’s already well-known, but I think he’s due for a notch-up. Another favorite of mine is Calvin Coolidge. His reputation was absolutely destroyed in the 1930s by a lot of dubious quasi-history. I regard him as one of the best Presidents, and I can’t think of any man whose life would give to ordinary Americans more useful lessons than Calvin Coolidge. He was a depository of many very important virtues, which are perhaps not sufficiently prominent today.

TAE: The Presidents judged "great" in these polls are almost invariably the war-makers and state-builders, are they not?

JOHNSON: Yes. It’s difficult to say what is the most important thing a President should do. Obviously, he has to lead, particularly in wartime and great crises, like the Depression. But he has to do other things. He has to be representative. He has to be ordinary man writ large. Curiously enough, Warren Harding scored high on that: he was in many ways an ordinary American. He used to take a horse ride around Washington every Sunday. And people would see him in the streets, they’d raise their hats to him, and he would bow or raise his hat. He’d complete his circuit and go back to the White House. I think he was the last President who occasionally answered the door of the White House himself. There was a butler there, but sometimes the door would ring, he’d open it, and the chap would find the President there. He’d ask him in and say, "What have you got to say? What are you doing in Washington?" He was very nice. That kind of domestic presidency, the intimate presidency, just can’t exist anymore, but it did exist and not all that long ago either.

TAE: Why do you suppose the quality of men in public life has declined so dramatically? From Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson to Bill Clinton and Trent Lott is a fall into the abyss, isn’t it?

JOHNSON: I don’t agree with that. There were a lot of mediocre Presidents in the nineteenth century. Between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, with the possible exception of Grover Cleveland, they were not a very impressive lot. In my lifetime, you’ve had some very good Presidents: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower. Although the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon ended in failure, both of those men had elements of greatness in their characters. Jerry Ford didn’t have much of a chance. Jimmy Carter was a great disappointment, though even he did one great thing, the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel. To achieve one really important thing in a four-year term is not all bad.

In 1980, the reputation of the presidency was very low indeed, and Ronald Reagan came in and almost immediately began to raise it. He brought back the ceremony of the presidency, which had been deliberately or tacitly abandoned in the ’70s as the presidency fell into disrepute. That had an enormous psychological effect, not merely on the people within the White House, who felt once more that they were part of the great governmental institution, but among the ordinary public. The great thing about the United States presidency is it’s an institution with a life of its own and it can survive fallow years. It is always there waiting for a great man or woman to occupy it and raise it to the heights again.

TAE: The Civil War has been called the single tragic event that continues to give our republic resonance. Others now dismiss it as remote and irrelevant. Which is it?

JOHNSON: I call it the central event in American history. It was the means whereby the organic sin of slavery was exorcised and expiated. It was also the means whereby the unity of the United States was confirmed in the most emphatic manner. Thirdly, it was a way in which America, which before had been a republic, became a nation. It’s interesting that the word nation is very little used by the Founding Fathers; in fact, some of them actually objected to it. When people say it’s irrelevant, they can’t have studied it.

TAE: Was the war inevitable: the logical climax of the story that began at Plymouth and Jamestown?

JOHNSON: The avoidance of it became increasingly unlikely. But if you look at the voting by states, you could argue that if all the slave states had come out for secession, the Civil War would not have taken place because the North would have had to abandon as impossible the policy of coercing them. If fewer of the slave states had come out for secession, then the rebellion would have collapsed very quickly. But a sufficient number came out—this is the awfulness of history—to make the Civil War and make it continue for a long time.

TAE: Three hundred eighty years after John Rolfe’s experiments with Virginia tobacco, we’re witnessing the redemonization of the weed. What do you make of the current war on smoking?

JOHNSON: You’re going back to James the First, aren’t you? He hated tobacco. He coined the phrase "the weed," and he wrote a book about it. He hated his American colonists producing tobacco and sending it to England. Then he discovered that he could tax it at five percent and that made it acceptable. Tobacco was the only thing that Americans could produce that anybody in Europe wanted. They could produce economically and in bulk. It is arguable that without tobacco, either the American colonies would not have survived or they would not have expanded and populated themselves so quickly.

TAE: Are we seeing with tobacco another spasm of witch-burning?

JOHNSON: There’s always that tendency in America. You can point to European examples, too: we had a witch-burning craze, we had the anti-Catholic riots, but everything in America is bigger. One of the interesting things I’ve found in examining what actually happened at Salem is that the way in which these children were encouraged by their elders to invent stories is awfully similar to what is now called "recovered memory" among children who say they were subjected to child abuse. If Arthur Miller were rewriting The Crucible today, he would be tempted to draw the parallels not between Salem and McCarthyism but between Salem and child abuse.

TAE: After you get to 1941 in your book, America claims less and less of the text and foreign affairs take over. Does America become less American, less interesting, after 1941?

JOHNSON: It’s hard to say that. America was never an isolationist country, and what happened in the 1930s was very much an aberration. The internationalist tradition of America is much older and deeper.

TAE: But among the people there was a strong desire to stay out of European wars.

JOHNSON: The people were protected by two great oceans, and they were there with a huge job to do on the American continent. The outside world impinged very little on their lives. Gradually that has changed. You are not protected by the oceans: you have to move about and interest yourself in the world. I don’t think it’s made America a less interesting country. It’s made it a country which is not any longer imprisoned in an amber of its own but which is exposed to all kinds of influences. It’s also made it a country which itself is exerting huge influence on the world.

TAE: Is Clinton’s second term, mired in sexual scandal, what jfk’s second term would have looked like?

JOHNSON: My reading of the medical evidence is that jfk might not have lasted very long anyway. Kennedy would have run into all kinds of trouble, quite apart from the medical side. I don’t think that his way of life was sustainable, and I think the conspiracy, if you would like to call it that, to protect him, would not have endured very much longer. Some of these things would have come to light even in his own time. But it’s more likely that his medical condition would have deteriorated, and he might not even have run for a second term.

TAE: Has a less moral man ever occupied the Oval Office?

JOHNSON: Jack Kennedy did have a moral background. He was brought up as a traditional Irish-American Catholic; so he knew the difference between right and wrong. He may not have thought that those things applied to himself. If you are looking for someone who had no moral background, Mr. Clinton is much more the case because he never displays any evidence that he thinks seriously about spiritual matters or ethical points.

TAE: You write that one thing that drove English visitors crazy about Americans was our habit of spitting. Does that bother you?

JOHNSON: I suppose there is a certain amount of it in the South, but I’ve never really noticed it. Portugal was the worst spitting country I’d ever come across. What did strike me when I first came to the United States a half a century ago was in New York you saw working men in overalls smoking enormous cigars. I remember walking down Fifth Avenue, seeing a Catholic priest with a biretta smoking a big cigar, and I thought, my, this is a different country. You wouldn’t see that at all in England. Of course, you don’t see it in America now. That’s stopped. So there you are. That’s one case of American exceptionalism which hasn’t endured.

TAE: Some believe the liberal/conservative division no longer makes sense and may be replaced by a globalist/nationalist split. Are we seeing that in England, with the rise of the Eurosceptics?

JOHNSON: Definitely. The old two-party structure in Britain is out of date. The Left have accepted the capitalist system and the market, sound finance and reasonably low taxation. So there
isn’t all that much to argue about, but there is a lot to argue about in our relationship to Europe. Therefore, I suspect we will see the evolution of the national party and a pro-Europe party. The traditional parties will split and rearrange themselves around the new dichotomy.

TAE: Do you see the same dichotomy in this country?

JOHNSON: The traditional party system is pretty strong because it’s so flexible. It’s almost amorphous. When you attack it, it’s like attacking a sandbag. So I would say the traditional party system here has more of a future than it does in England.

TAE: When all is said and done, does history treat its subjects fairly?

JOHNSON: I’d like to think that over the long term, history does justice to individuals, countries, and events. But take Warren Harding, dead almost 80 years and only beginning to get a bit of justice. There are probably quite a lot of other figures that have not had justice done to them, but for the big figures I think justice is nearly always done.The mills of justice grind slowly but they do grind exceeding small and sure in the end, and that’s encouraged me to go on being a historian.

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1998