The world was his classroom.
The world was his classroom.
T he journalist and historian Paul Johnson wrote more than 50 books, many of them magisterial surveys, such as Modern Times, a history of the world during the 20th century. He never taught at a university — his huge sales meant the world was his classroom.
But, when he died in London last week at the age of 94, every obituary was sure to mention near the top his political conversion: In the 1970s he left the Labour Party and joined the Conservatives, even becoming a sort of mentor for Margaret Thatcher, whom he first met when they studied at Oxford at the same time.
Johnson’s political transformation was a big loss to the Left. The Daily Telegraph says in its obituary that for many he was “the most powerfully provoking journalists” of his age.
For 15 years, Johnson was editor of the New Statesman, the most influential Labour-oriented journal. Michael Foot, the Labour Party’s candidate for prime minister in 1983, sneered that, while every movement had its Judas, this was the first time he could think of when the 30 pieces of silver had been converted into a permanent income for the apostate.
Johnson said that the trade unions who controlled Labour’s candidate-selection process were run by “gangsters . . . powerful men who conspire together to squeeze the community” by shutting down essential services with strikes. He could no longer see them destroy Britain, and in 1979 the electorate agreed with him by voting in Margaret Thatcher.
For more than 40 years after that, Johnson provided an intellectual defense of his favorite institutions, which included capitalism and Christianity. He argued that both were liberating forces that allowed men and women “to bring out that which was the best within them.”
He tackled every conceivable subject — a history of Christianity, then one of the Jews; attacks on Picasso, Karl Marx, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and biographies of Socrates, Charles Darwin, Napoleon, and Winston Churchill. The latter, a hero of World War II, may now be reviled by the Left as a racist colonialist, but Johnson was convinced that Churchill’s “whole life was an exercise in how courage can be displayed, reinforced, guarded and doled out carefully, heightened and concentrated, conveyed to others.”
Johnson was similarly enthusiastic about his love for the United States. In 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, he wrote:
What is America? It is not a race but a cohesion of all the races of the world. It will soon be a nation of 300 million, 10 per cent of whom were not even born there. Its creation from Europe[,] Africa and Asia is a continuing process, as countless immigrants arrive each year and are quietly absorbed and prosper. Moreover, these citizens, whose parents, grandparents or ancestors came from all over the world, are given the chance to participate in democracy at all levels, which exists nowhere else on earth. More than 600,000 offices in the US are elected. The entire public ethos of America is fashioned to finding out what the voters want and constructing policy on their wishes. America is successful precisely because it is a working multiracial democracy. To be anti-American, therefore, is to be anti-humanity. For no other country represents so clearly the current wishes and long-term aspirations of the human race.
To hate America is to hate humanity.
It came as no surprise that Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, a rare honor for a foreigner.
In 1983, Johnson published what became his most influential book, a sweeping history of the post–World War I era around the globe: Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. He revised it 18 years later to include coverage of the rest of the 20th century.
Modern Times shaped a generation and more of people who had studied history as interpreted by the Left. His explanation of the Great Depression drew greatly on the works of libertarian economists and provided a strong antidote to the conventional wisdom that FDR has saved capitalism from itself.
All his books were phenomenal. I think the first I read was Modern Times, then A History of Christianity, A History of the Jews, The Birth of the Modern (from Napoleon onward), Intellectuals, and many that I didn’t have time to study properly.
James Lucier, the successful owner of a political- and economic-intelligence service in Washington, told me of Modern Times’ impact on him. “To me, 19 or 20 years old, I was astonished by his ability to synthesize vast amounts of information and to present it, clearly and simply, in an erudite way. I have always wanted to write that way myself ever since.”
I was privileged to be Johnson’s editor for his op-eds in the Wall Street Journal in the ’80s and ’90s. I vividly recall how, during one lunch at the Journal, he described to me his research methods in writing a book in the pre-internet era:
I read everything I can of relevance, put the references and important bits on index cards and catalogue them. Then I rent the local school gymnasium on a weekend and spread them out, assembling my cards according to my outline. Then I tackle each chapter in turn, discarding and expanding on the cards as needed until a living, breathing narrative has given birth. Enough midwifing like that and you have a book!
To this day, I follow some of Johnson’s advice on research and writing.
A culture that produced Paul Johnson and others like him explains why British literary writing and journalism, on the whole, is so much better than most of what is produced in America. As Stephen Glover of Britain’s Daily Mail explains: “Even readers who thought they might disagree with him looked forward to his next offering. He never penned a dull sentence or had a dull thought.”
How much more praise can a writer ever expect? If you explore Paul Johnson’s work, you will not be disappointed.