Paul Johnson

The death of Paul Johnson is a sad moment for all of us here at the Sun. He died Thursday at his home at London at the age of 94. To us Paul Johnson was a journalist of the most magnificent kind and a writer of astounding breadth. He became a generous friend to us during our years in Europe and after. We thrilled to his love affair with America, his history of the Jews, his defense of Israel, and his clear-eyed view of the left.Johnson did not suffer fools, a point we learned the hard way at London one sunny morning, when we went with him for a walk through Kensington Gardens. He was then working on his magisterial history of art. At one point, he stopped to do some sketching (his father had been a drawing master), and launched into a denunciation of Pablo Picasso. We made the mistake of saying, “But what about ‘Boy Leading a Horse’?”That precipitated, as we later wrote in a review of Johnson’s book, a lecture on how sloppy, even cartoonish, was the boy’s left foot. “Just take another look at it,” Johnson commanded. “You’ll see.” We did, and he was right. Then again, too, the lad’s left foot was no worse than Rembrandt’s drawing of his own two hands. Not that it’s our purpose to quarrel with Johnson after he’s gone. On the contrary, we’ll never look the same way again at Picasso.Or anything else Johnson illuminated. He just had a way — via a clear mind and incredible industry and extraordinarily wide reading — of making things lucid and readable. He started out on the left and moved rightward with the passing years. He wrote columns for the popular press, like the Daily Mail, and higher brow publications, including, among others, the London Spectator and the American Spectator.Johnson wrote columns even as he was authoring important books — “The Birth of the Modern,” “A History of Christianity,” and “Modern Times.” Johnson was a child of the Depression who studied at Oxford, served in the British Army at Gibraltar, and edited the New Statesman. The 1970’s turned out to be his political road to Damascus, a time when he saw Britain’s knees bent and blamed Labor for putting her in that posture.Johnson wrote speeches for Prime Minister Thatcher. He mixed politics and journalism with an easy back and forth. Like the masters of the essay going back to Samuel Johnson, Paul Johnson was eclectic. In 1964, Johnson wrote an essay called “The Menace Of Beatlism.” He attacked James Bond, and ranked Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kwan Yew, atop his list of the 20th century’s great figures.The man who wrote an admiring “History of the Jews” was a devout Roman Catholic. A son of Manchester, Johnson was in 2003 awarded the Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. It was a glorious day, at which we happened to be present as Johnson stood with another winner, B.B. King (who told us that he was going to give Lucille — his legendary guitar — to the Pope). Johnson wrote biographies of Churchill, Charles Darwin, and President Eisenhower. He defended Richard Nixon, General Franco, and Augusto Pinochet. Though very much an Englishman, Johnson had an undimmed love for America. We mark the point because the sad fact is that all too many failed to defend America during the dark days of the Cold War. Johnson, it would turn out, was one of America’s most faithful friends.This shows in his “History of the American People,” which is one of the great tellings of the American story. It is dedicated to the “people of America — strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.” Come to think of it, that’s not a bad description of Paul Johnson himself. How America needs him now.

Paul Johnson

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