Johnson, Robert David 1967–

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Johnson, Robert David 1967–

(K.C. Johnson)

PERSONAL:

Born November 27, 1967. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1988, Ph.D., 1993; University of Chicago, M.A., 1989.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 2900 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11210. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, lecturer, 1993-94; Arizona State University, Tempe, assistant professor, 1994-95; Williams College, Williamstown, MA, assistant professor, 1995-99; City University of New York, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY, associate professor, 1999-2003, professor of history, 2003—, Graduate Center, New York, NY, associate professor of history, 2001—. Visiting professor, Harvard University, 2005. Spent five years as track announcer at Scarborough Downs.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, 2007-08.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) On Cultural Ground: Essays in International History, introduction by Ernest R. May, Imprint Publications (Chicago, IL), 1994.

The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1995.

Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1998.

(Editor) The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson, three volumes, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2005, Volume 2, with David Shreve, Volume 3, with Kent Germany.

Congress and the Cold War, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Author of the Durham-in-Wonderland blog. Contributor to books, including Oxford Companion to American History, Oxford University Press, 2001; The Cultural Turn, edited by Frank Ninkovich and Liping Bu, Imprint Publications, 2002; Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 2nd edition, Scribner 2002; Vietnam and the American Political Tradition: The Politics of Dissent, edited by Randall Bennett Woods, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light, edited by Mitch Lerner, University Press of Kansas, 2005; Lyndon B. Johnson: The Kennedy Assassination and the Transfer of Power, November 1963-January 1964, edited by Max Holland, Norton, 2005; and Dealing with Dictators: Dilemmas of U.S. Diplomacy and Intelligence Analysis, 1945-1990, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, MIT Press, 2006. Contributor to professional journals, including Journal of American-East Asian Relations, International History Review, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Cold War Studies, and Diplomatic History. Author of op-ed articles for newspapers, including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Sun, New Republic, Inside Higher Ed, and the Weekly Standard.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robert David Johnson is a historian who specializes in American history and politics. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of several books of history. In his The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, the author provides a history of the foreign policy perspective of peace progressives, a bloc of dissenters in the U.S. Senate between 1913 and 1935. Writing in the book's introduction, the author notes: "During their period of greatest influence … the peace progressives acted as a well-organized congressional block articulating a consistent anti-imperialistic vision, which they applied to all areas of the world. (They viewed the tariff and immigration as domestic concerns only.) The peace progressives advocated this anti-imperialism not simply for moral reasons, but for strategic and economic reasons as well. In short, they developed a quite consistent foreign policy critique."

Focusing on the senators during the peak of their collective influence, the author examines how they formed an anti-imperialist policy, thus becoming peace progressives who advanced the left-wing alternative to the agenda of President Woodrow Wilson. The author details how the peace progressives became the most powerful opposition to internationalism based on business prospects that typified the era's Republican administrations. Martha L. Gibson, writing in the American Political Science Review, called The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations a "well documented and nuanced account of American foreign policy in the early years of this century," adding that "Johnson is to be applauded for a well-written work of impressive scope and depth." Foreign Affairs contributor David C. Hendrickson referred to the book as a "prodigiously researched volume."

Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, published in 1998, is a biography of a politician who is well known for his vehement fight against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. As a part of this fight, he was one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964. In the biography, the author reveals Gruening's sixty-year public career, from his early days in Progressive-era Boston, to his role as the editor of a reform newspaper in Portland, Maine, and on to his time writing for the Nation. In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Gruening as chief U.S. policymaker for Puerto Rico and then governor of Alaska, where he served for fourteen years. Johnson goes on to follow Gruening's election as a U.S. Senator from Alaska in 1958 and his ensuing years of providing one of the few dissenting outlooks in the U.S. Senate or the U.S. Congress. Gruening took contrary stances on everything from foreign-aid policy to the relationship between the federal government and the economy.

"This book is impressively, even remarkably, researched," asserted David F. Krugler in the Historian. He went on to note that the author treats "Gruening with a refreshing mix of sympathy and criticism, [and] Johnson also offers succinct, unobtrusive sketches of the major events that touched Gruening's life, from World War I to the 1972 Democratic National Convention." Philip Zelikow concluded in Foreign Affairs that the book is "a model for how to write a congressional biography."

In his 2006 book Congress and the Cold War, Johnson challenges the historical view of a weak Cold War U.S. Congress that helped lead to an unbalanced relationship between the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. federal government. According to some historians, this state of affairs culminated into the escalation of troops and commitment in Vietnam in the 1960s. It also paved the way for the passage of the War Powers Act in 1973, which stated that the president could send troops abroad only by authorization of Congress or if American troops are already under attack or serious threat. Observing that the author has taken an earlier historian's advice to provide "precise, detailed descriptions of the tactics involved" in any study of congressional power, Barry M. Blechman went on to write in the Political Science Quarterly: "Johnson takes this insightful statement to heart, and his book is clearly the richer for it. Covering a period of roughly forty years, Johnson chronicles the see-saw of competing ideological factions and competing political parties in the Congress, and their respective rise and decline in influence on U.S. Cold War policy."

Johnson, furthermore, provides a more flexible concept of the congressional role in foreign policy. In the process, he focuses on three facets of legislative power: the use of spending measures; the internal workings of a Congress increasingly dominated by subcommittees; and the ability of individual legislators to affect foreign affairs by changing the way that policymakers and the public consider international questions. Writing in the book's prologue, the author points out that it was the U.S. Congress that blocked the United States from joining the League of Nations in 1919 and 1920. The author continues: "What commentator Walter Lippmann termed the Cold War—the diplomatic, strategic, and ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union—opened with an institutional memory of an exceptionally active and powerful legislative branch." Johnson goes on to point out that a true turning point occurred after World War II: "The willingness of the federal government to use its financial might for foreign policy purposes forced Congress to consider the relationship between its appropriation powers and international affairs." The author goes on: "Finally, the advent of nuclear weapons placed the government on what amounted to a permanent war footing, spawning a new interpretation of constitutional theory that redefined the commander-in-chief clause to increase the president's freedom to act unilaterally. The early Cold War, accordingly, is not remembered as a period of intense congressional activism."

Johnson begins his book with a discussion of constructing a bipartisan foreign policy and then examines legislative power and the congressional right. He goes on write about the redefining of congressional power and the consequences that the Vietnam War had on this power. The book's final two chapters look at the new internationalists' Congress and the triumph of the Armed Services Committee.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Johnson, Robert David, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1995.

Johnson, Robert David, Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1998.

Johnson, Robert David, Congress and the Cold War, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, June, 1996, William C. Widenor, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 941; December, 2000, David Levy, review of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, p. 1764; October, 2007, Peter Lowe, review of Congress and the Cold War, p. 1205.

American Political Science Review, September, 1995, Martha L. Gibson, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 761.

Choice, July-August, 1995, S.K. Hauser, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 1788; June, 1999, D.R. Turner, review of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, p. 1852; January, 2007, L.M. Lees, review of Congress and the Cold War, p. 890.

Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2003, "Brooklyn Scholar Gets New Shot at Tenure"; March 7, 2003, "U. of Washington Names New Tech-Transfer Chief; Historian Wins Rare Victory in Tenure Appeal; Stanford Lures 2 from U. of Texas."

Foreign Affairs, July-August, 1995, David C. Hendrickson, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 142; July 1, 1999, Philip Zelikow, "The United States," review of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, p. 126.

Hispanic American Historical Review, November, 1996, Stephen J. Randall, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 838.

Historian, fall, 1996, Charles Chatfield, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 147; summer, 2000, David F. Krugler, review of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, p. 874.

International Affairs, November, 2006, David Ryan, review of Congress and the Cold War, p. 1188.

International History Review, May, 1996, Lloyd E. Ambrosius, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 442; August, 1996, Hilary Conroy, review of On Cultural Ground: Essays in International History, p. 742; June, 2007, Scott Lucas, review of Congress and the Cold War, p. 433.

Journal of American History, December, 1995, John Whiteclay Chambers, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 1256; September, 2000, David F. Schmitz, review of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, p. 751; December, 2006, Jeffery C. Livingston, review of Congress and the Cold War, p. 931.

Pacific Historical Review, May, 1996, Marian C. McKenna, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 352.

Pacific Northwest Quarterly, summer, 2001, Richard Lowitt, review of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, p. 149.

Political Science Quarterly, winter, 2006, Barry M. Blechman, review of Congress and the Cold War, p. 723.

Reviews in American History, September, 1996, Lewis L. Gould, review of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, p. 466.