Security Official Robert H. Johnson Dies

Robert H. Johnson, 84, a former State Department and National Security Council staff member who later taught and worked at several Washington think tanks, died of a heart attack May 23 at his condominium in Alexandria.

Mr. Johnson, while at the State Department's Policy Planning Council in 1964, directed one of the most thorough examinations of the likely costs and consequences of proposed American military bombing of North Vietnam. The study concluded that bombing would not work and could backfire on the United States.

Author David Halberstam noted in "The Best and the Brightest" (1969) that the report, although important and prescient, had little impact because the council was not influential, it was issued a year before decisions were made, and Walt W. Rostow, for whom Mr. Johnson worked and who later was President Lyndon B. Johnson's national security adviser, disagreed with the conclusions and limited its distribution.

Mr. Johnson's other moment in the headlines came in 1975, when he testified to a Senate select committee investigating assassination plots against foreign leaders. He had been the official note taker at a National Security Council meeting in 1960 when the Congo's troublesome premier, Patrice Lumumba, was being discussed. According to a memo in the National Archives, Mr. Johnson testified that he remembered President Dwight D. Eisenhower turning to CIA Director Allen Dulles "in the full hearing of all those in attendance and saying something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated."

There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds, according to Mr. Johnson, and then the meeting continued. The committee, run by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), later decided there was reasonable inference that Eisenhower authorized Lumumba's assassination; the CIA sent one of its scientists to the Congo with a vial of deadly poison but was never able to infect Lumumba, who was killed in 1961 by Congolese rebels.

How a Hannaford, N.D., native found himself in the midst of international intrigue was by following the well-worn path of education, military service and government employment. Mr. Johnson grew up in North St. Paul, Minn., and Fargo, N.D., where his father was vice consul for Norway in North Dakota. He graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., and in 1943 received a master's degree in public administration from Syracuse University.

During World War II, he served as an officer in the Navy Supply Corps. After the war, he received a doctorate in government from Harvard University in 1949. He taught at Harvard for the next two years, directing one of the earliest government-sponsored foreign exchange programs.

In 1951, he joined the National Security Council, where he worked for the next 11 years, receiving a Rockefeller Public Service Award that allowed him to travel in Asia for a year. Upon his return, he became the senior staff member responsible for East Asia just as the Kennedy administration began to focus on Vietnam. In 1962, he switched to the State Department's Policy Planning Council.

Mr. Johnson left the government in 1966 to become a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and then went to Colgate University as a political science professor and department chairman until 1984. He taught at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria and lectured at the Foreign Service Institute and the National War College.

He published numerous articles on foreign policy and wrote "Improbable Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After" (1994), which argued that legitimate security threats to the United States were often exaggerated by the nation's leaders.

A 1998 column in The Washington Post by Stephen S. Rosenfeld called Mr. Johnson "no peacenik and no glib second-guesser. But he is convinced that our evolving perception of the Soviet threat arose not simply from a calm, objective reading of Soviet purposes but from insufficiently examined subjective considerations of our own."

In retirement, Mr. Johnson held appointments at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Overseas Development Council and the National Policy Association. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Political Science Association and Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ in Arlington.

His marriage to Jean Johnson ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife, Constance Hendrickson of Bethesda; a sister; and three children from his first marriage, Mark Johnson and Eric Johnson, both of Baltimore, and Hilary Durrette of Richmond.