Sam Johnson: A Legacy of Valor and Service (1930–2020)

Samuel Robert Johnson, Jr. United States Air Force pilot, veteran of the Korean War, prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, and U. S. representative for Texas’s Third Congressional District, was born on October 11, 1930, to Samuel Robert Johnson, Sr., and Mima (Nabors) Johnson in San Antonio, Texas. Johnson grew up in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1947. After high school he attended Southern Methodist University (SMU), where he joined the Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity and the Delta Chi social fraternity. Johnson married Shirley Lee Melton on September 1, 1950. The following year, in 1951, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

While at SMU, Johnson enlisted in the military. He served in the United States Air Force for twenty-nine years and flew sixty-two combat missions as a fighter pilot in the Korean War and twenty-five in the Vietnam War. While in training Johnson met future astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The two flew together in Korea and were lifelong friends. Aldrin later wore a silver POW bracelet engraved with Johnson’s name during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Following his time in Korea, Johnson served as a flight instructor, training officer, and as director of the Air Force Fighter Weapons School in Nevada. He also flew with the Thunderbirds Aerial Demonstration Team in 1957 and 1958.

While flying a bombing mission over North Vietnam in 1966, Johnson was wounded when the North Vietnamese army struck down his plane and captured him. He was taken to the Hỏa Lò Prison, nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton.” Johnson was one of eleven U. S. military prisoners, known as the Alcatraz Gang, that were separated from other prisoners because they were seen as leaders of prisoner resistance. They were held about a mile away at a special facility dubbed “Alcatraz” by the Americans. He was held as a prisoner of war for nearly seven years, forty-two months of it in solitary confinement at Alcatraz. Johnson was repeatedly starved and tortured, and the injuries that he sustained during his capture, including a broken right arm and back, were never properly treated. By the time of his release, on February 12, 1973, during Operation Homecoming, he weighed only 120 pounds, his right hand was disabled, and he walked with a permanent limp. Johnson remained in the U. S. Air Force, and in 1974 he earned a masters degree in industrial administration from George Washington University through an off-campus program for military officers. He subsequently served as the deputy commander for operations for the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, as wing commander of the 31st Tactical Fighter Wing at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, and as air division commander at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, before retiring as a colonel in 1979. Johnson co-authored an air-tactics manual that was still in use at the time of his death. He recounted the details of his POW experience in his autobiography, Captive Warriors: A Vietnam POW’s Story (1992).

Following his retirement from the military, Johnson returned to Plano, Texas, and established a home construction business. In 1984 he ran for a seat in the Texas legislature. He narrowly defeated his Republican primary opponent, Brian McCall, by 267 votes in a runoff election. Johnson represented House District 60 from 1985 to 1991. He gave up his seat to run in the special election to fill the unexpired term of U. S. Representative Steve Bartlett, who resigned to run for Dallas mayor. One of twelve candidates, Johnson defeated Tom Pauken in a runoff to win his seat as representative for Texas’s Third Congressional District. Taking his seat in Congress on May 8, 1991, Johnson soon earned a reputation as a one of the most conservative members of the U. S. House. A fiscal conservative who supported a strict construction of the U. S. Constitution, he championed lower taxes and small government. Johnson opposed extending unemployment benefits, sponsored legislation to delay social security benefits to retirees by two years, promoted deregulation of the oil and gas industry, and supported the abolition of the Sixteenth Amendment empowering the federal government to collect income taxes. He was an outspoken critic of Democratic President Bill Clinton. On December 19, 1998, Johnson voted in favor of all four articles of impeachment against Clinton–two of which passed. Johnson repeatedly signed the Americans for Tax Reform’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge. According to the National Journal’s rankings in 2010, he was tied for the most conservative member of Congress. As representative of one of the nation’s most conservative districts, Johnson faced no serious challenge to his reelection throughout his twenty-seven-year-long career in Congress.

In the House Johnson supported high military spending, advocated the needs of active and veteran service members, and backed professional development for members of U. S. military leadership. He helped secure the passing of the 2003 Military Family Tax Relief Act, which reduced the taxes of service members and increased benefits to the families of those killed on active duty. Johnson secured the approval to build two veterans health clinics in Plano that opened in 2016. While at the Hanoi Hilton, Johnson had been imprisoned alongside future U. S. senator John McCain. Although members of the same party, the two had a contentious political relationship; Johnson opposed McCain’s efforts to normalize relations with Vietnam and ban torture by the U. S. military and backed George W. Bush over McCain for president during the 2000 Republican primary. However Johnson came to McCain’s defense after then-presidential candidate Donald Trump made disparaging comments about McCain and other POWs. “Comments like those of Donald Trump, or any other American, suggesting that veterans like Senator John McCain or any other of America's honorable POWs are less brave for having been captured are not only misguided—they are ungrateful and naïve,” Johnson wrote in a July 2015 Politico Magazine op-ed.

During his tenure, Johnson served for many years on the House Ways and Means Committee, briefly served as acting chair of the committee in 2015, and was chair of its Social Security subcommittee. He also sat on the Joint Committee on Taxation. As a member of the Ways and Means Committee he sponsored the Senior Citizens’ Freedom to Work Act of 2000, which successfully repealed earnings limits for social security recipients. He also co-sponsored the unsuccessful “Good Samaritan Tax Act,” which would have allowed businesses to take tax deductions for the charitable giving of food. Johnson also served as Republican deputy whip. He was a founding member of the Conservative Action Team (later the Republican Study Committee) in 1995 and the House Air Force Caucus in 1998. Additionally, Johnson was a member of the United States Congressional International Conservation, Immigration Reform, Public Pension Reform, and Sportsmen’s caucuses. He also sat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, in which he chaired the Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations and was a member of the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth and Families.

Johnson was ranked as the most admired member of the House in a 2009 National Journal poll. That same year the conservative advocacy group Citizens Against Government Waste named him a “Taxpayer Hero” for consistently voting against increased government spending in 2008. In October 2009 Johnson accepted the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s National Patriot Award. He received the Bob Hoover Freedom of Flight Award in 2011 at the Living Legends of Aviation award ceremony, dubbed “the Oscars of aviation.” In 2015 Johnson received the Air Force Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The following year he was the first recipient of the Greater Dallas Military Foundation’s first Patriot Award, and he and John Lewis received the Bipartisan Policy Center’s first Congressional Patriot Award. Johnson was inducted into Woodrow Wilson High School’s Hall of Fame in 1990 and received a Distinguished Alumni Award from SMU in 1994.

Johnson served on the boards of SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and John Goodwin Tower Center for Public Policy and International Affairs. In 2017 he established the university’s Honorable Sam Johnson Endowed Military Scholarship Fund. Johnson was a supporter and patron of the Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Archive at Texas Tech University, which houses an oral history he contributed to the collection. He was also a regent for the Smithsonian Institute in New York. Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election shortly after the start of his fourteenth term in 2017. He served in Congress until 2019, when, at the age of eighty-eight, he stepped down from office. He was the oldest member of the House at the time of his retirement.

Johnson and his wife Shirley had three children together—a son, James Robert “Bob” Johnson, and two daughters, Gini (Johnson) Mulligan and Beverly (Johnson) Briney. Johnson was preceded in death by his son in 2013 and his wife in 2015. Sam Johnson passed away on May 27, 2020, at the age of eighty-nine from causes unrelated to COVID-19 and was interned at Restland Memorial Park in Dallas.