Charles W. Johnson

This oral history collection with former House Parliamentarian Charles W. Johnson contains three interviews. Johnson recounts his early life, education, and involvement in the U.S. military in the first interview. He reflects on the nature of public service and political involvement in the 1950s, as well as the culture of higher education, which was mostly absent of women and people of color. He details the interview process for his first position in the Office of the Parliamentarian in 1964 and describes his early work to turn the office’s administrative scrapbooks—a collection of clippings and notes compiled since 1920—into published volumes of official precedents.

In the second interview, Johnson takes a closer look at the history and development of the Precedents of the U.S. House of Representatives, starting with the volumes compiled by former Parliamentarians Asher Crosby Hinds and Clarence Andrew Cannon. He also describes his own role in editing and organizing the volumes published by Lewis Deschler and William Holmes Brown. He discusses the Office of the Parliamentarian’s relationship with the House committees, particularly the Committee on Rules and the impact of its expansion in 1961. Johnson remembers the changes the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 enacted, including the introduction of electronic voting.

The third interview focuses on the creation of a formal ethics process in the House. Johnson outlines the investigation of New York Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the late 1960s and the institutional effects of the Supreme Court ruling on the decision of the House to exclude Powell from the 90th Congress (1967-1969). He also describes the origins of what is now the House Committee on Ethics.

Throughout this series of interviews, Johnson traces the distinct leadership styles of House Speakers and their relationship with the Parliamentarian’s Office during the many institutional changes in the late twentieth century. He provides a firsthand account of the inner workings of the Office of the Parliamentarian, emphasizing the need for strict confidentiality in interactions with Members of Congress as well as the office’s role as “procedural historians” of the House. This is the first group of interviews in an extensive series the Office of the Historian conducted with Johnson.

Johnson also participated in a series of interviews conducted by the Office of the Historian to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001. His transcript and clips from that interview are available on this page as well.