THE DEVIL IN PHILIP JOHNSON

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CULLEN MURPHY

Philip Johnson's work is familiar to everyone—the AT&T building, the Glass House, the Seagram Building interiors. His very appear-

ance made him a pop-culture icon. But as historian Marc Wortman points out in 1941: Fighting the Shadow War (Atlantic Monthly Press), to be published this month, Johnson took pains to bury an important part of his past—the long period when he was an enthusiastic Nazi supporter, an ardent ally of the notorious Father Charles Coughlin, and a writer of vile commentaries in Coughlin's newspaper, Social Justice. He vis„ ited Hitler's Germany and was awed by the spectacle of a Nazi rally at Potsdam. He looked forward to the day when a small elite would undertake the reorganization of society. When supporting Hitler became untenable, Johnson covered his tracks. Friends in high places may have helped. His pre-war sympathies were noted by William L. Shirer and others, but he somehow lived out the next 60 years in sanitized acclaim-lionized in the very strata of society where you'd have thought he'd have been a pariah. -CULLEN MURPHY

(a vf.com To read an adaptation drawn from 1941, about Johnson's NAZI past, go to VF.COM