Johnson was born on September 27, 1904, in Clermont, Georgia, the eldest of seven children of William M. Johnson, a lawyer, and Willie Estelle Bolding, a teacher and school principal before her marriage. He grew up in nearby Gainesville. His father died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, shortly after Johnson turned fourteen. His mother took in boarders to help make ends meet and later invested profitably in real estate.
Johnson graduated from Gainesville High School in 1922. He then attended Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, from 1922 to 1926 but did not graduate.
Johnson was a controversy-stirring editor of the school newspaper, and in 1924 he began to work for the Macon Telegraph under Mark Ethridge, later the publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal. In 1926, he wrote a series of articles exposing the criminal activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Tombs County, Georgia, that gained national attention and, along with a recommendation from Ethridge, led to a job offer from the New York Sun. Johnson began working for the Sun on September 24, 1928, initially planning to return to the Macon Telegraph in a few years. Once in New York City, however, he fell in love with both the city and his new job. Johnson's early Sun assignments included the failure of the Bank of the United States, the burning of the cruise ship Morro Castle, and the Lindbergh kidnapping. In 1933, Johnson attended the meeting in Heywood Broun's apartment at which the Newspaper Guild was founded. He was an active early member and tried unsuccessfully to establish a Guild chapter at the Sun. By the late 1930's, however, Johnson had ceased to be active in the Guild, and the Sun formed its own editorial union. For nine years, Johnson was the Sun's Broadway columnist, and he frequently served as a critic.
After the United States entered World War II, however, he moved back to general news. From February 1945, he was a Pacific correspondent, covering the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Japanese surrender. He was also with the first group of correspondents to tour Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. One time, what started out as a routine crime story - the murder of Thomas Collentine, a hiring boss on the docks, in April 1948 - turned into the biggest story of Johnson's career. While covering the murder, he became convinced that there was a major story in what was wrong on the waterfront. He dug for about six weeks, with little to show for his efforts. Then he had a lucky break after meeting and gaining the confidence of an informant, an ex-convict, who had worked with the racketeers. His story set the pattern, and he steered Johnson to other sources. His editors gave him the time he needed, and he worked on the story, single-handed, for five months. The Sun received a spectacular payoff: a twenty-four-part, front-page series that ran from November 8 to December 10, 1948, under the title "Crime on the Waterfront. " It exposed an interlocking system of shakedowns, kickbacks, loan-sharking and terrorism, as well as union officials who exploited their members in order to maintain a hold on lucrative waterfront rackets and a shipping industry without the inclination or the will to challenge the racketeers. Johnson and his family were the target of numerous threats, but he continued to write on the subject, doing some 300 follow-up articles in 1949. His articles led to three official investigations of waterfront crime and the formation of the Waterfront Commission in 1953.
On January 3, 1950, after more than twenty years at the Sun, Johnson lost the job he loved when the paper was sold to the New York World-Telegram. Johnson wrote the article about the sale for the paper's final issue on January 4 - in effect, the 117-year-old paper's obituary. Newspaper people consider that article one of Johnson's best, but it always held bitter associations for him. Johnson, who had been the Sun's star reporter, received job offers from several other New York City papers, but the demise of the Sun had left him bitter about newspaper publishers in general. He took the most lucrative offer, which was from King Features Syndicates, which distributed his articles through International News Service. He was a special-assignment reporter for that wire service from 1950 to 1954, covering the Kefauver hearings on organized crime, among other things, but he was never happy there. Meanwhile, Johnson's "Crime on the Waterfront" articles continued to generate attention. In June 1949 he sold the movie rights to the Monticello Film Company. In 1950 he published a book, Crime on the Labor Front, based largely on material from those articles. Between 1951 and 1953, Budd Schulberg wrote eight scripts for a film to be titled Crime on the Waterfront, which evolved from a documentary into a fictional piece. By 1953, the movie rights had reverted back to Johnson, and he sold them directly to Schulberg. In July 1954 the movie On the Waterfront opened; it won eight Academy Awards in 1955, including that for best picture.
The same month that On the Waterfront opened, Johnson left reporting for good, taking a job with the public relations firm of Robinson-Hannigan and Associates. The firm was sold to Hill and Knowlton two years later, and Johnson continued there, working on a variety of accounts and eventually becoming a vice-president. In 1968, Johnson was one of three editors of the book Current Thoughts on Public Relations: A Collection of Speeches and Articles by Members of Hill and Knowlton, Inc. In 1969 he wrote movingly about the Sun's final days in an article for the Silurian News; "To the New York Sun - In Fond Remembrance" was reprinted in the 1974 book Shoeleather and Printer's Ink, edited by George Britt. Johnson retired from Hill and Knowlton in 1973. He made his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, after his retirement and died in nearby Middleton, on June 17, 1976.
Johnson was both an industrious legman and a polished writer. To him, being a reporter meant doing everything, and he took pride in getting the most out of any story - small or large. He is best known for his 24-part series in the New York Sun, Crime on the Waterfront, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1948.
On December 4, 1928, Johnson married Emmie Ludie Adams; they had four children. In 1966, Johnson's eldest son, Haynes, won a Pulitzer Prize. To date, they are the only father and son to have won reporting Pulitzers.
