G. Griffith Johnson Jr., Movie Trade Group Executive, 94

[DGH]

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Gove Griffith Johnson Jr., a retired executive vice president of the
Motion Picture Association of America, the film-industry trade group,
died September 10, 2006, at the Williamsburg Landing retirement
community in Williamsburg, Virginia, from pneumonia, at the age of 94.

Early on, Mr. Johnson was a New Deal economist and worked closely with
economist John Kenneth Galbraith. In the early 1960s, he was assistant
secretary of state for economic affairs, partly based on his long
friendship with Undersecretary of State George W. Ball.

To work at State, Mr. Johnson took a leave of absence from the Motion
Picture Association of America, which he had joined in the early 1950s
as an economic adviser. He returned to his work there in 1964 and
retired in 1983.

Mr. Johnson was born in the Bronx, New York, and raised in Washington
DC, where his father became pastor of National Baptist Memorial Church.

He was a 1930 graduate and class president of the old Central High
School and a 1934 summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University. He
also received a doctorate from Harvard in government in 1938.

In 1934, while on a Harvard traveling fellowship, he toured Germany and
was held and questioned for hours by Nazi secret police after
witnessing maneuvers by storm troopers. He and a traveling companion
were released unharmed.

Mr. Johnson held positions in the Treasury Department, the National
Resources Planning Board and the Commerce Department before joining
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's staff as an assistant in 1939.

Later, he worked at the Office of Price Administration, and Galbraith
recruited him in 1945 to work on the strategic bombing survey of
Germany to determine the harm done to the German economy during World
War II.

Mr. Johnson was chief economist for the Bureau of Budget and economic
adviser in the Office of Economic Stabilization before joining the
Motion Picture Association.

He was a former treasurer and trustee of what is now the National
Policy Association. His memberships included the University Club, the
Annapolis Yacht Club and Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase.

He moved from Annapolis to Williamsburg in 1991.

Survivors include his wife of 70 years, Janet Young Johnson of
Williamsburg, Virginia; and two children, Carol J. Martin of New Bern,
North Carolina, and Gove G. Johnson III of Oriental, North Carolina.

Washington Post