Jeh Johnson’s long frame sits in a soft leather arm chair in his office. But despite how comfortable he looks, the former Secretary of Homeland Security is never in it for very long. He is constantly jumping up to show me something of interest on a wall or shelf or to retrieve something from a drawer. Or to grab my suit jacket, folded sloppily on his sofa, and kindly place it on the back of a chair.

Johnson and I are high above Sixth Avenue, in Mid-town Manhattan, in the seating area of his corner office at powerhouse Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. That Johnson has an office at Paul Weiss was no easy feat. The firm turned him down for a job during his third year of law school. “I didn’t even get a call back,” he told me. “I still have the rejection letter.”

And it is not just a career at Paul Weiss that seemed unlikely at one time. Just graduating from college was no sure thing. At the end of his first year at Morehouse College Johnson was staring at a 1.8 grade point average.

But some things happened during Johnson’s Sophomore year that changed his trajectory. Now instead of frequent visits to the dean’s office, he was on a path that would one day send him on regular trips to the Oval Office.

The long-time Paul Weiss attorney, and member of President Obama’s Cabinet, was kind enough to let me visit him to reflect on his diverse career in private practice and public service and homeland security. For well over an hour, Johnson, warm, engaging and telling me not to worry that we’re going over the allotted time, told stories that left me speechless and gave very thoughtful answers to my questions. No, Secretary of Homeland Security is not the most thankless job in America he told me. Is a cyber 9/11 coming? He thinks it may already have. What’s it like to give the order to kill someone? Few can describe that. Johnson can. And yes, the man responsible for TSA took off his shoes when going through airport security. You bet I asked.

The Morehouse Spirit of ‘76

Jeh Johnson, 60, entered Morehouse College in 1975. A poor start seems unexpected from the grandson of a distinguished sociologist and president of Fisk University and son of an architect, Columbia graduate and Vassar College professor. Johnson’s great-grandfather also provided large shoes to fill. An emancipated slave, who taught himself how to read and write, he graduated from college and went on to become a Baptist minister.

Johnson said he was a decent student as a youngster, but that deteriorated. High school was a world of Cs and Ds. “A C was a gift,” he said. “I just didn’t think it was part of my persona to be a good student.”

Poor grades continued when Johnson first arrived at the all-male, all-black college in Atlanta – with Spike Lee and Martin Luther King III as classmates. But the tide turned after his first year. “I went there,” Johnson said, “and discovered other young black men who were very motivated, very dedicated and very studious. That was new to me. The spirit at Morehouse was contagious. It was impossible not to be infected with it after a year or so. So my first year I had a 1.8 GPA. By Sophomore year, when I’d given up football, baseball, track and everything else, except studying, that’s when I took off and I discovered that I had a brain.”

Home from college in December 1976, Johnson’s father suggested that he read an article in The New York Times – “The Law Firm That Stars in Court.” The story was a profile of Paul Weiss, describing the firm’s celebrity clients and notable lawyers, as well as its financial success. “Senior partners,” the article declared, “whose time is billed at $250 an hour and more, might easily take in $200,000 a year.”

Johnson walked across his office and grabbed a copy of the Times article from a drawer. He read me one particular passage: “On many levels – the celebrity of its clients, the high proportion of government officials and agencies it has represented and the frequency with which its partners move in and out of government service – Paul, Weiss is as close as any New York City law firm to the public consciousness.” “First impressions are powerful things,” Johnson told me.

Johnson left Morehouse, entered Columbia Law School and decided that the big firm life was right for him. He landed at Sullivan & Cromwell. But the firm wasn’t what he was looking for. So after a year and a half he tried again at Paul Weiss. This time the outcome was different. “Right away the place felt right for me,” Johnson said. But despite how satisfied he was at the firm, he also knew he wanted to go into public service, or maybe elected office, at some point. Having worked on Capitol Hill during college summers, and volunteered for the Carter campaign in 1976, he had been bitten by the bug.

And Johnson did as planned – leaving his high-powered litigation practice at Paul Weiss four times -- serving as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, General Counsel of the Air Force and General Counsel of the Defense Department, where he oversaw 10,000 lawyers and co-wrote the report that paved the way for the repeal of “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell.” In late 2013, the man born on September 11th was sworn in as head of Homeland Security. I bring up that New York Times article, which commented on the frequency with which Paul, Weiss partners move in and out of government service. “It was pre-ordained,” Johnson replied.

But these several leaves of absence from Paul Weiss are not, Johnson assured me, a matter of “hey I’m getting bored. I want to try other things.” “I believe in service to the country,” he told me, “as well as excellence in the practice of law.”

Johnson’s resume – combining long-time loyalty to the same law firm with several stints in public service -- is certainly unique. So is where he keeps it -- in his drawer. Literally. Johnson stood, walked over to his desk and signaled for me to join him. He pulled opened the top drawer. The bottom was covered with writing in a thick marker. It was a list, Johnson explained, of all of the places where his desk has lived since he acquired it in 1994. He takes me through the entries. It is Wikipedia on a tree: “Paul Weiss, 1994 to 1998. It was home in my attic in Montclair [New Jersey]. I brought it to the Pentagon in 1999 to January ‘01 at the end of the Clinton administration. Back to Paul Weiss for eight years. . . . Then when I went to the Pentagon with Obama in ‘09 to the end of the first term. Then he drafted me to be Secretary of DHS so I brought it to DHS. And it arrived back here December 20, 2016.”

“They’re Waiting For You To Tell them It’s Okay To Kill Him.”

Johnson is the nation’s fourth Secretary of Homeland Security. The first three were also lawyers. I told Johnson that this seems like a bad idea. After all, being DHS Secretary obviously requires making quick decisions at times. Lawyers, on the other hand, are frequently not in the quick-decision business. They analyze, research, get six peoples’ advice, have 30 days to do this and 60 to do that.

Johnson understood my point – and acknowledged that law school, with its focus on issue spotting, does not teach decision making – but he did not agree with my conclusion. There is a “decision making spectrum,” he explained, “between those who make flash judgments, based on just a little bit of information” and “someone who doesn’t want to make a decision and keeps asking for more information.”

Johnson’s decision making style as DHS Secretary, he told me, was somewhere in the middle: “I want to make sure I’ve heard from all of the stakeholders. I want to make sure I’ve heard from all of the component leadership within the department who will be affected by this decision and who will know how to implement it. . . . Bob Gates taught me if people feel like they’ve been heard, and listened to, they may not agree with the decision, but they’ll likely support it.” “There are definitely some lawyers, in non-lawyer, executive positions, who are guilty of what you said,” Johnson concedes, “but there are others who are prepared to make up their minds pretty quickly.”

On the subject of decision making, there may be none more challenging, for any lawyer, than what Johnson experienced in one aspect of his job as General Counsel of the Defense Department: signing-off on drone strikes and other counter-terrorism operations. About a month into it, Johnson explained, he was visited by some special operations personnel from the Pentagon. After they presented the case for taking out a terrorist, Johnson’s deputy looked at him and said: “They’re waiting for you to tell them it’s okay to kill him.” Johnson’s first reaction: “I’m not God.” Johnson told me that he frequently had to give such legal sign-offs, following his review of information from various sources. “That was probably the most serious aspect of my job,” he said. “And I took it very seriously.” He also made it his business, when possible, to watch the video of every drone strike he authorized so he could “see the gravity” of his actions.

Johnson told me that, “without a doubt,” helping to develop and refine the legal architecture, for the counter-terrorism efforts in the Obama Administration, was “the most intellectually stimulating part of my legal career.” [The New York Times reported in 2015 the Johnson was one of four government lawyers who worked in intense secrecy – without the knowledge of aides or even the Attorney General – to develop the rationales to overcome any legal obstacles surrounding the impending raid to capture Osama bin Laden.]

Johnson’s career being “pre-ordained” in a 1976 New York Times article is not the only eerie foreshadowing that he has experienced. In 1992, as a Paul Weiss associate, Johnson, with some assistance, represented a New York City police officer, pro bono, accused of homicide for throwing a child off a rooftop. The grand jury returned a verdict of no true bill. The allegations against the police officer were later completely discredited. Nine years later the officer was at the World Trade Center on September 11th and saved lives -- and almost lost his own. Today that former New York City detective, Roger Parrino, Sr., after serving as Senior Counselor to Johnson at DHS, is the Commissioner of Homeland Security for the State of New York.

Johnson and Parrino remain close. They were recently together at the site of the killings on a bike path in New York City near the West Side Highway. Johnson grabbed his phone to show me some pictures of it. On the subject of that attack, Johnson told me that, regrettably, he was not surprised by it.

The Last Stop For The Desk

Given Johnson’s prior leaves of absence from Paul Weiss, to pursue his commitment to public service, my last question was the obvious one – will another entry be made inside his desk drawer? His answer is clear and unambiguous, in both words and tone - no. “I had ten really remarkable years with Barack Obama. And now I’m content to be done.”

Johnson is also pleased to be rid of the Secret Service. He praised their work, but told me he is happy to now be able to drive his own car, take the bus and subway and go to the bathroom in a public place without the need for an operational plan.

Johnson told me that he knows that the net worth of some of his partners is multiples of his. But he has no regrets about his public service work, calling it “the most gratifying part of my career.” “Having gay service members introduce me to their spouses and saying ‘thank you for what you did,’ you don’t get those experiences in private life.”

At the end of our meeting Johnson walked me to the elevator. How am I getting to Penn Station, for the train back to Philadelphia, he wanted to know. My plan had been a cab. But it was now pouring. So I knew I was headed for the subway. Hearing this, Johnson jumped into action: Take the 51st Street exit. Go down to Seventh Avenue and there’s a subway at 50th Street. Take the number 1 train downtown. It’s the second stop. The mission was a success. The federal government took Jeh Johnson out of New York a few times. But nothing will take New York out of Jeh Johnson.

[Elizabeth Vandenberg, 1L, University of Iowa College of Law, assisted with this article]