Michael Johns
Michael Johns (September 8, 1964 - ) is an American health care executive, former federal government of the United States official and conservative policy analyst and writer.
Born September 8, 1964 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Graduate, Emmaus High School (Emmaus, Pennsylvania), 1982. Bachelors in Business Administration, University of Miami (Coral Gables, Florida), 1986. Resides currently in Deptford, New Jersey.
A versatile, persuasive and extremely influential advocate for many of the prominent themes of mainstream conservatism, Johns has held high-level posts in American business, government and public policy. His writings on American foreign policy in the 1980s helped shape and promote the foreign policy of the Reagan administration. He was one of the original advocates of the so-called "Reagan Doctrine," successfully urging the United States to support forces opposing Soviet client states. He was one of the first Reagan Doctrine advocates to actually visit the front lines of these hot spots (Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and the former Soviet Republics) with regularity. Johns also was a close political and military advisor to Angola's Jonas Savimbi, who launched one of the Reagan Doctrine's bloodiest conflicts against a Soviet-aligned Third World nation.
He is credited with helping turn Washington's intellectual tide away from containment of the Soviet Union (as advocated by post-war American leaders, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman) and toward a more aggressive approach dedicated to the "rollback" of global communism. Many conservative historians now credit this latter approach with leading, ultimately, to the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
Johns also was one the most vocal U.S. conservatives in defending Ronald Reagan's controversial description of the former Soviet Union as an "evil empire." In a lengthy Policy Review article, "Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev," for instance, Johns labeled the Soviet system "history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror" and lambasted its "crushing of the human spirit." He offered 208 examples, dating back to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, that warranted the labeling of the Soviet system as "evil."[1]
Following the Cold War's end, Johns helped advance pro-active American engagement in the post-Cold War world, running U.S. government-funded international economic and political development projects in post-war Kuwait, Turkey and other nations.
Johns has been a leading national voice while at the conservative Heritage Foundation and has worked closely with leading figures on the American right. But he also has been tapped by moderate Republicans, including former New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean, U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe and former President George H.W. Bush (for whom he served as a White House speechwriter) to help advance Republican policies. In the first Bush White House, he helped define and advocate some of the policies that have come to be known as "compassionate conservatism," focusing on outreach to low and middle-income Americans and non-traditional Republican constituencies.
Since the mid 1990s, Johns has emerged as a major force in corporate health care, serving with global pharmaceutical powerhouse Eli Lilly, in the health care practice of a leading Philadelphia consulting firm and, since 2000, as vice president of Gentiva Health Services, a Fortune 1000 corporation. As part of Gentiva senior management, Johns has helped lead a quintupling of the company's market capitalization and one of the largest health care acquisitions in recent years [1]. He also has defended the interests of publicly-traded companies, including as a founding member of the influential CEO Council [1].
In his health care roles, Johns has advocated a moderate course on American health care policy, vigorously supporting the need to protect biopharmaceutical and free market health care innovation, while simultaneously defending the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid and other governmental health programs for the nation's elderly, poor and disabled.
Biography
Career
Adapted from the Disinfopedia article, Michael Johns, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.