VANITY FAIR ON FAMED ARCHITECT PHILIP JOHNSON’S HIDDEN NAZI PAST.

Not all that hidden, particularly in Johnson’s later years and after his death. Back in April of 2008, inspired by Jonah Goldberg’s then-new Liberal Fascism, I shot an early Silicon Graffiti video segment while I was still my getting video chops together titled “The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Philip Johnson,” an allusion to the 1994 documentary on Leni Riefenstahl’s similar attempt to downplay her own Nazi past.

As I said in the video, “At the time of his death in early 2005, at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America’s best-known architect. If you live in America and Bauhaus did come to your house, you can largely thank Johnson, who almost single-handedly created the architectural department of New York’s Museum of Modern Art shortly after its founding in 1929. But in the 1930s, Johnson was sort of the real life version of Woody Allen’s Zelig character, moving fluidly in the radical leftwing politics of the era, from socialism to national socialism to populism and back to national socialism in less than a decade, a period that he later almost entirely airbrushed from his past.”

Found via Terry Teachout, who tweets, Johnson’s far left past “isn’t news to the well read, but it’s always good to be reminded of it.”