(A few weeks later a group of reporters gathered to have dinner with Johnson at the home of Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun, an old Johnson friend. The reporters asked various questions. Russell Baker, one of them, asked what the first thing was that had gone through Johnson’s mind as the shots were fired and Rufus Youngblood threw himself on Johnson. “That the Communists had done it,” Johnson said, and Baker would remember being shocked by the reply, it had seemed so primitive.)
