“I want to convey that depression is a treatable illness,” Johnson, 84, said in an interview. He went to work in the Johnson (no relation) White House right out of graduate school at Harvard. He was trusted enough that when LBJ left the White House to return to Texas in 1969, he took Johnson with him as his top aide. In retrospect, the 11 years he spent as CNN president marked its period of greatest success as a television network. A hunter, Johnson took his guns to a colleague to get them out of the house.