Update 02/05/2018 (about 4 years later)...I tested this again as people have been upvoting my question/answer and Sotirios Delimanolis is correct that I should not h
I think you can achieve what you're aiming for simply using the RestTemplate and specifying a JsonNode as the response type.
ResponseEntity response =
restTemplate.exchange(url, HttpMethod.GET, entity, JsonNode.class);
JsonNode map = response.getBody();
String someValue = map.get("someValue").asText();