The Last Time a President Dropped Out of the Race
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
“I shall not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Those are the words not of President Joe Biden, who announced his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, but of a previous president who took himself out of the running: Lyndon B. Johnson, speaking from the Oval Office on March 31, 1968.
I was in high school at the time, and remember watching the speech with my parents on an old black-and-white TV with semi-functional rabbit ears. All through the 1960s, major events collided with a chaotic intensity that in retrospect is hard to disentangle—a pattern that may seem all too familiar today.
Of all those years, 1968 was the most fraught. It began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam—ultimately a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, but a psychological blow from which the U.S. did not recover. In March, the strong showing in the New Hampshire primary by the anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy against the incumbent Johnson was perceived as tantamount to a win. In April came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; in June, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; in August, the demonstrations and ferocious police response outside of the Democratic convention, in Chicago.
Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race took America completely by surprise—more than Biden’s exit did—and overshadowed his announcement, in the same speech, of a bombing pause in Vietnam and a renewed push for negotiations. I’ve always wondered what kind of moment it was for him. Earlier this year, The Atlantic published excerpts from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s memoir based on more than 300 boxes of archival materials that her husband, Richard “Dick” Goodwin, had saved from his time as a prominent speechwriter and presidential adviser. Johnson had been an important figure in both of their lives. Dick Goodwin wrote some of Johnson’s landmark speeches, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian and a former special assistant to Johnson, published her first book in 1976 about LBJ, with whom she had worked closely as he wrote his memoirs.
“The first thing to recognize,” she told me when we chatted earlier this week, is that by March 1968 “he was facing a precarious political situation. He had been battered in New Hampshire, and he was expected to lose, big, in Wisconsin. More importantly, he had been told by his generals that he had to send 200,000 more troops to Vietnam, but that even then the most that could be expected was a stalemate.” There was also the issue of his health. Johnson had suffered a major heart attack in 1955, and the men in his family had a history of early deaths. In 1967, he initiated a secret actuarial study on his life expectancy, and was told he would die at 64—a prediction that came to pass. As Goodwin noted, “he would have died in that next term, if he’d had a second term.”
“What he talked to me about later was more personal,” Goodwin went on. “He knew he couldn’t go out on the streets without being bombarded by people carrying signs. How many kids did you kill today? There was no pleasure any longer in the part of politics he had always loved: being out with people. He told me that he had this nightmare regularly—that he was in a river, and he was trying to get to shore, and he went toward the shore on one side, and then he couldn’t reach the shore, so he turned around, figuring he was going the wrong way, and he couldn’t reach the shore on the other side either. He was just caught in the middle.”
Goodwin recalled that, up to the last moment on March 31, 1968, the people closest to Johnson weren’t sure he would deliver the final part of his speech—the withdrawal passage. In 1964, he had thought about not running for a full term as president; his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, had helped change his mind. In this case, withdrawing from the race was essential to his credibility on Vietnam: He believed that he would not be seen as acting in good faith to end the war if he were still a candidate.
“That night, I think, he was relieved and knew that he had done the right thing,” Goodwin said, going on to re-create the moment in time. “All the editorials are superlative. He has put principle above politics. It’s a personal sacrifice. He goes to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and gets a standing ovation. In the polls he goes from a 57 percent disapproval rating to a 57 percent approval rating. Most importantly, on April 3, he gets a message that North Vietnam is willing to come to the table. His aide Horace Busby said that, for Johnson, it was one of the happiest days of his presidency.”
Shortly after Johnson’s speech, Tom Wicker of The New York Times, one of the preeminent political writers of his day, described in these pages how Johnson had been drawn inexorably into Vietnam. The background of intractable war—more than half a million American soldiers fighting on foreign soil—is one of several differences between Johnson’s decision not to run and Biden’s. Johnson was not in (obvious) physical decline, as Biden seems to be. However imperfect, political and civic institutions were stronger back then. An authoritarian demagogue did not appear to be waiting in the wings, and the future of American democracy did not seem to be at stake (though Richard Nixon’s disregard for the law would ultimately drive the country to crisis). But both presidents faced a badly divided nation, and both seemed to understand that they could not be the instrument to heal those divisions.
Biden’s short speech to the nation yesterday evening was freighted with sadness. Like Johnson, Biden has never not been a politician. Biden was in his final year of law school when Johnson gave his withdrawal speech. He was elected to the New Castle County Council roughly two years later, and to the U.S. Senate two years after that. Politics helped give him purpose in the face of personal tragedy—the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident, in 1972; the death of his son Beau, from brain cancer, in 2015.
Will Biden experience the sense of release that Johnson did? For Johnson, it was momentary. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. The rest of 1968 unspooled in anger, protest, violence. The Vietnam peace talks bogged down. And retirement, when it came, did not prove easy. Leo Janos, a former White House speechwriter, contributed a haunting account to The Atlantic of Johnson’s postpresidential life on the LBJ Ranch, in Texas, where Johnson faced more health issues and struggled to come to terms with his exile from politics. “He wanted so much for what he had done to be remembered,” Goodwin recalled.
Biden has a lot to be remembered for, too. But legacies are slippery. It can take decades to appreciate their value, and the country may squander them anyway. One thing can be said for sure: Whatever Joe Biden does when he leaves office, he will not be driving around a 350-acre spread in Delaware checking on his cattle.