What Biden Can Learn From LBJ’s Decision to Drop Out in 1968

Lady Bird Johnson could see the tears on her husband’s face. It was the morning of March 31, 1968, and Lyndon B. Johnson was still lying in his White House bedroom. His presidency was falling apart. His domestic record—once rightly acclaimed as the greatest of any president since Franklin Roosevelt—had been overshadowed by violence in the nation’s cities and public anger over his prosecution of the Vietnam War.

Two weeks earlier, Robert F. Kennedy, an old and bitter Johnson enemy, had launched a campaign to be the Democratic Party’s nominee in the coming presidential election. Johnson had long dreamed of the great things he could accomplish in a second full term. (He’d won his first full term in November 1964—11 months after assuming the presidency following the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas.) But some of his closest advisers were now cautioning that he might well lose the presidency if he ran for reelection.

As he lay there despondent in his bedroom that March morning, Johnson’s “face was sagging,” Lady Bird later recalled. “There was such pain in his eyes as I had not seen since his mother died.”

That night, the world would find out why. At 9 p.m., Johnson was to deliver a live address from the Oval Office on the state of the war effort. Just before the camera started rolling, Lady Bird whispered in his ear, “Remember…pacing and drama.”

At the speech’s end, the drama came: “With American sons in the field far away,” Johnson said, “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office…. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

It’s been 56 years since Johnson shocked the world with those words, but they suddenly feel alarmingly fresh. After all, so many of the things that made 1968 an electric and terrifying year have now been revived in ghastly 2024 form. There are the protests on college campuses. There is the insurgent presidential candidacy of a man named Bobby Kennedy. There is the Democratic convention, planned once again for August in Chicago, with the potential for chaotic revolt. And there is—gulp—the gnawing sense that the fabric of American life is coming apart.

And now, after Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance in last Thursday’s debate, there is the same urgent question that haunted Democrats in the spring of 1968: What does it take to convince an accomplished, and obstinate, sitting president to give up on running for another term in office?

It’s a vexing problem because it requires asking Biden to override the essential elements of any elite politician’s nature—his ambition, his perseverance, and his unflagging, perhaps irrational, belief in himself. But the example of 1968, the only time in the last 70 years that a sitting president eligible to run for another term chose not to, should offer hope. If Johnson, as primal a political animal as ever resided in the White House, was coaxed away from an ill-fated reelection bid, perhaps Biden can be too.

The analogy, as Biden’s diehards will hasten to point out, is far from perfect. Johnson was running in the last days of the old party system, when candidates won nomination at the conventions—wooing delegates on the floor and party bosses in smoke-filled rooms. As Johnson deliberated over dropping out of the race that March, five months remained before Democratic delegates would choose their 1968 nominee. His fate remained very much in the hands of his party. Biden, who clinched the requisite delegates nearly four months ago, knows that the nomination is his and his alone.

If anything, Biden’s defenders might point to 1968 as a cautionary tale. Johnson’s withdrawal that spring presaged an extended season of progressive infighting that crescendoed in scenes of terrible violence outside the Democratic convention that summer. It doesn’t take much to imagine history repeating itself on the streets of Chicago this summer, should Biden throw open the nomination fight a mere six weeks before Democrats are set to convene there.

Still, the similarities between the two embattled presidents shed light on the right and wrong ways to convince Biden to let go. Johnson’s agonized decision to bow out was rooted in his deeply held identity as a serious statesman-politician. Any effort to get Biden to step aside must be too.

Both Biden and Johnson were old-school politicians, shaped by their glory days in the US Senate. There they learned to disdain flashy public performers; the real power players, they understood, were the ones who got things done behind the scenes. That’s who they set out to be.

Over time, Johnson’s idea of himself as the ultimate workhorse shaped his understanding of the tribulations and resurrections in his own political career. He was forever traumatized by his tenure as John F. Kennedy’s vice president, when the president’s urbane inner circle mocked him as a Texas rube and banished him from the councils of power. Catapulted into the presidency after Kennedy’s death, he obsessed over proving that, while the Camelot crowd could talk about transformational change, he was the one who could get it done.

Biden, too, was scarred by his vice presidency when Barack Obama’s aides rolled their eyes at him and, in Biden’s team’s view, failed to appreciate the essential counsel he provided a novice president. He will never get over 2016, when Obama nudged him to clear a path for Hillary Clinton. Nor has he forgotten 2020, when sophisticates disdained his primary candidacy only for him to go on to win the nomination and defeat Donald Trump.

Biden may well view the post-debate freak-out as yet another moment when he’s being wrongly counted out by elites. In that mindset, editorials in prestige publications, however well-argued, may actually encourage him to dig in his heels.

That was usually how it worked for Johnson. In 1965, Frank Church, a Democratic senator from Idaho, publicly broke with the White House over Vietnam. When Johnson called to complain, Church protested that his critique was in line with the recent writings of Walter Lippmann, the preeminent establishment columnist of the day. “Next time you’re in trouble out in Idaho,” Johnson replied icily, “you ask Walter to come help.”

But for all their grievances, old bull politicians like Johnson and Biden pay attention to political reality, particularly when it threatens their image as selfless servants for the greater good. By the spring of 1968, Johnson could see that the divisions over Vietnam had made further domestic accomplishments unlikely. His wife, Lady Bird, helped him to begin imagining another course. “Suppose someone else were elected president,” she asked her husband delicately in March. “What could Mr. X do that you could not?” Three weeks later, Johnson announced his decision not to run.

Likewise, Biden will consider dropping out only when he begins to believe in the possibility that another candidate really does have a better chance than him of defeating Donald Trump. When, and if, he gets there, Biden will need his own loved ones to help him see that stepping aside is the noblest course. When her husband finished his address to the nation that night in 1968, Lady Bird embraced him. Later, in her diary, she speculated on what people thought of the speech. “Those who love him, must have loved him more,” she observed. “And those who hate him must at least have thought: ‘Here is a man.’”