In the last 75 years, only two Democratic presidents, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, decided during an election year not to run again, surprising the nation by announcing that they would allow fresh candidates to vie for their party’s nomination.
In both cases, the Democrats who became the nominees — Adlai Stevenson, then the governor of Illinois, and Hubert Humphrey, then the vice president — lost the general election to Republicans.
The momentous decisions by Truman, in March 1952, and Johnson, in March 1968, to take themselves out of the game may offer only limited insight into how President Biden’s decision to step aside will reshape the race, and history, given how different the political backdrop was in the early 1950s and late 1960s.
Among Democrats, “worries about history repeating are certainly causing concern,” said Tim Naftali, a presidential historian and faculty scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “But the fact of the matter is, history doesn’t really repeat.”
Today, he added, “the circumstances are quite different.”
Truman, who was 67 when he decided not to seek another term, and Johnson, who was 59, withdrew from their respective races in the middle of primary season, as they struggled to find a way to end grinding, unpopular wars. For Truman, it was Korea. For Johnson, it was Vietnam.
Mr. Truman had ascended to the presidency after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945, and had won a close election in 1948. By 1952, his popularity had dropped to a record low, in part because of the U.S. military’s involvement in Korea and corruption scandals in his administration. That helped nudge him to announce, on March 29, that he would not seek a third term. (Truman was not subject to the 22nd Amendment, which established presidential term limits in 1951, because of a grandfather clause).
Truman’s approval numbers in January 1951 had fallen to 23 percent, compared to Mr. Biden’s current approval rating of 38.5 percent. And yet, much like in 2024, it was inconceivable for some in Truman’s inner circle to imagine anyone else securing the nomination.
“Boss, you’re going to have to run in ’52,” one of Truman’s closest advisers, Harry Vaughan, said to Truman at one point, according to the historian David McCullough’s 1992 biography of Truman. “Who else is there?”
“We’ll get someone,” Truman answered.
For Johnson, trouble came early in the election year of 1968, first with the Tet offensive, in which North Vietnamese and Vietcong combatants launched surprise attacks on South Vietnamese and U.S. forces beginning early on the morning of Jan. 31. Less than a month later, Walter Cronkite aired a CBS special report from Vietnam, opining that the war would end in “stalemate.” It was widely acknowledged as a serious blow to Johnson and the war effort, not least by Johnson himself.
At the end of a speech on March 31, Johnson told the country he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination for re-election.
Unlike Mr. Biden and his family, who for weeks have insisted that he was fit for the job and eager to serve another term, Truman and Johnson expressed doubts about the wisdom of staying on as president. Both were significantly influenced by their wives, who wanted them to leave the job.
“In ’52, Bess Truman wanted Harry to go back, wanted them to go back to Missouri. They did their public service,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and professor at Rice University. “And Lady Bird Johnson thought her husband had been sick, with a heart attack and high blood pressure.”
In 1952, Democrats nominated Stevenson, the Illinois governor, to be their candidate. He was defeated in a landslide by the Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U.S. Army general.
In 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination but was defeated by Richard M. Nixon.
It is impossible, of course, to say whether Truman or Johnson would have fared better if they had stuck with it. But even as incumbents, they would have faced serious challenges. Eisenhower was a revered hero of World War II, and in 1952 there was a sense, even among some Democrats, that the Democratic Party had been in power for too long. Roosevelt’s and Truman’s combined time in office spanned two decades.
In 1968, Vietnam had badly fractured the Democratic Party, and George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist, ended up siphoning away many Southern Democrats in the general election as a third-party nominee.
“Each election,” Mr. Brinkley said, “has a different tone and tenor.”
After leaving the White House in 1953, Truman moved back to his hometown, Independence, Mo. He died in 1972. Johnson returned to his Texas ranch and died in 1973.
The post Truman and Johnson Also Stepped Aside, but ‘the Circumstances Are Quite Different’ appeared first on New York Times.