President Biden isn't the first incumbent to end his re-election bid. In 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson also chose to walk away.
Why did Johnson drop out?
In March 1968, the Texas Democrat was in a tight spot. A shrewd and colorful former Senate majority leader and vice president, he had assumed the presidency following the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the following year had won election to a full term in a landslide. With large Democratic majorities in Congress, Johnson had a remarkably productive run, passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Medicare and Medicaid, and a slate of social programs for what he called the Great Society. But by 1968, his domestic wins had been eclipsed by growing anger over the Vietnam War, in which some 500 Americans were dying every week. In February of that year, military brass asked Johnson to boost the U.S. troop deployment in Vietnam from 500,000 to 700,000, even as advisers privately cautioned that the war was unwinnable. The next month, Eugene McCarthy, a little-known anti-war Minnesota senator, pulled a stunning 42 percent in New Hampshire's primary, to Johnson's 50. Four days later, Robert F. Kennedy — JFK's younger brother and a longtime LBJ nemesis — joined the race. With his approval ratings at a dismal 36 percent, Johnson "was facing a precarious political situation," said former aide Doris Kearns Goodwin. He also had personal reasons for wanting out.
What were those reasons?
Johnson, 59, was worried about his health. He had suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1955, and knew that heart disease had killed other Johnson men in their early 60s. "He did not want to put the country through the health crisis that Franklin Roosevelt had put the country through," said Mark Updegrove, head of the LBJ Foundation. Yet "the biggest reason to do it is just one thing," LBJ told speechwriter Horace Busby. "I want out of this cage." After going back and forth on quitting the race, he took the plunge during a prime-time address on March 31, 1968. Johnson spoke for 40 minutes about Vietnam, calling on the North Vietnamese to enter talks to bring "this ugly war to an end." Then he said that "with America's sons in the fields far away," he did not believe it right to devote his attention "to any personal partisan causes" other than "the awesome duties of this office." And so, he explained, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."
How was the speech received?
With utter shock. The announcement landed like a "Pearl Harbor in politics," said then-Rep. Wright Patman (D-Texas). Johnson was lauded in newspaper editorials: The Washington Post, a fierce critic of his Vietnam policy, praised his "personal sacrifice in the name of national unity." Opponents of the war were overjoyed, and LBJ's approval rating shot up to 57 percent. But celebrations were short-lived. On April 4, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot on a Memphis motel balcony, triggering a wave of riots that engulfed American cities. Amid the unrest, Kennedy and McCarthy battled in the primaries, and Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, announced his candidacy, further dividing the party. At the time, many states held no primaries and candidates needed the backing of state party bosses to win delegates. Humphrey sat out the primaries and put his focus there. In June, Kennedy was fatally shot moments after winning the California primary, the nomination within reach. South Dakota Sen. George McGovern picked up his mantle and entered the race — which would be decided at the Democrats' August convention in Chicago.
What happened at the convention?
The tension, anger, and unrest that had been building for years across the nation exploded in "a week of hate," said photojournalist Dennis Brack, who covered the event. Tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators descended on Chicago, and Democratic Mayor Richard Daley deployed all of the city's 12,000 police, backed by 6,000 National Guardsmen and 1,000 intelligence agents. Amid orders from Daley to give no quarter, police used billy clubs and tear gas; beatings were caught on TV cameras, appalling many viewers. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite called police "thugs," and Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D-Mass.) denounced their "Gestapo tactics" from the dais. Daley then stood up and allegedly shouted at Ribicoff, "F--- you, you Jew son-of-a-bitch." Even within the convention hall, McCarthy delegates were manhandled by police, and CBS reporter Mike Wallace was slugged in the face on camera. Vice President Humphrey — who supported escalation in Vietnam and who hadn't entered a single primary — received the nomination as enraged protesters rioted outside.
How did the election play out?
Humphrey left Chicago the candidate of a deeply divided party. And the scenes of chaos at the convention gave a boost to "law and order" Republican candidate Richard Nixon. Nixon beat Humphrey in the popular vote by less than a percentage point, with independent George Wallace, a Southern segregationist, taking 13 percent. But he won handily in the Electoral College, 301 to 191. Nixon, who'd pledged to seek "an honorable end" to the war, kept the U.S. in Vietnam. By the time the last American troops left Saigon in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans had died in the war. Johnson returned to Texas, where he died of a heart attack in January 1973, at age 64. That same month a 30-year-old from Delaware was sworn in for his first term in the U.S. Senate: Joseph R. Biden.
Truman's exit
Sixteen years before LBJ gave his withdrawal speech, another Democratic incumbent stood down amid an unpopular war. Like Johnson, President Harry Truman was a vice president who rose to the top job, after Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945. Truman served three years, then won a second term in 1948 — and could have run again, being grandfathered in under the recently passed 22nd Amendment, which set a two-term limit. But his stewardship of the Korean War, which was mired in a stalemate, sent his approval ratings cratering to 22 percent, and he lost the 1952 New Hampshire primary to Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Two weeks later, Truman announced his retirement. Kefauver won 12 of 16 primaries, but was supplanted at the Democratic convention by Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, who subsequently lost to Republican Dwight Eisenhower, a celebrated World War II general. Truman expressed no regrets: To hang on to office was to "start down the road to dictatorship and ruin," he said. But he understood why some might cling on. "There is a lure in power," he wrote. "It can get into a man's blood."
