The impulse to seek lessons from history is wise, but the lessons are only as good as the history.
President Biden’s alarming failures during his debate Thursday with former president Donald Trump confirmed what a majority of Americans already held to be true: At 81, the incumbent is too old for a second four-year term. But some overcautious commentators have drawn a lesson from 1968 to suggest that Biden would sow chaos were he to drop out now.
But that’s a misreading of that admittedly chaotic year. The late decision by an incumbent president to stand aside was actually the most popular, most unifying moment in an ugly series of divisive events.
Lyndon B. Johnson had won the 1964 election in one of the greatest landslides of American history. By 1968, however, the war in Vietnam — and the rising inflation that accompanied it — had eaten away much of Johnson’s popularity. Then, on Jan. 30, North Vietnam and its Viet Cong allies launched an offensive in the south to further escalate the war.
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Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who as a young aide to Johnson had a front-row seat on 1968, follows the timeline in her recent memoir, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.” “By the end of March,” she writes, “the president’s approval; rating had dropped to 36 percent, the lowest of his career.” (Biden’s most recent rating, according to Gallup, was 38 percent.)
That’s when Johnson surprised the nation by taking himself out of the 1968 campaign, after his own embarrassing wake-up call in the form of a dismal showing in the New Hampshire primary. A lifelong politician — like Biden, LBJ had served in the Senate, as vice president and in the Oval Office — Johnson lived for the competition and loved the stump. The public understood that quitting did not come naturally or comfortably to him.
Goodwin channels the response when she writes that “Johnson had done something extraordinary by putting the country above his own ambitions.” And she documents the overwhelmingly positive reaction. “Overnight, the national political landscape was turned upside-down. A Harris Poll the day after the president’s speech registered this reversal, flipping from 57 percent disapproval to 57 percent approval. …
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“One editorial after another applauded the president’s renunciation,” the author continues. “The Washington Post pronounced that LBJ ‘has made a personal sacrifice in the name of national unity that entitles him to a very special place in the annals of American history.’”
Johnson’s decision to honor the public mood and take himself off the ballot was hugely popular. Far from sending the system into chaos, it gave Americans an event to applaud and a leader to approve of. Johnson bathed in the warmth, enjoying “the happiest week of his presidency and possibly of his public career,” Goodwin quotes his speechwriter Horace Busby observing.
How did this happy interlude come to be associated with chaos and upheaval? Days after Johnson’s announcement, on April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis — a crime that had nothing to do with Johnson’s decision, but which whipsawed the national mood. Violent protests, leading to widespread looting and arson, erupted that night in D.C. and cities across the country.
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The awful conjunction with King’s assassination obscures the proper lesson of 1968 for Biden and his supporters. Johnson’s decision to leave the race scrambled politics in his party’s favor. The president’s approval rating went immediately from low to high. And it jump-started a brisk race to pick up Johnson’s baton that appeared to be settling in favor of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (N.Y.) when, in early June, Kennedy, too, was assassinated.
The mayhem and bloodshed had nothing to do with Johnson’s abdication, but they curdled the mood of the briefly relieved electorate and allowed the “law and order” candidate Richard M. Nixon to eke out a win over LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey.
Fourteen presidential election cycles later, the world, and American politics, have changed in important ways. Yet Biden can still expect that his willingness to set aside his own ambitions for the good of the country, as Johnson did, would result in a similar outpouring of admiration and gratitude. His willingness to hear and heed the message of the public would turn his approval ratings upside down, and jump-start a brisk and exciting race to choose one of many fresh faces in the Democratic Party ready to pick up his baton.
We can be thankful that 2024 is not a replay of 1968. Our leaders are not being murdered and our cities are not in flames. Because of these differences, Joe Biden can emulate LBJ without courting chaos. Biden can finish the noble work that was denied to Lyndon B. Johnson — healing the country and lifting his party to victory, through an admirable act of self-awareness and courage.
