Back in 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not be seeking reelection to a second term. Then, as with President Joe Biden’s similar announcement on Sunday, the news sent shockwaves across the U.S.
No one knows this story better than author and historian Mark Updegrove, president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. He joined the Standard to put Biden’s decision into historical context. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What was your reaction when you first heard the news about President Biden yesterday?
Mark Updegrove: Well, I was pleased. I think it was the right thing to do for the country, for history, for Joe Biden’s legacy and a very, very difficult decision to make.
I know we’ll talk about LBJ in a moment, but this is somebody who has had more political experience than any president we’ve ever had – 36 years in the Senate, eight years in the vice presidency, three plus years in the presidency. Had captured the ultimate political prize, had gone on to win his party’s nomination for another term as president unchallenged by members of his party, and has to give it up because of the effects of old age.
So it’s got to be an enormously difficult decision. But you have to give Joe Biden enormous credit for, I think, again, doing the right thing. It really shows his ability to put the needs of the nation above his own concerns.
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Was President Lyndon Johnson, back in 1968, under similar pressure from fellow Democrats to withdraw from the presidential race, or no?
Well, he was being challenged by members of his own party.
Eugene McCarthy, notably, was on the ballot in New Hampshire. Lyndon Johnson, notably, was not on the ballot, but got 46% of the vote anyway as a write-in candidate. But Eugene McCarthy got 40% of the vote as an antiwar candidate. It showed the divisions in the party.
Bobby Kennedy, seeing that result, threw his hat in the ring as well. Of course, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated later in the year, but there were fissures in the Democratic Party. I don’t think that anyone was calling for LBJ to step aside. There wasn’t a great deal of…
Public dissent?
Yeah, well, I would say there was certainly public dissent around the war.
But what about among Democrats?
I think, again, you could see splits in the party. Without question, there were prominent members of the party who were antiwar at that time.
Focusing on those fissures then in ’68 as now in 2024, Democrats were headed to Chicago for their convention with the then-vice president considered by some to be the leading candidate, but the nomination still unsettled as the convention got underway.
You think about the parallels: There was a member of the Kennedy family seeking the presidency in ’68 – of course, he was shot and killed during campaigning. Student protests over U.S. foreign policy – another parallel. In what sort of position do Democrats today find themselves compared to ’68, do you think?
I think it’s a little different. You could see yesterday there was a major effort to coalesce around the support of Kamala Harris as the the logical nominee, as the heir apparent.
You didn’t have that quite so evidently in 1968. You know, Hubert Humphrey was the establishment candidate at the time. I think there was some controversy, particularly among young people, around that.
But I think that our divisions are not around a war as they were in 1968. They’re really political. They’re very tribal. So it’s really political divisions that mark this time, not so much divisions around a war that has become a quagmire.
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I guess for all the coincidences or all the softer lines that you could draw between now and ’68, are there any more broad-stroke lessons from that year for today’s politics, and perhaps for Democrats more broadly?
Well, let me talk about the similarities, and the similarities are abundant.
You had political violence. You just talked about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King had been assassinated just two months earlier. And of course, we saw the attempted assassination on former President Trump’s life just a couple of weeks ago. So there’s the political violence.
There are the marked divisions in our country – some of them political, some otherwise – but major cultural, social, political divisions …
Of people, really.
Absolutely. There’s no question about that. But I think the lesson we should derive from 1968 is that we survived. It rocked our country to its very foundations. And yet we came out of it ultimately strong. It took a while, but there was a time in 1968 when people thought … LBJ notably called it the “The Nightmare Year.” But we came out of it, and I think we can come out of this stronger, too.
The other major difference, and this can’t be underestimated enough, is that our democracy was not under threat. And I think there are major threats to our democracy today. You see a Democratic Party sort of staying the course and you see a Republican Party going in a markedly different direction.