Publicly, he continues to firmly rule out the possibility of a step back, but Joe Biden privately, with trusted advisors and friends, admits that the next few days will be crucial in determining the future of his new candidacy for the White House. If the 81-year-old president does ultimately decide to retire, he will not be the first president to step aside instead of running for reelection.
The most recent precedent is that of Lyndon B. Johnson who shocked the country on March 31, 1968, by surprisingly announcing that he would not seek reelection, speaking from the Oval Office. “With America’s sons on distant battlefields, with America’s future challenged here at home, with our hopes and the hopes of the world at stake every day, I do not believe that I should not devote an hour or a day of my time to a personal or party cause or any other duty than that of the President in office,” Johnson said in his speech originally intended to outline his plan to limit U.S. military operations in Vietnam.
“For that reason, I will not seek or accept the party’s nomination for another term as president,” concluded the Democrat who was sworn in for the first time as president on November 22, 1963 aboard Air Force One parked at Dallas airport, two hours and eight minutes after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In 1964 he was then elected to what was then his first full term, leaving him the possibility of running for a second term in 1968. Something that Johnson, who was born in 1937 in Stonewall, Texas, declined to do when he was not yet 60. He then died of a sudden heart attack at 64, when he had not yet matured the requirements for Social Security, the pension he had strengthened, and Medicare, the public health service for the elderly that he had signed into law.
Unlike Biden, who won the Democratic primaries virtually unopposed, Johnson had several challengers in the race for the nomination at the time he decided to forgo re-election.in an America divided by the Vietnam War and racial tensions. And despite the great social reforms he launched, the Democratic president had arrived at the primaries with a popularity in sharp decline.
With his popularity in sharp decline, Johnson narrowly won the New Hampshire primary in early March against anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy.
But the most alarming political signal for him was his entry, on March 16, into Robert Kennedy’s primary raceJFK’s brother against whom Johnson had already lost the primaries in 1960, then entering as vice president in his ticket. With the president out of the race for the nomination, Bob Kennedy became the front runner in the primaries that he would have won if he had not also been assassinated on June 4, after having won the primaries in California.
According to Mark Updegrove, presidential historian and director of the LBJ Foundation, It was mainly health concerns, rather than internal party splits. “There’s a misconception that LBJ chose not to run again just because of the growing controversy and division over the Vietnam War, which may have been part of it, but the primary concern was his health,” he said in an interview with CNN.
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