President Johnson shocked the nation when he announced he would not run for a second full term—but the First Lady had seen the decision coming for years.
It was at the end of a nearly 40-minute televised speech that President Lyndon Johnson shocked the nation with his words: “With American sons in the field far away, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office…. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Johnson had become President following the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963 and had won election to a full term in a 1964 landslide; the expectation was that he would run for the second full term that the constitution allowed him. The primaries had already begun. His March 31, 1968, announcement made Johnson one of only a handful of U.S. Presidents to decline to run again. As Democrats today debate whether President Joe Biden should make a similar decision, that most recent historical example is once again top of mind for some voters.
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The story of Johnson’s choice is also an illustration of how a First Lady can play a most powerful role, especially when a President is making consequential decisions. In 1968, as he weighed whether to run or not, President Johnson, as he always had, “looked to Lady Bird first and foremost to give counsel on the most important decisions of his life and presidency,” says Mark Updegrove, President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation and and author of Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency.
In fact, Lyndon and Lady Bird had been having the conversation about running again since as early as six months after LBJ first became President. When the complicated, paradoxical man from Texas faced depression and doubts about making the 1964 run for the Presidency, he put Lady Bird in charge of helping him decide.
In mid-May of 1964, she arranged for two of her husband’s doctors, Lyndon’s personal physician and his cardiologist, to come for dinner in Huntland, Va., for a discussion about the President’s physical and emotional health. The night before, she’d had a tough phone conversation with her husband, who was in a deep funk, concerned about Vietnam and its impact on his domestic agenda. He was pondering leaving public life and turned to her as his trusted partner, someone who knew him better than anyone, and who was an experienced and knowledgeable Washington hand. He asked her to write a memo outlining what she titled, “if you run vs. if you don’t.”
When the two doctors arrived that evening at Huntland, Lady Bird handed them an envelope for the President marked “personal, please,” which contained the seven-page document weighing the pros and cons of an election bid.
After the meal, daughters Lynda and Luci retreated to a game of Crazy Eights while Lady Bird and the doctors went back to the sitting room for more talk about the President’s political future and the “phycological [sic] aspects of a medical exam, which was to take place the next morning,” as she recorded in the audio diary she kept. All 123 hours of that audio diary are now available via the LBJ Library.
She also recorded a summary of their thinking: “Both thought that inaction, idleness, lack of command, would be a harder role for him than the long hours and heavy responsibility he now shoulders.” But she feared that neither one of his doctors “understands the depth of his pain, when and if he faces up to the possibility of sending many thousands of American boys to Viet-Nam or some other place.”
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The President’s political outlook was not the only concern. His health had always been a major worry. “This goes unrecognized by many folks,” says Updegrove,. “Lyndon Johnson had a congenital heart issue—inherited a bad heart from both his father and grandfather, both of whom had died in their early 60s.” The President had suffered a heart attack just before he turned 47 years old in 1955, “which sidelined him for about six months. He knew how perilous his health was… and he did not want to put the country through the health crisis that Franklin Roosevelt had put the country through,” says Updegrove.
Lady Bird’s memo started with a draft of an announcement that he would not run for election just “in case he wanted to use it.”
“I wish to spend the rest of my life in my home state, in peace with my family, for whom the rigors of my duties have left me too little time for companionship. This decision is made easier by the fact that I can feel my conduct of the Presidency, which came in such a tragic hour of national rending, has not been without some solid accomplishment.”
But, though she fleshed out various possibilities for the 1964 campaign, Lady Bird was clear that she wanted the President to run and to be elected in his own right. She said of the draft, in her audio diary, “I hope he won’t use it—that’s that!” But she went a step further and advised that after a full term, should he win in ’64, it might be advisable to exit political life by 1968. She wrote in the memo that he would turn a “mellow 60” at the end of the term and concluded, “I believe the juices of life will be stilled enough to let you come home in relative peace and acceptance. (We may even have grand-children!).”
She predicted a mixed outcome if he did not run: “We will probably return to the ranch, and he will enjoy the country he loves, and me, and Lynda and Luci, more than we ever had, and that will be good for all of us.” But she warned that the political fallout could be devastating. “There would be a wave…of hollow disappointment and ‘You let us down, Lyndon,’ among those people who really look to him as the best candidate of the Democratic party.”
“She was unbelievably incisive, and she also knew Lyndon Johnson as well as anybody,” says Updegrove. “She felt her role was first and foremost to manage the emotional turmoil in her husband so that the country got the most from him as president.”
Johnson did run in 1964 and won the election in a landslide with 61% of the vote. But over the years, the war in Vietnam had divided the nation; 1968 would see the highest American death toll in a single year. His approval rating had declined, and the health worries were ever present.
By the morning of March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s mind was made up. This time, he would not seek re-election. When Lady Bird went to the president’s bedroom at the White House that morning, she found him still in his pajamas, tearful. “When I went back into Lyndon’s room, he was crying,” she would recall. “It’s the first time since [his mother] died that I have seen him cry. But he didn’t have time to cry. Today was a crescendo of a day.”
The President decided to attend church services with daughter Luci and son-in-law Pat Nugent. Following the service, they stopped at the apartment of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The President had a private word with his Veep and showed him the draft of the speech he would be making at 9 pm. Humphrey was in shock as he learned for the first time that the President was not running—and that he himself would be the one mounting a campaign.
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Lady Bird described the busy White House morning: “Sometime during the morning Buzz [speechwriter Horace Busby] came in, took up his place in the Treaty Room and began to work on the speech. I had spent a good part of Saturday, and some on Friday, working on it myself….read it over again, for what was the umpteenth time.”
Lady Bird and two of their closest family friends, Arthur and Mathilde Krim, were in Lyndon’s bedroom when he read the statement to them and asked what they thought. “The four of us had talked about this over and over,” recalled Lady Bird. “But somehow we all acted and felt stunned. Maybe it was more of a calm finality in Lyndon’s voice, and maybe we believed him for the first time.”
Julia Sweig writes in Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, that Lady Bird posed a question to her husband. “Given how polarizing a figure he had become in a now-splintered nation, could LBJ possibly be the only one to unify the country?”
Lady Bird asked him, “Suppose someone else were elected president. What could Mr. X do that you could not?” The President’s answer: “Unite the country and start getting things done.”
“I salute him for being clearheaded enough to see that,” says Updegrove. “Health reasons were certainly paramount, but I think he also saw it was not his moment in history.”
Family members and advisers joined the President in the Oval Office for the speech. Lady Bird viewed it as “his best speech, nobly done, and almost, in its way, as dramatic as our entrance into this job.”
Julia Sweig observes that Jill Biden’s support over the course of President Biden’s career is a close parallel to Lady Bird’s outlook. “Not just because they had similar roles as senate spouse, second lady, and then First Lady, but also because, as did Lyndon Johnson, Joe talks about her a lot,” Sweig says. “He recognizes publicly her significance.”
The undefined nature of the First Lady’s role, argues Sweig, means that those in the position often fly under the radar, only to rise to “massive significance” in the moments that matter most. Today, “Jill Biden has so much power…more than any of the advisors, more so than Nancy Pelosi, more so than 100 Senators,” says Sweig. “She and President Biden are the only two people that matter.”
