HEY HEY LBJ: A PRESIDENT’S DECISION NOT TO RUN RESONATES TODAY

It was a Sunday, the 31st of March fifty-two years ago, 1968. I was in my last year of high school, already halfway out the door to college. The Vietnam war was a concern, but knowing I’d been offered scholarships, and would spend the next four years deferred from the draft, it was not an immediate worry. On that quiet spring evening President Lyndon B. Johnson was about to address the nation on television. I was watching it alone, but I began to shout to my family once the import of his now-famous words sank in. “…accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

‘We’ had toppled a president! Eugene McCarthy’s strong second place finish in the New Hampshire primary, backed by Vietnam protesters dubbed ‘the Children’s Crusade’, had shown LBJ he would have to endure a battle to get what should have been, as a sitting president, an automatic nomination. Though he spoke of unity and his concentrating on finding a solution for the Vietnam War, those words rang hollow. I was celebrating. LBJ was a favourite of my grandfather, who was a long-time Democratic party hack. Ten years earlier Grandpa had come back from a ‘Jefferson-Jackson’ fund-raiser at which then-Senator Johnson spoke, and given me an LBJ-autographed programme. ‘This man will be president some day,’ he told me. LBJ fulfilled my grandad’s prophecy, but now change was coming. Johnson would be gone. A war would be over.

Of course, that did not happen. Change came, but in none of the ways I’d…