The messaging from the White House right now is clear: President Biden will stay in the race. However, historical precedent shows that if he did make the difficult decision to withdraw, it wouldn’t be unprecedented. Back in the 1960s during a time of racial and social unrest and the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a similar decision.
Kevin Boyle, a professor of American history at Northwestern University, shared his insights on the parallels between the situations facing both Presidents Johnson and Biden in a recent op-ed for The New York Times with Scripps News. Boyle stated, “The really critical comparison in my mind is that Johnson withdrew from the race in March 1968 for a lot of complicated reasons — personal reasons, political reasons. But at the heart of it, what he was trying to do was to solve this huge complex of escalating crises.”
Boyle further elaborated, “He was trying to defuse what he saw as a huge fundamental threat to the United States. That’s what he thought he could accomplish by stepping out of the race. And I think that in many ways Joe Biden faces a deeper, more existential threat to the nation that even Johnson did. I think that’s where the comparison is: That stepping down for Biden would be an act of sacrifice, of self-sacrifice, for the good of the nation.”
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Boyle pointed out, “What Johnson faced was a combination of a war in Vietnam that was spinning rapidly out of control, a party that was splintering around him, and a financial crisis — a global financial crisis he needed to defuse. Those are huge, huge things. But what Biden faces in my view is the threat to democracy itself that comes with the reelection of Donald Trump.”
