1968: Could LBJ have won if he stayed in the race?

Politics & Elections
21

COULD Johnson have won? Sure. I just think he was feeling tired, beaten and broken. His heart just wasn’t in politics any more. LBJ didn’t live that long after leaving office, you know. Doctors may not agree whether it’s possible to die of a broken heart, but LBJ may have done just that.

Johnson was a complicated man- both a tyrannical egomaniac and an idealist who wanted to be loved. In 1964, he was on top of the world! He’d been all but unanimously re-elected and was ruling over the world’s richest, most powerful, most admired country. He had just ended segregation and ushered in a new era for civil rights. He imagined he was now going to get the love he always craved.

By 1968, that dream was gone. He was the most despised man in the world, and he knew he’d be remembered NOT for the 1964 Civil Rights Act but for My Lai and the Tonkin Gulf. If he’d been a heartless, amoral cynic and willing to fight for his political life, he MIGHT have hung in there and pulled it off. But he wasn’t JUST an amoral cynic.

22

He died just after Nixon’s second inauguration, which was enough to kill anyone.

He did have the satisfaction of seeing Nixon supplant him in the hierarchy of hate. Take what people feel today about Trump and about the people who aid and abet Trump and vote for Trump and multiply that by 1000. That was Nixon in his second term for the rest of the country.

23

I’m not saying Nixon was a strong candidate in '68, nor that the Democrats were poised to lose no matter what in '68. Just that Johnson was not going to win.

Johnsons policies had become very unpopular with the public and Congress. He was already getting his ass handed to him in the primaries. Had he somehow pulled off the nomination he still would have lost in November.

The incumbent thing would have worked against him not with him. Getting 3 wins in a row is difficult for any party at any point of history. Now add that to a President who’s popularity and support are going down the tubes. I just don’t see him able to win under any scenario.

24

Whoa, wrong.

I remember draft card burning ceremonies as well as anti-draft/war protest on the news probably every night following footage of the war in Viet Nam. I was in college in San Diego and there wasn’t a wall in that school that didn’t have anti-war material on it. I remember the SD police becoming violent against fellow students and the “Police beat off mob” headlines the next day in the paper all because the students wouldn’t disburse (on campus). Maybe in Muskogee they weren’t protesting, but every other fucking place with a college in it they were. I can’t ever remember one person, other than those from the government, ever supporting the war.

The Vietnamese have said one of the reasons they continued the war was due to the high level of civil unrest it was causing in the US. They knew the US couldn’t withstand the internal pressure and eventually they would be successful.

25

At the time, yes. The war was incredibly unpopular. Of course you wouldn’t know it from reading your current Facebook feed, hardly a day goes by that you don’t see a post saying how much we should appreciate Vietnam vets. Yeah, right. Without them we would have lost the war. But back then there was no patriotic correctness. Back then people actually questioned military adventurism. Back then people actually thought about the issues. Nowadays, running on perpetual war is an electoral winner. But not in 1968.

26

That’s not why we should appreciate Vietnam vets. We should appreciate and respect them because the government fucked them over.

27

I agree that the government should definitely honor any agreements that they had regarding training, medical care and the like. Not only that, many got exposed to some pretty wicked toxins. I’ll be happy to vote for any candidate that wants to make things right by them. But in my opinion, this retroactive gushing over them is often way over the top.

28

This is the perfect argument - for my side. Of course, colleges were protesting. (Not all, of course. Just the ones we prefer to remember.) What was the result? The people hated that. Nixon promised “law and order” and they thought that was the best thing ever. (“Police beat off mob” i.e. hooray for the police: the attitude of the vast majority of newspapers in the country back when they still swayed attitudes by the way they reported things.) They’re exactly the same people, often literally, who voted for the promise of a border wall. The anti-war movement accomplished exactly nothing. (Yes, I was part of it. I learned my lesson, like everyone else, after Kent State, when we shut down hundreds of colleges and the country shrugged.)

It’s true that polls showed a majority of Americans against the war, by which they meant against the growing death announcements. It’s also true that Nixon had a “secret plan” to end the war and thought that was a good political strategy. That he could get away with it was predicated on the fact that he wasn’t running against Johnson. Johnson had essentially admitted that he was wrong on the war when he withdrew. As an active campaigner his plans would have carried enormous weight, far more than a mere candidate. Remember, this was 50 years before Trump proclaimed that he knew better than the generals and it would all be so easy to get things done. People didn’t know the depths of lying that a President would sink to because Nixon hadn’t be in office yet.

29

I disagree with **Expano’s **conclusion, but I have to agree that the Silent Majority was opposed to the McCarthy-McGovern antiwar sentiment.

Of course we remember protest on college campuses. But we’re forgetting college students didn’t even have the right to vote (18-year olds didn’t get the vote until 1971!)

The polls at the time showed the public swinging toward an anti-war position. Were the people who opposed the war registered voters? I don’t know, but I know Nixon sold the public on his Secret Plan to end the war. Humphrey was stuck with Johnson’s position. Nixon won.

30

I think the key point is that Nixon’s campaign promise was that he had a secret plan to end the war. And he won.

If the majority of the public supported the war in 1968, Nixon wouldn’t have won with a promise to end it.

31

Not a chance, even if he’d had the stomach for it by then.

32

I think LBJ could’ve won, but it would’ve been tough. The advantages of incumbency were considerable, even for an unpopular LBJ by then. He had considerable liabilities but also great strengths. He was a far more skilled politician than Nixon, who only very narrowly beat Humphrey that fall. And for those who say Johnson’s heart wasn’t in it, IIRC Bill Moyers, among others, wrote that after RFK’s assassination LBJ seriously considered getting back into the race. He was a political animal down to his toenails and really would have preferred to stay in the Oval Office if he could.

Longtime political journalist and occasional novelist Tom Wicker wrote what we would now call an alternative-history novel, which I can’t find on Amazon or through Google, very early in the 1968 campaign. I read it in college. He posited that

[spoiler]LBJ stayed in the race all along, realized he needed Bobby to win, and offered to make him his running mate. Bobby, loathing LBJ, but ambitious and eager to maintain a Kennedy role at the highest levels, accepted. (Humphrey was, much to his chagrin, sidelined as Secretary of State).

The Republicans, after a convention long deadlocked between Nixon and Reagan, finally and exhaustedly turned to John Lindsay, the then-popular liberal GOP Mayor of NYC, as their nominee. He chose Texas Sen. John Tower, a conservative, as his running mate (Tower is best-known today, if at all, as GHWB’s failed Defense nominee in 1989).

After a hard-fought campaign, the Electoral College didn’t give a majority to either major-party candidate (I think Wallace was the spoiler), and the election of the President went to the House. Neither LBJ nor Lindsay could win there, either, due to the partisan balance of the House. The Senate, still dominated by Democrats, elected Bobby as VP, and he became Acting President with the House still deadlocked.

Farfetched, but an interesting book![/spoiler]

33

Updating this thread there is an interesting article on how Nixon sabotaged Johnson’s peace efforts:
When a Candidate Conspired With a Foreign Power to Win An Election
It took decades to unravel Nixon’s sabotage of Vietnam peace talks. Now, the full story can be told.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461

34

See my link in post #20.

35

There is no way in hell LBJ could have won in 1968.

You gotta understand that very, very, very few people in recorded history have the kinds of political instincts that Lyndon B Johnson had. This guy knew how to play political poker better than just about anyone he ever faced. When LBJ resigned it’s because he didn’t want to suffer through the disgrace of losing a primary to RFK. He knew it was going to happen. And LBJ’s party went nuclear Bernie Bro (or RFK bro or hippy Bro) on him in 1968 before Bernie Bros even existed. Landslide Lyndon knew this was one race he wasn’t going to win. He didn’t want to suffer the disgrace of losing.

36

He didn’t resign though.

37

Well, that’s late night glass of wine speech for ‘He didn’t run for a 2nd term’…which is kinda like a resignation for an incumbent president, eh?

38

This is largely the way I see it too. When it comes to 1960’s politics the combined political wisdom of this forum hardly comes close to LBJ’s wisdom of his contemporary period. If LBJ believed he couldn’t win then im gonna assume he probably couldn’t win, and no recent graduate with a politics degree will convince me otherwise.

39

No, it’s nothing alike really. Resignation is leaving office before the term is up. Did Truman resign when he declined to run in 1952? Did Polk resign when he didn’t run for a second term? Coolidge?

It’s often forgotten that in large part LBJ didn’t run again because he did not think he would live through a second term, and didn’t want America to have to go through another President dying in office again. And look, he died two days after his third term would’ve ended anyway, without the stress of running a war or a country on his back. He had an actuarial study done in 1967 which said he would likely die at age 64, which he did.

40

I’m not debating that ‘resign’ was a poor choice of words and wrong. What I was getting at and meant to say instead was that he left the office voluntarily, which is something most incumbents finishing a first term don’t do.

I hadn’t known that, actually. Interesting stuff.