Skip to main content

Time Machine

March 2023
1min read

… Exit LBJ

Lyndon Johnson had considered giving up his pursuit of a second term long before he actually did it, in a surprise ending to a nationally televised speech on March 31. The advance press copy of Johnson’s address contained his announcement of a halt to bombing in North Vietnam and proposals on American troop levels—dramatic stuff by itself—but gave no warning that the troubled President would then read on to say, “With American sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge here at home, with our hopes … for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes. … Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Johnson’s address had started out as a part of his re-election effort. With his proposals for de-escalation in Vietnam, the President hoped to unbalance McCarthy’s single-issue campaign as well as to counter the long-dreaded candidacy of Robert Kennedy, who entered suddenly on March 16. He was announcing finally, declared the senator from New York, not “merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies … and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all I can.” Kennedy had also been watching the Republican polls and, seeing Nelson Rockefeller weakening, relished the idea of thrashing Richard Nixon in a November race.

None of the dozen or so drafts of Johnson’s speech had even hinted at his quitting the race. He had given his alternate ending to the speech to the Teleprompter operator an hour before airtime. Only a handful of people knew he might use it, one of them his wife, at whom he glanced before reading out the final section. The President had been polling his staff on his own viability as a candidate for at least a year, but more increasingly after the Tet Offensive of January 30. Staffers in the White House remembered him occasionally patting his shirt pocket in response to some fresh attack and saying, “I got my resignation right here in my pocket.”

When the President made his announcement, McCarthy was speaking in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and got the news from his audience. The exuberant scene later reminded him of “Orestes being smothered by the Eumenides,” he said. Senator Kennedy, whose campaign to oust Johnson was merely two weeks old, found himself suddenly without a target. “I don’t know what I can do now,” he confessed. “It’s no fun attacking Nixon so early in the game.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "February/march 1993"

Authored by: The Editors

Jno. Trlica’s photographs of Granger, Texas

Authored by: The Editors

The First Flight

Authored by: The Editors

Trouble in Paradise

Authored by: The Editors

Spring Forward, Fall Back

Authored by: The Editors

“Barnyard Marriage”

Authored by: The Editors

Swashbuckler

Authored by: The Editors

Enter Clean Gene …

Authored by: The Editors

… Exit LBJ

Authored by: Jill Jonnes

One man invented the modern narcotics industry

Authored by: John Steele Gordon

It opened fifty years ago and changed Broadway forever

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.