Why did LBJ refuse to run in 1968?

[Edwin Ortiz]

MMany have speculated LBJ behind the assassination but why didn't he run again in 68 ? There have been many theories but no definite answers to my knowledge ?

[Jim DiEugenio]

I discuss this in my review of Tom Hanks' documentary 1968: The Year that Changed History.


There are two reasons. First, the Wise Man meeting with Acheson and Bradley among others. This is where Acheson got so fed up with Pentagon disinfo on Vietnam that he walked out. He later insisted on seeing raw reports and talking to on the ground commanders. So after this LBJ sent Clark Clifford over to the Pentagon to do just that. The new Sec Def had been a hawk on the war. After two weeks seeing the real record he became a dove and advised Johnson to find a way out, he was not going to win.

Then, after narrowly beating McCarthy, and then RFK announced he was running, LBJ's support collapsed in Wisconsin, the next primary state. His advisors on the ground told him he was going to actually lose straight up. That was it. Two days before the primary he got on TV and announced he would not run again but try to get a settlement in Vietnam.

He lost the Wisconsin primary by 30 points.

Exaggerating slightly, when you do not know something, go to Kennedysandking.com

[Joseph McBride]

I discuss tis in my review of Tom Hanks' documentary 1968: The Year that Changed History.


There are two reasons. First, the Wise Man meeting with Acheson and Bradley among others. This is where Acheson got so fed up with Pentagon disinfo on Vietnam that he walked out. He later insisted on seeing raw reports and talking to on the ground commanders. So after this LBJ sent Clark Clifford over to the Pentagon to do just that. The new Sec Def had been a hawk on the war. After two weeks seeing the real record he became a dove and advised Johnson to find a way out, he was not going to win.

Then, after narrowly beating McCarthy, and then RFK announced he was running, LBJ's support collapsed in Wisconsin, the next primary state. His advisors on the ground told him he was going to actually lose straight up. That was it. Two days before the primary he got on TV and announced he would not run again but try to get a settlement in Vietnam.

He lost the Wisconsin primary by 30 points.

Exaggerating slightly, when you do not know something, go to Kennedysandking.com

******

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

In fact, as I was beginning to recognize at the time of Nixon's resignation in 1974, three presidents in a row -- Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon -- had been removed from office. It was becoming hard not to notice how the political system had changed with the Coup of '63 and the coverup that followed. The calamitous turn in the Vietnam War when the Vietcong mounted the Tet Offensive in January 1968 led to President Johnson's forced withdrawal from that year's presidential race at the behest of his senior advisers, "The Wise Men." That group was largely drawn from the leadership of the eastern establishment and including Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. Their decisive meeting with Johnson came on March 25, six days before he stunned the nation by announcing at the end of a televised speech about Vietnam, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."

Henry Brandon, the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, reports in his autobiography, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent's Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (1988), about a conversation he had with President Johnson in 1968, after that decision was made: "LBJ, aware by then of his public repudiation, seemed to drag a burden of anguish in his wake when he spoke his own epitaph during a flight to visit President Truman in Independence, Missouri, aboard Air Force One: The only difference between Kennedy's assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.'" (Johnson visited Truman in Independence on May 3 and October 11 of that year.) Former Secretary of State Acheson summed up the March decision by the Wise Men by saying that "we can no longer do the job we set out to do [in Vietnam] in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage." Carl Oglesby in The Yankee and Cowboy War interprets what he calls Johnson's forced "abdication" as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men to "break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson's Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed."

[Richard Coleman]

FWIW, I recall back in the day, a story/urban legend perhaps, that something that got to LBJ was that his daughters started giving him grief about the war.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Wasn't that in that TV film, John Frankenhiemer's The Path to War?

[Richard Coleman]

Wasn't that in that TV film, John Frankenhiemer's The Path to War?

Downloading it. Will let you know. I never heard of this flick. Frankenheimer was something!

[Richard Coleman]

Wasn't that in that TV film, John Frankenhiemer's The Path to War?

Nope. I downloaded it and it ain't there. Not Frankenheimer's best either. Very sympathetic toward LBJ as tortured by the war, agonizing over every escalation.