The President stands down: A distant mirror on a divided America

by Joel Connelly

The night I turned twenty, March 31st, 1968, was hardly a happy birthday. The death toll of U.S. troops in Vietnam hovered around five hundred, the Pentagon was asking for 200,000 additional troops, and Lyndon Johnson’s heels seemed dug in despite the surprise showing of anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary.

With friends active in anti-war politics, I adjourned to a bar with TV set to watch President Johnson — known then and now as LBJ — address the nation.

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Polls show that McCarthy would clean his clock in the upcoming Wisconsin primary, one pegging Clean Gene at sixty-four percent of the vote. Senator Robert F. Kennedy had entered the Democratic nomination race and was drawing enormous support (unlike his son in 2024). Johnson spared himself humiliation. Our hope for the country soared that night.

Alas, the country convulsed with a hemorrhaging that would last for years. Less than a week after Johnson announced his exit, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. A beautiful speech by RFK kept the lid on in Indianapolis, but riots and burning swept other cities and reached to within blocks of the White House. A month later, RFK fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. Party insiders rigged the process, turned back reformers, and assured that Vice President Hubert Humphrey would secure the Democratic nomination.

https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2024/07/the-president-stands-down-a-distant-mirror-on-a-divided-america.html

Pretty good article if you have time to read the whole thing