Democrats (and Republicans) Have Challenged Their Party’s … – The New Republic

Category: Democrats

On the evening of March 31, 1968, at the end of a televised speech to the nation on the raging war in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson made a stunning announcement, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president. It had been a tightly held secret. LBJ, in fact, had two separate endings to the speech. Vice President Hubert Humphrey (who went on to lose the 1968 election to Richard Nixon) was only informed of Johnsons final decision midway through the speech.

For all of Johnsons raging ambition, his reelection campaign effectively died three weeks earlier when Eugene McCarthya cerebral, mercurial antiwar Minnesota senatorwon more than 40 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. The stunning repudiation of the Vietnam War in the kickoff primary prompted the doomed Robert Kennedy to also enter the race against Johnson in mid-March. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Kennedy, the bitterly divided Democrats nominated Humphrey, amid the stench of tear gas at the August Chicago convention.

1976: A Man, A Plan, Panama

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Democrats (and Republicans) Have Challenged Their Party's ... - The New Republic

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April 4th, 2023
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