“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” Lyndon B. Johnson told a shocked national television audience on the evening of March 31, 1968, thus becoming the most recent U.S. president to decide not to run for a second elected term.
Johnson, who had been John F. Kennedy’s vice president, ascended to the presidency upon Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. Having completed Kennedy’s term, he was elected president in his own right by a landslide in 1964. Johnson’s ambitious Great Society domestic agenda was overshadowed by failures in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, in which the Tet Offensive—initiated on January 31, 1968, by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese—seemed to reveal the futility of continued American involvement in the war. The offensive was finally quelled on February 24, but some three weeks later Johnson only narrowly escaped defeat by peace candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. Suffering ill health, with his public approval rating under 40 percent, and stung by the widespread opposition to his handling of the war, Johnson chose not seek reelection.
Johnson is not the only U.S. president who decided not to seek a second elected term. The others are James K. Polk, James Buchanan, Rutherford B. Hayes, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry S. Truman. (Theodore Roosevelt declined to run in 1908, after being elected president in 1904 and serving one term, but he again sought the office—and lost—as a third-party candidate in 1912.)