I do not believe that I should devote an hour
or a day of my time to any personal partisan
causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties
of this office.
The presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not see and I will not accept
the nomination of my party for another term as your
president.
That was the last time we had an incumbent president
saying no.
I'm not seeking another four years, let alone a chance
to be renominated by my party.
Of course, Joe Biden of the latest to say that
probably won't be the last.
I always love these historic moments because they give me
a chance to talk to probably one of the single
best presidential historians on the planet outdoors.
Kearns Goodwin, her latest runaway best seller and unfinished love
story.
I highly recommend it.
But it does look back at this 60s.
So, Doris, your thoughts on what Joe Biden did?
Now, some argue it was a great thing to do.
Republicans, you might be shocked saying he read the writing
on the wall and his party's going to lose anyway.
Your thoughts?
I think it was the hardest decision he had to
make, as was LBJ's winner.
President never wants to relinquish the presidency.
And the hardest thing is to give up that chance
for a second term because that's the way you get
remembered for having finished the job that you set out
to do.
Even Abraham Lincoln in 1864, he said it was more
important to win the second term than the first because
it would mean that his administration was endorsed by the
people.
And he said, too, as Biden kept saying, I want
to finish the job.
And I think somehow in the last three weeks, before
Biden was able to make the decision to stand down,
he kept thinking that he'd come back before from these
kinds of adversities and that maybe he could come back
from that disastrous debate performance.
And despite the pressures on him from the outside, he
kept saying, I know I can do this.
But finally, I think those pressures just reached the point
where congressmen and senators were telling him that their constituencies
did not think that they could believe that he had
the age or the fitness for the job because of
the health considerations that they were seeing in the age.
And then he had to realize with the polls that
he had to do this.
It will be considered by many people, it already is,
as something courageous.
It's very hard to put that desire for the future
against your own present desires.
And when Johnson withdrew from the race, it was considered
a great, stunning move.
I mean, for those of us who lived through it,
Neil, it was a shocking thing, even more, much more
than Biden's is because there was no consideration that he
was going to do it right.
I mean, we knew that he had been battered in
New Hampshire.
We knew that he was likely to win Wisconsin.
He had not won the nomination, unlike Biden, but we
did not know that the elders in the party had
told him that the only way he could continue the
war was to send 200,000 more troops and even then
it would only be a stalemate and that he had
made the decision he had to wind down the war.
And he knew that if he did that he would
have to be believed and he couldn't be believed as
a candidate.
So he came forward.
The whole first part of that speech was all about
the war and stopping the bombing and hoping to bring
the North to the negotiating table.
Then the last part, right?
And you know what's interesting, the last part, they weren't
even sure the people close to him that he would
deliver that last part.
It was possible he might end the speech with the
war because he was going back and forth and back
and forth.
Lady Bird said, I mean, she knew that he was
probably going to do it.
And she felt every tick of the clock that day.
She was so uncertain what was going to happen or
even if it did happen.
She knew what it was going to mean for him
to lose the presidency, to lose everything he's living for
for all those years.
A public service.
Yeah.
It's it's hard to give them a good thing.
In my case, if they try to do to me
here, Doris, I would crazy glue my hands onto the
teleprompter.
And I think they'd then take the teleprompter and they
out of there.
But you're right, it's a it is a big sacrifice.
But I'm wondering what comes of it right now because
you're a great historian, Doris.
This was done under different circumstance.
Had we not had that debate, which again, you know,
Biden's folks abide himself for pushing to do early in
retrospect, a big mistake.
But that debate sealed the oppression.
All right, You're, you're, you got to go.
And I'm wondering what's to stop the future pressure on,
on, on White House incumbents.
A bad poll, a bad debate, a bad event.
You know that that's a slippery slope, isn't it?
I think you're right, except that I think we have
to remember that even before the debate, three out of
four people thought that his age was a problem and
that that would be a problem in the presidency, not
simply because of where he was then, but how old
he would be in the next 4 years.
I mean, for Lyndon Johnson, too, one of the reasons
he he did do that was he knew that all
the men in his family had died at 64.
And he knew he'd had a major heart attack in
the when he was in his 40s.
And he wasn't sure he could live through the next
term in term.
In fact, had he won that election, he would not
have lived through that next term.
So I think that was already there.
Otherwise it was just a bad debate minus the age
problem, I think wouldn't have been impossible to overcome.
I'm, I'm wondering very, we've had a lot of one
term presidents.
I think James Polk stands out as the only one
who came into office one term.
That's it.
They pushed him.
Go ahead, Go for what he was done.
But they like to stay there for the most part,
I guess.
It's a great house.
You never deal with traffic.
The commute is pretty good.
It's just a staircase down.
So what keeps them in this high pressure job, right
towards where they all get so old so fast, Right?
Yeah.
And 2nd terms, even though they do help you reward
yourself if something good happens to them, they often difficult
a second term.
And the pressures are enormous.
I mean, the pressures on Lyndon Johnson before he withdrew
from that race, none of the days were pleasant.
He would go outside and people were yelling at him.
You know, how many kids did you kill today?
The war was so pressuring on him at the same
time, he couldn't sleep at night.
He had this dream that he was swimming in a
river and he was trying to get to shore.
And each time he moved toward the shore, he wasn't
getting any closer.
So he'd turn around and swim the other way.
And still he wasn't getting to shore.
So in a certain sense, he was just under enormous
pressure.
Teddy White, the journalist who was watching him that night
of the withdrawal with my husband actually up in New
Hampshire.
He said he'd seen him five days before, and his
eyes were sunken.
His voice was so soft you could hardly hear what
he was saying.
But then when he saw him on television that night,
even before he heard what he was going to say,
he said to my husband, Dick Goodwin, he said, something's
up, something's changed.
Look at his face, look at his face.
And his face was composed and looked serene.
So he knew that he was making the decision that
was for his health, for the country and hopefully for,
you know, for his own legacy.
And the pressures would then be relieved or so he
hoped very tight return that I apologize for that.
But real quickly your thoughts on what happens now to
Democrats Usually divided parties lose and I'm I'm I'm looking
back to 1968.
That might have been hastened by the you know, George
Wallace.
It was a third party challenge that got 48 electoral
votes.
You would Humphrey otherwise might have won that year.
But what it what do you think now?
No, you're absolutely right that a divided party at a
convention is going to be deadly for a nominee.
But the question among the Democrats is they may be
slow in in deciding whether or not it's going to
be Harris, whether it should be more open, you know,
a little primary or not.
But my guess is when they get there, it's hard
to imagine them attacking one another.
They know what's at stake right now for them.
And so I'm not sure how divided they'll be by
the time of the convention.
And that's still many, many weeks away or four weeks
away, right.
It seems like each who knows what's going to intervene
between now and then.
Fate seems to come back and back on us every
single moment.
We think we know what's happening.
And maybe we got.
You and me come together when one of these historic
events takes place.
We say we'll meet you at the next one.
And I think I'll see him months later.
And here we are every week.
The debate, the assassination attempt.
And now Biden's standing down.
Here we are again.
Yeah, here we are.
I'm fine with that part, Doris.
But I'd waved goodbye.
But my hands are, as I told you, crazy glue
to my teleprompter.
Always good seeing you, Doris.
Thank you very much.
Great read on all of this.