The History Lesson Jill Biden Must Read: How Lady Bird Johnson Got LBJ to Step Aside

Joe Biden's presidency has been compared to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s for its highly significant reshaping of domestic policy. But here’s another comparison which has not been embraced—and should be: the crucial role of Lady Bird Johnson in creating and executing the strategy that resulted in LBJ bowing out after a single elected term.

It’s a comparison that our current first lady should study closely, because these next few days may be the most consequential of her life.

The parallels between Jill Biden and Lady Bird Johnson are clear: both were senator’s wives and second ladies before entering the East Wing; both faced roiling crises—civil rights, COVID, Jan. 6, Israel—tearing at America’s social fabric. Now, like Lady Bird, Jill must help her husband make the ultimate choice: to run or not to run for a second term.

When LBJ grudgingly accepted the vice-presidential slot on JFK’s 1960 ticket, he was Senate majority leader; the role was a demotion by any light. For him, it was “like trying to swallow a nettle: hurt, sticky, spiny,” in Lady Bird’s account, as detailed in my book, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight. But as second lady, while her husband wallowed, she began to thrive. An often despondent Jackie Kennedy tossed her a large chunk of her ceremonial duties. Yet Lady Bird accepted them with aplomb.

For the Johnsons, promotion to the presidency and the role of first lady not by election but by assassination was far worse than choking on a nettle. At first, Lady Bird genuinely believed they were caretakers and would stay in office only for 13 months. But six months into the presidency, and as a devout New Deal Democrat, she began to believe that LBJ—with her help—had the chance to make good on the domestic policy agenda—particularly civil rights and universal health care—that FDR’s death in 1945 had left unrealized.

But she had two problems to overcome. One was LBJ himself; the other was the country.

LBJ lived under the cloud of depression and, after a massive heart attack almost killed him in 1955, the prospect of not living to finish out even a first full term was real. As much as LBJ has been painted as the embodiment of power, his formidable ability to exercise it came at a huge cost to his mental and physical health. Serving as Senate majority leader had almost killed him; the presidency might finish the job.

Lady Bird’s fears were voiced as early as May 1964, when the inexorable pull into the unwinnable morass of Vietnam was only just beginning. Lady Bird by then well understood, as she wrote in her diary, “the depth of [Lyndon’s] pain, when and if he faces up to the possibility of sending many American boys to Vietnam or some other place.”

LBJ was worried less by his ability to beat Barry Goldwater in November than by his capacity to hold public support and to govern going forward.

Despite her stiff and two-dimensional public persona, Lady Bird Johnson possessed deep reserves of wisdom, stamina and, crucially for her husband, political judgment. And she was the only person in his immediate circle whom Lyndon trusted without reserve.

That May, she retreated to the Huntland estate in Virginia and, at LBJ’s request, wrote him a strategy memo. The Huntland memo set forth the idea that LBJ commit to one full term in office—she didn’t want him to retire early and drive her crazy back at the Ranch. “If you win,” she concluded, “let’s do the best we can for three years and three or four months.” And then, in “February or March 1968” she proposed, announce that he would not run for a second term.

Of course, LBJ ran and defeated Goldwater and, before Vietnam became the intractable crisis, passed the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society legislation which Joe Biden considers his inspiration.

By fall 1967, though, the mood in the country had turned. After living in what she described as “insulated against life” at the White House, Lady Bird began her own shift when appearances on American campuses to promote her environmentalism were drowned out by protest and as one daughter’s fiancé and another’s husband prepared to deploy to Vietnam.

“I want to know what’s going on—even if to know is to suffer,” she said. She had already begun counting the days to the end of his term and in October of that year launched her campaign to focus Lyndon on the timing of his public announcement that he would not run for a second term.

She helped draft his January 1968 State of the Union; in his breast pocket was tucked a section announcing he would not run, but he decided not to deliver it. Instead, it was on March 31, 1968, in an Oval Office address purportedly about Vietnam that her husband explained his decision not to stand as a candidate for re-election.

The campaign was too consuming, the priorities of the presidency as he saw it- a peace process with Vietnam, a deeper civil rights expansion—had to be his focus. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Lady Bird had helped draft this speech too, but it was her quiet strategy nearly four years in the making that LBJ embraced that night and that our current first lady can learn from.

Coaxing someone she loves out of doing what he loves—and Joe Biden clearly loves his job and relishes the potential of a second term—may well be the hardest moment of Jill Biden’s own political career. But it may be as consequential as saving the American republic this fall.