....announced that he wasn't running for President again.
Therefore, at the end of a March 31 speech, he shocked the nation when he announced he would not run for re-election: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President"
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Forty years seems like a long time when you're young. But I still remember that moment just like it was last week. Even at 18 I knew that it was an important statement, although at the time I wasn't even sure what the differences were between Democrats and Republicans. And I knew that it would shake things up a bit, what with RFK and McCarthy running.
Who, at that point, could have predicted the 7 years or so after that? I mean, look at just the following few months -- RFK dead, MLK dead, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and then how wimpy Humphrey looked coming out of it. Then Nixon getting elected.
It took seven more long years for Viet Nam to end after Nixon was elected, even after knowing that Johnson was refusing to run because of the war. In between was Watergate and an American President who had to resign in shame.
As bad as all that was and it was -- politics since then have been pretty strange too. So when all the hoopla about this year being an unusual election year gets repeated by half the media and the blogosphere, just remember, there is no 'normal'.
This is my first diary, but I hated to let this day pass without a mention of LBJ. Maybe he's not worth mentioning, but I think he set a standard for enlarging an illegal war.