Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, March 31st, 1968,

L.B.J's surprise announcement that he is not seeking re-election.

We're joined as always.

Well, this is the first time actually, but we're joined by Nicole Hammer of Columbia, Nicki.

I'm very excited to be doing this series with you and this is our first episode.

Hi. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. So I know we call this show Esoteric political history. We will hit all sorts of different types of stories but this is obviously a big moment

a president announcing that he will not seek re-election and I guess one thing is I can hear our more lefty

listeners here in 2020, maybe a little hopefully saying to themselves,

wait a minute, an embattled president, and a moment of crisis, you can just announce that you're out,

that you no longer want to run, how often does this happen?

Yeah, it doesn't happen very often.

Don't get your hopes too high.

I think it happened one other time with Truman.

And like LBJ, he had a little bit of extra time at the beginning of his term because he was a vice president who inherited the presidency.

So let me lay out some of the basics of this story and then we'll come around to kind of what we think it means and some more.

But L. B. J. made this announcement at the end of a 40 minute address from the Oval Office.

It was ostensibly an update about the Vietnam War, but then at the end of his address

he famously says, I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as president.

He'd, as you mentioned, taken over for Kennedy after the assassination in 1963.

He trounced Goldwater in the 64 election.

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