Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

On March 31st, 1968, with the country seeking further into crisis over the Vietnam War,

President Lyndon B. Johnson sat down for a meeting with Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Johnson handed Humphrey the draft of a speech he planned to give that night in a nationwide

broadcast about the war.

Humphrey perused it, then looked up with absolute astonishment.

Johnson, the tough talking Democrat from Texas, didn't try to explain himself.

He simply put his finger to his lips.

Johnson had become president in 1963 after John F. Kennedy's assassination.

And despite the circumstances under which he'd assumed the position, he took to it, implementing

a series of programs aimed at reducing

poverty and improving civil rights across the country. He won the presidency outright in 1964

in a landslide election. But by 1968, things were going badly for Johnson. He was running

for a second term as president while promising

that any day now, sometime soon, if the country is patient, the tide would turn in favor of the

United States and South Vietnam. But of course, that wasn't true. A few months earlier, the

Viet Cong launched the surprise TED offensive throughout the country that included an audacious

attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

A weeks-long battle in the old capital of Hwei left 2,500 dead before U.S. and South Vietnamese

forces regained control.

Back home in the United States, the political sharks were circling.

Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Democrat from Minnesota, decided to challenge the president for the Democratic nomination,

...