Biden was bumped from prime time, but it could have been worse

In August 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had announced in the spring that he would not seek another term, was scheduled, as Biden was, to be a keynoter at that year’s convention, which also was in Chicago.

That week was also his 60th birthday. A 5-foot-tall cake had been baked, and the Hilton Hotel’s lavish Imperial Suite was awaiting him.

But, even as he was polishing his address, clashes were taking place between the police and anti-Vietnam War protesters in the streets and parks of the city. The president got a call from Rep. Hale Boggs of Louisiana, the platform chair, disinviting him. The situation was just too volatile. Were LBJ to show up, Boggs told him, he would even be met by boos inside the hall from party delegates.

So the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, arranged a forlorn little birthday dinner for her husband at his Texas Hill Country ranch.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, now a renowned historian, was a White House aide who was in Chicago at the time. As she recounted in her recent book about the period and in an interview with me, Goodwin was startled to get a call from the president. His pretext was that he was looking for a flashlight that she had borrowed from him.

And when she asked how he was doing, LBJ retorted: “How do you think I am? I never felt lower in my life. I can’t go up to Chicago in front of my own people, my own party, on my own birthday.”

It was one of the most dramatic turns of political fortune ever seen. At its convention only four years before, when Johnson was headed for a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater, his party had celebrated by lighting up the skies over Atlantic City in fireworks that formed a portrait of him. But with the toll of the war, and in a year that had been marked by the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), America was turning its anger and grief on its president.

In the decades since, the lens with which the Johnson presidency is viewed has softened. Yes, Vietnam was the tragedy that will forever scar his election, but historians also have come to regard with admiration his substantial domestic achievements.

“I hope it may be said, a hundred years from now, that by working together we helped to make our country more just, more just for all of its people, as well as to insure and guarantee the blessings of liberty for all of our posterity,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his final State of the Union address the following January.

“That is what I hope,” he added. “But I believe that at least it will be said that we tried.”