With more than 100,000 people casting a vote against the incumbent president in the Democratic primary last week in Michigan, a swing state essential to his reelection, the wisdom of Joe Biden’s decision to face voters in November is again under intense scrutiny. Historically speaking, it isn’t too late for President Joe Biden to voluntarily drop his reelection bid. And he must know it: Two other Democratic presidents in his lifetime surprised the nation by announcing in March of an election year that they would not seek a new term.
The enormous challenges that confronted Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson—wars in Korea and Vietnam—have little substantive resemblance to Biden’s current predicament. But the question Biden now faces is the same: Should he risk his presidential legacy by seeking another term in office? The events of 1952 and 1968 are as much a guide to making what is a hard, lonely decision as they are a warning: Having lost the advantages that incumbency incurs, the Democratic Party lost both of the elections that followed, and Republicans took the presidency.
The Korean War, which began with North Korea’s surprise attack on South Korea in 1950, would make Truman—the winner of a come-from-behind stunner of an election in 1948—a deeply unpopular president. By 1952, the war had become a stalemate. Truman was 67, older than Franklin D. Roosevelt had been when he died in office in 1945, but in good enough health that his age was not considered a political liability. Truman, however, was ready to end his presidency.
Although Truman was publicly noncommittal in January 1952 about seeking reelection, many insiders knew even before the start of the election year that he was thinking about retirement and his legacy. In October 1951, he had met with Chief Justice Fred Vinson and his former chief aide Clark Clifford to offer Vinson his full support if Vinson left the Supreme Court to run for president. In late January, Truman wrote to his beloved only child, Margaret, “Your dad will never be reckoned among the ‘Great’ but you can be sure he did his ‘level best’ and gave all he had to his country.” Meanwhile, also in January, Truman confided in one of the ambitious men around him, Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman, that he was likely not going to run.