Dan Snow's History Hit - Bidens Out: A History of What Could Happen Next

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

How unprecedented is Joe Biden's sudden withdrawal from the presidential race? He's given his endorsement to Kamala Harris to take his place, but not all Democrats have, including former president Barack Obama. How will a new candidate be chosen? Dan is joined by Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge Gary Gerstle to look back to 20th-century presidential campaigns that may shed light on what could happen next and unpick the 'political conventions' process of electing a new candidate.Produced by Dan Snow, Mariana Des Forges & edited by Dougal PatmoreEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. An ageing president with approval ratings in the tank and criticism from within his own party about foreign military entanglement decides not to seek another term in the election year. There's a contested convention in Chicago. Party bigwigs wrestle the vice president onto the ballot. They lose to a conservative president with a very expansive view of his own powers, who campaigns on law and order to win that November election. I'm talking 1968, folks.

The tumultuous campaigning season that saw Lyndon Johnson step aside, a divisive convention, and an eventual narrow loss to the Republican Richard Nixon. As Joe Biden stepped aside this past weekend, clearly all of us thought back immediately to that election of 1968 and what history suggests might come next. Presidents do not typically stand aside. Truman was declining in 1952. He was getting on, he was unpopular,

and he eventually chose to avoid the Ike train, the Eisenhower locomotive heading down the tracks fast towards him. Lyndon Johnson, as you'll hear, bowed out in 1968. And now Joe Biden has announced he will not seek the nomination with only days to go before he was due to be nominated as the Democratic Party's candidate take on Donald Trump in this November's presidential election. Let's go to one of the finest now to find out what history can tell us.

Gary Gersel, Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University. I'm going to talk to him about presidents that step aside, about the prospect, the rare prospect, of a contested convention the likes of which we haven't seen for a couple of generations, and what he thinks history can tell us about now. Enjoy. Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Gary, everybody is in a tizz about Biden going.

It's odd as a brick because we've had several prime ministers leave thanks to ill health, even quite recently. We've had, obviously, Churchill, Eden, Wilson, to name a few. Why is what Biden has done so unusual in US history? Well, in the British case, it's important to point out that the prime minister is not the head of state and the president is the head of state. So a president declaring that he's not going to run again, he's invested with the authority of the nation in a way in which a prime minister is not. And so it makes someone dropping out in this way a much more significant event in American politics than

it has been in British politics. And that's a basic difference between the American and British systems. What about that decision to run again, not to run? I mean, Truman didn't run again when he could have done, presumably, the Eisenhower train was coming down the tracks at him. Johnson chose not to run again. And although he wasn't old by us, he did die reasonably shortly after. There was a range of things, I guess, that stopped him from running. FDR did run in 1944. Was there simply less focus on the president's health? Was there less media access into how he was doing? Did the Americans not know how sick he was? I don't think Americans knew how sick he was. It was a different media age. And even though Roosevelt, in his own way, was a pioneer of the then new technology being the radio.

If you listen to his fireside chats, it's not a chat, it's a formal speech coming into your living room. It's not at all like we would imagine a chat would be today. So the relationship between the president and the public remained much more formal. Access to the president in terms of pictures was much more controlled. A lot of Americans didn't see Roosevelt in a wheelchair and didn't know how impaired he was even when he was healthy in terms of his legs being absolutely useless. And he went to quite extraordinary lengths to disguise his infirmity. What happened

in 1944 is that his circulatory system was failing. He was a very ill man. I don't think most Americans voting for him knew how ill he was. He certainly, if you look at pictures of him in 1944, he certainly looked ill. But the kind of access we have today was not available then. And those people who had some intimate knowledge believe that finishing the war with an experienced commander-in-chief was more important than telling the truth about the severity of Roosevelt's ill health. And so, yes, I think you're correct in surmising that Americans in 1944 did not have any idea of the kind of physical debility from which he was suffering. It should also be mentioned that there was not evidence of mental debility in Roosevelt's

case in 1944. The debility was physical. Now, that certainly limited his energy, but there's no indication that his judgment was impaired. In Biden's case, really, it was the inability to complete sentences, to carry through with his thoughts. I have a lot of respect for Biden as president, and I too was not fully conscious until that debate moment of the rather severe decline he had suffered in the last six to nine months. We are now heading, as a result of Joe Biden's decision, we're now heading for a contested and open convention. Quickly, before we get on to the prospect and the parallels of this convention coming up, just tell us, what is a convention, Gary? And how did they emerge as part of this, the choreography of American democracy? Well, conventions emerged improvisationally. If you look for a plan for elections, party organization, in the blueprint of America,

also known as the Constitution, you will find very, very little. You'll find the designation of an electoral college, which is an important part of the presidential election. You will find very, very little. You'll find the designation of an electoral college, which is an important part of the presidential election. You'll find tremendous delegation of authority to the individual states to run elections as they saw fit. politics that actually emerged in the United States, though they formally committed themselves to popular sovereignty. We, the people, are the first three words of the American Constitution, the most sacred document in America, even though they were formally committed to that. They were imagining a much more limited franchise in terms of who could vote. They were imagining old habits of deference to elite figures continuing. They were not imagining politicians getting into wrestling matches with each other, mud wrestling, which is what a lot of American politics is like. And yet, as Americans wanted to be part of the political process, as they demanded the

franchise and the vote, suddenly you had masses and masses of people wanting to vote and no provision having been made to organize those votes or to reach potential voters. And so parties emerged willy-nilly. There was no blueprint for political parties emerging. There was no provision made for funding these political parties. And so all the provision of funding initially came from private hands. And of course, once politics became mass politics, the idea that a small group of men would gather and choose a candidate for president and everyone else would fall into line, that wasn't going to

work anymore because people were developing their mass bases and they demanded to be heard. You needed some mechanism for sorting through who would become the candidate of a party. And that's when the idea of a party convention was born in the 1830s and 1840s. And the expectation was that multiple candidates would come to these party conventions. They would come with their supporters. They would come with banners, slogans, boisterousness, roll calls, and then the horse trading would begin. And so the conventions became the site where each party would choose its nominee for president

of the United States. So today, in my adult life, I've become very familiar with these conventions being boisterous, but also very stage managed, like Trump's last week. It was a sort of a coronation. There was no debate. It's all designed as a sort of TV show to persuade undecided voters. For example, no one was allowed to mention the word abortion from the stage. It was very disciplined.

You've got the balloons dropping, the showmanship. Is all that a relatively new phenomenon? Well, balloons have always been popping for as long as people had balloons that they could blow up. Conventions were always theatrical, extravagant, boisterous. They were a political theater of the best sort, and they still are today. That's one aspect of conventions that has not changed. And one of the reasons the world is so gripped by them is not just because America is the largest economy in the world and militarily the most powerful nation in the world, but as political theater, they really are terrific. And that has always been the case. And it's a way in which America renews itself as a

republic and comes to understand what it stands for, the people being sovereign every four years, the people choosing a new candidate to run for president every four years or every eight years, president in office, leaving office. And there's great ceremony attached to that. And in the absence of having any tradition of a king or a monarch or those sorts of traditions, this process of renewal and embracing what America is and what it stands for has always been very, very important. But conventions used to serve a much more practical and important political purpose, and that was to actually choose the nominee of the party, the Republican and Democratic parties. It used to be that the expectation was that the presidential race would not be settled until the convention.

Some states had primaries, contests between people of the same party to see who would be the nominee from that state. But many states did not have primaries in quite a few states, party organizations, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, a governor and his men, a big city mayor and his men, they would be the ones who held the votes of their state's delegation. And they would not often release those votes until the convention itself was occurring. And they saw themselves as kingmakers and they were kingmakers. And so the choice of a presidential nominee until 1968 really did not occur with hardly any assurance until the convention itself.

There was also the phenomenon of what were called favorite sons, where a political rising star who was a favorite in the state, often a governor or a mayor, the delegates to the national convention would all pledge themselves to him. They understood that the chances of that favorite son winning were very slim, but they wanted to put their favorite son in nomination to get him some attention, to get him some national exposure. And after the inevitable failure on the first, second, or third ballots, then they would begin to shift their votes to those who had capacity to get a majority of all the delegates at the convention. So the horse trading went on, and sometimes a favorite son could slip through, or someone who was tremendously unexpected to become the presidential nominee could come through, mostly because the two favored nominees, the one with the most votes, couldn't get themselves a majority.

There was a deadlock in the convention. This was particularly true of the Democratic Party, which was very FISA Paris, always seemingly coming apart at the seams, deep division between its northern and southern wings. They often couldn't get it together to settle it between the two major candidates. And that would sometimes allow a dark horse or a favorite son to slip through. Woodrow Wilson in 1912 was a dark horse. He did not go into the convention as a favorite. A man by the name of Champ Clark, Speaker of the House from Missouri, was a favorite. And in 1924, the Democratic Party fought 103 ballots over two and a half weeks of the sweltering heat in New York City and Madison Square Gardens before the two principals, Al Smith, the Irish-American governor of New York, and

William McAdoo, the son-in-law of Wilson and a diehard Protestant from the South. This is when the culture wars in America were being fought between Catholics and Protestants, and they could not abide each other. And finally, in the 103rd ballot, they gave up to nominate a nondescript corporation lawyer from West Virginia by the name of John Davis, who then predictably gets crushed in the general election by one Calvin Coolidge. Okay, so these conventions, the delegates, you mentioned there is some voting in some states. So sometimes these delegates have been elected

and they're being sent to, say, New York. Other times they're just, what, powerful party managers, just men in suits who turn up and get to cast a vote. Yes, it's important to understand too that if we ask, what is the National Democratic or Republican Party? It is really a collection of state parties. The New York Democratic Party, the New York Republican Party, the Texas Democratic Party, the Missouri Republican Party, the Wisconsin Republican Party. And each Republican Party in each state would have a head of the party organization and

they would wield this effective power. And to a certain extent, the different states could write their own rules. They could decide whether they were going to have a primary or whether the delegates would be chosen by some other mechanism. So it was a very decentralized system that put the effective power of choosing delegates in the hands of the party organizations of each state. And this remains the case pretty much until 1968, when the battle in Chicago tears that existing structure apart. You're listening to Down to No's History. We're talking about presidents that have stepped aside

and the convention battles that follow. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. More coming up. hopes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. so let's come on we've had the epic struggle in new york let's come on to the other that other famous 20th century convention talk to me about 1968 who's going into the convention as favorites well lyndon johnson the president uh who became president upon jfk's assassination and then was elected with an overwhelming mandate in 1964, pushes through the Great Society programs, going to complete the New Deal, sees himself as the heir of FDR, one of the great democratic presidents of all time. That's his image of himself, pushing civil rights, pushing anti-poverty legislation, really bringing a kind of egalitarianism

to America that had not been there for a very long time. And then the civil rights issue becomes contentious as the civil rights movement moves from the South to the North. The issues of addressing racial inequality are structural, they're built into institutions, they are much more difficult to solve. And then, of course, the Vietnam War erupts. And Johnson had historically had very little interest in foreign affairs, very little expertise. And he gets drawn into a war that he cannot control. And he obfuscates the depths of American involvement. He obfuscates how poorly the war is going in 1966, 1967. Very few American people are being told the truth about what's

going on. In these circumstances, a massive anti-war movement takes root, arguably the biggest anti-war movement in all of American history. And in 1968, a little known senator from the state of Minnesota by the name of Eugene McCarthy, who had had a very undistinguished career in the Senate. He was better known as a poet than as a senator, begins running on a peace platform. Johnson has become so unpopular because of the war that he comes close to defeating a sitting president in the state of New Hampshire primary. That is in February 1968, gets 42% of the vote. February 1968, gets 42% of the vote. And Johnson is shocked. He's also shocked by the Ted offensive, an offensive conducted by the North Vietnamese, which reaches the gates of the American embassy way in the south of South Vietnam in Saigon, which exposes the lie of America having success in

Vietnam. And the fury of Johnson is so great that he takes the extraordinary step of withdrawing from the race at the end of March 1968. That opens the door not to Eugene McCarthy, but to Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy is assassinated in June. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April. It is one of the worst years of American politics in terms of violence and trauma. And then the Democratic Party begins to gather around Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, which infuriates the anti-war movement. And they decide to turn out in force in Chicago, take to the streets. They want to show that the whole world is watching that Johnson and the Democratic Party

have no support. The police of Chicago battle furiously with these protesters, beat them up in images that go all over the world, giving a very black eye to America and its politics. But inside the convention hall in Chicago, the party bosses still have enough power. One of the party bosses is Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, one of the great old style politicians in America. And he and his buddies are able to secure the nomination for Hubert Humphrey in that election. He is going to lose not by a lot of votes to Richard Nixon. And the anti-war legions come out of that election thinking if this had been a fair square election and nomination and convention,

someone else would have been nominated, someone else more sympathetic to the anti-war movement. And the anti-war movement would have triumphed with a more liberal Democrat rather than handing the presidency to Richard Nixon. And so the decision after that convention is to strip the party bosses of their power, to make sure that they cannot in the future gather around a candidate like Hubert Humphrey, who the machine bosses want, but which the majority of the American people don't want. In other words, open up the conventions, commit to primaries, commit to really making the people in their primaries sovereign. And so they then are given the power to elect the president. And

from that time forward, the delegates to the national conventions are pretty much committed to the nominees that they are pledged to from the various states. And from that point on, the conventions become more just theater and less horse trading and real business. So we can say that the modern American convention, the one that the world sees today, was born in 1968 and was held for the first time in 1972. Okay, so in 1968, there have been some primaries. We know that Robert Kennedy had been killed after winning the primary in California. So are those just sort of advisory votes? How come that there isn't just a tallying up of all the different primary scores once they get to Chicago? What's the process for sort of overruling those and inserting other candidates? The rules would vary. Some pledged them to the candidate who they represented in the states on the first ballot.

Sometimes the rule said they were pledged for several ballots. Sometimes the different states said they would be released from their obligations on the fourth or fifth or sixth ballots. They can't be summed up with a general rule because it's not a national rule governing this. These are state rules, state parties doing their work. And because of this variety, if the contest went on beyond the first ballot, you would see horse trading begin to go on and various deals being made and the leaders of different party delegations entering into discussions with the leaders of party delegations from other states and big city bosses. Our candidate can't win. We will make your candidate the nominee if you give us this, maybe this post in the cabinet or that post in the cabinet,

or if you commit to a certain policy that's very important to our constituents. This is what went on in conventions. Cigars, smoke-filled rooms, far from the floor of the convention itself, where these bargains were being hatched. Is 1968 the reason the Democrats in particular are so triggered by the idea of having a so-called contested convention? Why not just get Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg and Gretchen Whitmer and all sorts of characters, get them in there, get them making speeches and have a series of runoff ballots? Like, why is that so terrifying for Democrats?

Well, probably the only person in the Democratic Party who has a memory of that is Joe Biden himself. And the unknown is often frightening. And no one knows what would happen. Also, the rules for horse trading have been tightened. So there's much less flexibility. Money has become a far more important element to these campaigns. And there are rules about if you raise money in a political action committee for Joe Biden,

to whom and under what circumstances can it be transferred? But I think the greatest fear is that there's simply not enough time to have an airing of views on the part of different candidates that they need more time in order to establish themselves. The Democratic Party is a deep bench of young talent, but most of them are untested on a national stage. And one only has to look at the experience of Ron DeSantis in Florida, an enormously successful governor of Florida, reelected with overwhelming margins, falling completely on his face as he goes up against Trump in a national election. One never knows how a local or a state politician has got a fair in the nation as a whole. So there's nervousness about that. And ultimately, the nervousness is a fear of Trump, and that if he

is reelected, the end of American democracy, as Democrats understand it, will be over. So Gary, let's go to a piece of history that certainly rhymes. Finish the story of 1968 after the convention. What happens and how do the Democrats fare in the rest of the campaign and the election? Well, Hubert Humphrey is chosen as the candidate at a deeply contested convention in Chicago. The contestation going on within the convention hall and also outside on the streets where tens of thousands of protesters, anti-war protesters had gathered to stop the war in Vietnam and were determined to be heard. So a tremendous period of contestation, but inside the convention hall, the party bosses are able to structure things so that there's

gathering around Hubert Humphrey, who was Johnson's vice presidential man, and he becomes the nominee of the party. There's a big gap between the Republican nominee, Nixon, and Humphrey. But as the campaign season goes on, the distance between the two men narrows. And so the election of 1968 turns out in the end to be quite close. But the disorder within the Democratic Party, the unhappiness with the Vietnam War, the blaming of the Democratic Party for getting America into a war, which everyone pretty much acknowledged by 1968, could no longer be won. And then the divisiveness within the Democratic Party itself, these proved to be challenges too big to overcome. So Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey in November 1968 and

becomes president of the United States. Do you think there are any useful parallels, not just in the convention, but in the rest of that campaign? Anything to look to for the rest of this year? Well, it's not a perfect guide to the current moment. For one, Biden's withdrawal from the race comes much later than Johnson's withdrawal. Johnson withdrew as Democratic nominee, contesting for the Democratic nomination at the end of March. Here we are almost at the end of July. When Johnson withdrew, the expectation was the primary season would go on. Other candidates would have an opportunity to present themselves fully to the American people, fully air their strengths, their weaknesses, their commonalities, their differences. And they had a vigorous campaign, which then gets upset again with the killing, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy after the

California primary in June 1968. So even with that catastrophe, there had been time within the Democratic Party to run a full-fledged set of primaries. And even though Humphrey was the choice of the political bosses, a plausible case could have been made that at least there was a chance for other candidates to get into the fray and make their voices heard. The big question that looms over the United States right now is whether Kamala Harris is going to be essentially coronated as the Democratic nominee within 36 to 48 or 72 hours. In other words, so many endorsements that no one else feels able to take her on. Or whether the Democratic Party will go for the other option, which has never been tried before, to basically run a primary season in four weeks. One could

imagine how this might be done. Imagine four town halls with four candidates, each town hall located in a different part of the country. The different candidates, if you could settle on four, would have a chance to present themselves to the American public. They would then come to the convention and the actual voting for these candidates would occur at the convention itself. So it would be a return to the wide open conventions of the 19th century. That's the option that is open to the Democrats if they're worried about simply anointing Kamala Harris as Biden's successor. And there are arguments on both

sides about which way to go. The Democratic Party has been so hurt and damaged by Biden staying in the race as long as he has that there's an argument for coalescing as quickly as possible behind a successor. So the Democratic Party has time to develop a strategy, develop unity, which is more than surface, has real depth to it. On the other hand, there are suspicions of Biden having misled the public, his people having misled the public. He has anointed Kamala Harris as his successor. There is sentiment in certain parts of the party, and I'm certain among broad sectors of the American population, that would like to see a broader array of candidates presented to the American public before the Democrats make their choice. But if they go the latter route, I would say that's a high reward and high risk strategy.

The high reward element of that strategy is that American voters would be able to see what the Democratic bench looks like, who the alternatives to Kamala Harris might be. The danger is that the calls for unity, notwithstanding, it could become very divisive and become an occasion to tear the party apart and further damage it for the election in November. I heard earlier today that Joe Manchin, a senator from West Virginia who had left the Democratic Party because he no longer felt it was his home, was considering re-entering the Democratic Party today to run against Kamala Harris. Well, I don't think Joe Manchin was on anyone's list of the four candidates who might debate

Kamala Harris for the right to represent the party in November. He has since said that he will back Kamala Harris, but you can bet that there will be other Joe Manchins who say, this is my opportunity. Why should I let some elite within the Democratic Party tell me whether I can or cannot be a candidate? So if the Democratic Party goes that second route, having a mini primary season, I think it potentially carries higher reward, greater legitimacy, but it definitely also carries higher risk. And if I were a betting man, which I haven't been for some time, I would bet on the Democratic Party coalescing around Kamala Harris in the next 48, 72 hours or the next week to present

a solid front to develop her candidacy and to have time to take the case to the American people for another democratic term in a way that Biden was so manifestly unable to do. Before I let you go, Gary, you talk about Biden's manifestly unable to campaign. Is he able to govern? And are we going to be hearing more about the 25th Amendment, which was, as I understand, the response to Eisenhower's pretty significant health challenges in his term and the mechanism added to the Constitution for removing a president for incapacity? I don't think that's going to happen. It would require his cabinet to vote to do that. And I think his cabinet members are very loyal to him.

I also think that on crucial issues in the world, Ukraine, the Middle East, China, I don't think there's sufficient evidence to indicate right now that his judgment itself is impaired. I think he can't campaign. I think he can't speak for 30 minutes without a text to make his case to the American people. I think he has trouble finishing sentences, but I'm not sure that extends to his judgment being impaired. It does not suggest that he is unable to sit down with his closest advisors and make the right decision. I know this decision to withdraw from the race was a long time in coming, but I think we have to give him some rope there because that's a very, very difficult decision for a man in his position to make. And the kind of letter that his administration issued about why he was stepping

down, I thought was extraordinarily eloquent and suggests that in circumstances where he has his close advisors with him, he's able still to make the right call regarding issues that will be facing the country and its security. So as of today, I see no movement to invoke the 25th Amendment. The Republicans would like to see that happen because that will create yet more disorder in the Democratic Party and strengthen their case for a man who has things under control, one Donald Trump, to come into office in November. But the Republicans can't initiate the 25th Amendment. It's not within their power to do that. That rests with members

of Biden's cabinet. And I have seen nothing to indicate thus far that they are in any sense moving in that direction. Thank you very much for coming on this podcast. Great to have you back on. Have you written a book recently, Gary, do you want to tell everyone about? Yeah, I'm writing a book now called Politics in Our Time, Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hopes in America in the 21st Century. Well, I'll be first to buy that. Thank you very much indeed for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. you