Alone and Abandoned, Biden Learns That Friends Are More Dangerous Than Enemies

Across the arc of American history — and certainly during the 52 years that Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been a player on the national stage — presidents simply do not leave office or give up the race for reelection voluntarily.

On the rare occasions it happens involuntarily, it is not enemies in the opposition that force them to do what the hard-wired patterns of a lifetime tell them to resist. Inevitably, it is the work of ostensible allies within a president’s own party.

That is precisely what happened to Biden this summer. Twenty four days after a shockingly weak performance at a debate he himself had initiated — “ Make my day, pal ,” he taunted Donald Trump — Biden tried interviews, speeches and personal appeals to lawmakers in his bid to bring his skeptical party back onto his side. It was clear he was ready to keep trying. In Covid isolation at his Delaware vacation home, he concluded it was too late only after other party leaders made it unmistakably clear they had already and irrevocably reached the same conclusion.

One doesn’t have to be 81 years old, as Biden is, to grasp the historical dimensions of what happened on Sunday. But no one under the age of, say, 55 would have even the faintest childhood memories of the most recent precedent.

Biden was a 31-year-old junior senator, elected less than two years before, on the hot August day a half-century ago when Richard M. Nixon gave a televised address to the nation . That the 46th president actually knew the 37th president while he was still in office — and would have voted in his impeachment trial had the president tried to cling to power — is a reminder of the breathtakingly long arc of Biden’s public career. In my case, I was a ten-year-old at summer camp in Colorado when the counselors rolled black-and-white televisions into the dining hall and urged us to pay attention to history in the making. “I have never been a quitter,” Nixon intoned , on August 8, 1974, announcing that he would leave office at noon the next day. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.”

Nixon, however, offered a kind of clinical detail about his circumstances that was absent from Biden’s letter to the nation released on personal, not presidential, letterhead and posted on X. Nixon, under siege during the Watergate scandal, acknowledged, “In the past few days . . . it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify” fighting to remain in office.

In Nixon’s case, the realization came when Sen. Barry Goldwater, the party’s 1964 nominee, led a delegation of House and Senate Republican leaders to confront Nixon in the Oval Office . “Mr. President, this isn’t pleasant, but you want to know the situation and it isn’t good,” Goldwater said.

If there is an equivalent moment of high drama in Biden’s case — perhaps a fateful call from Barack Obama or Bill Clinton — we don’t know it yet. The visible pressure on him came on a cascade of public appeals from less prominent Democrats, and a torrent of news stories with background sourcing making clear that the most influential people in the party — former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — believed a diminished Biden had too little chance for beating Trump this fall.

As with Nixon, Biden’s decision had come to seem inevitable — and yet the news when it came was stunning even so. The short letter, in which Biden acknowledged that he had expected to be nominee but changed his mind, carried a whiff of to hell with it or even to hell with all of you . Even close aides, like longtime counselor Anita Dunn, were given scant advance notice of the news — which abruptly reversed what Biden campaign aides had been insisting were his plans even minutes before. He promised to address the nation but didn’t say precisely when.

Unlike in Nixon’s case, Biden is leaving not in disgrace but with most people in his party — now that he has made his choice — ready to bathe him in honor.

That is also a difference from the other notable example that lives in history books for most Americans but which Biden lived through as a 25-year-old newlywed about to graduate from law school: Lyndon B. Johnson’s March 31, 1968 decision that he would no longer be a candidate for reelection that year.

That was a decision that truly did catch even close observers by surprise. Backlash to the Vietnam War was growing, and LBJ faced two anti-war candidates in his own party in Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy — the latter of whom would be assassinated on the night of the California primary just more than two months later.

Like Biden, LBJ knew that his support was crumbling. Like Biden’s latter-day skeptics in the Democratic Party, LBJ concluded that even if he kept the nomination, running as an unpopular incumbent atop a demoralized party might be a lost cause.

LBJ kept his news to the very end of a speech dealing mainly with the latest developments in Vietnam . Then he pivoted: “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office–the presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Signs suggest Biden and his family have considerable resentment toward party leaders for forcing his hand — or, in the case of Obama, for not coming to his vigorous and sustained defense — but his decision in some ways represents a full circle in his thinking. Although he never committed to running for just a single term, many of his advisers once assumed that would be the case. In 2020 Biden said, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

But not many presidents easily liberate themselves from the power and prerogatives of the office. The last one who did — following through on a pledge to only serve one term — was James K. Polk , who was elected in 1844 and did not seek reelection in 1848 (allowing him a three-month ex-presidency before dying at age 53 on June 15, 1849).

None of the words Biden dashed off on Sunday seem likely to echo for the ages. Presumably his public address, when it happens later this week, will aspire to that.

For now, the Democrats who coaxed and even shoved Biden out of the race will be left to hope that he avoids joining another president — the 23rd, Benjamin Harrison — in a particular category of White House history. Harrison both succeeded and preceded the same person, Grover Cleveland. If Biden serves his full term, and Trump defeats the Democratic nominee in November, he will join Harrison in that distinction.