Lyndon B. Johnson announcing a bombing halt in Vietnam and his decision not to run for re-election, March 31, 1968. (Wikipedia Commons)
Dinner fare
At 7 pm, GMT, I was tucking into my tabbouleh with pomegranate seeds at the Gem Restaurant in Norwich, when the news flashed on my phone. At first, it was confusing; The Times had posted an update to a story that hadn’t yet been published. It began in medea res: “Biden’s momentous decision to drop out of the race…” Then, a few minutes later, the headline appeared, all in caps (Trump-style): BIDEN DROPS OUT OF THE 2024 RACE followed by a feature, pre-written as if for an obituary. It covered the basics: calamitous debate performance, advanced age, nomination challenges ahead, and highlights of Biden’s later career. The U.S. paper of record mercifully omitted any account of his undistinguished 35-years in the U.S. Senate. While considering a promising plate of falafel and humus, I reviewed that career in my mind.
To say Biden’s pre-presidential career was undistinguished is generous. As a young U.S. Senator, he befriended, and sometimes voted with the notorious racists, senators Strom Thurmond, John Stennis and Jesse Helms, to oppose school integration. Later, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden’s failure to support Anita Hill in her testimony concerning sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, facilitated the appointment to the Supreme Court of arguably the worst justice in its history. His co-sponsorship of the 1994 crime bill sent tens of thousands of poor and mostly Black men to prison. Biden’s consistent support for the banking and credit card industries at the expense of consumers needlessly impoverished the very middle class families he claimed to champion. And his 2002 vote in favor of George Bush’s “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution” resulted in decades of conflict and millions of deaths. It wasn’t just his vote that was egregious: As Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (he has been a promiscuous occupier of committee chairs), Biden rigged the hearing so that opposition voices were sidelined and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction — the causus belli – were presented as fact instead of the fiction many of us knew them to be.
When in 2008, Barak Obama chose charismatically challenged Biden to be his veep, it seemed the fitting end to a tired pol’s career. The position, as Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice-President John Nance Garner told Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960, “isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” True to the observation, Biden did little and said less in his eight years in office. In 2016, the 73-year-old meekly accepted being shunted aside in favor of Obama’s preferred presidential hopeful, former Secretary of State, former New York Senator, former First Lady, former Republican, always cold-warrior Hillary Clinton. (Thanks for that, Joe.) Four years later, just when it looked like Bernie Sanders might win the nomination to run against President Trump – politically weakened by his disastrous handling of the Covid pandemic — Biden was thrust forward by the Democratic establishment in recognition of his decades of mediocrity, mendacity and obeisance:
“I always voted at my party’s call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!”(Gilbert and Sullivan, “Sir Joseph Porter’s Song,” HMS Pinafore, 1878)
Biden as president
Until February 2022 Biden – to everyone’s surprise — was one of the better presidents in recent history. Though he wasted months negotiating with himself and a pair of weak U.S. senators (Mancin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona), he eventually got passed a nearly $2 trillion Covid relief bill, $1 trillion infrastructure package, and $400 billion Inflation Reduction Act that included significant investments to combat climate change, and support for low income, environmental justice communities. Suddenly, Biden was looking positively Rooseveltian! But just when a Green New Deal appeared to be the horizon, Biden went all Johnsonian instead. He went to war.
I won’t rehearse here the causes – long and short term – of the war in Ukraine. I have written about them here extensively, as have at least a dozen other Counterpunch writers with far more knowledge and experience than me. Suffice to say, the consensus is that this is a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia, with Ukraine paying the biggest price. The war will soon end on the same terms available before it started: Russia will keep possession of Crimea and gain some territory in the disputed Donbas region; Ukraine will gain membership in the E.U. and eventually in NATO; and a long-term peace treaty will be signed with Russia, possibly guaranteed by third parties. That the war still grinds on is a colossal waste unless you are a U.S. or European aerospace, munitions or fossil fuel corporation.
Biden’s second war, now in its second year, has cost the lives of more than 100,000 Palestinians and destroyed Gaza’s rudimentary infrastructure. He didn’t instigate it, but he acceded to Israeli polices that did. Prime Minister Netanyahu openly pursued a strategy of triangulation – supporting Hamas while weakening the Palestinian Authority — in order forestall the establishment of a Palestinian state, and enable Jewish Israeli settlers to claim more and more Arab land in the West Bank. That program blew up on Oct.7, 2023, at a cost of more than a thousand innocent Israeli lives.
Hamas is a vicious and unscrupulous military and religious cult, but they are the organic result of decades of oppression and international machination. The idea of erasing them, as the Israeli government claims to be doing, is ludicrous. Where there is oppression, there is resistance, and the more grotesque the former, the more perverse latter. Israel is not fighting Hamas, it is perpetrating a genocide, and Joe Biden has become its accomplice. Whatever else he has done, and whatever else he will ever do, his support for Netanyahu’s war of elimination will mark his name and tenure in office as surely as the war against Vietnam did Johnson’s. When the latter quit the race for re-election in March 1968, it wasn’t his electoral prospects that decided him, it was those damn kids chanting: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.”
Biden speech next week
Alas, there is no evidence that Biden ended his run for re-election because of student protestors who have called him ‘Genocide Joe.” He quit reluctantly, without contrition or self-understanding. He sees himself as head of the “indispensable nation” and as acknowledged leader of the free world. He believes, sincerely it seems, that he’s the best candidate to defeat Trump and fend off the American bend toward fascism. In both respects he’s as delusional as Trump, if not as narcissistic. Now that he is out, there is at least a chance to beat Trump and if not end the slide toward autocracy, at least slow it enough that progressive forces might have a chance to regroup and resist in the future.
Biden still has an opportunity to accomplish a lot more. He can offer magnanimity and hope, like Johnson did in his speech from the Oval Office on March 31, 1968. (I remember it vividly, though I was just 12.) He began by announcing a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. “We ask that talks begin promptly, that they be serious talks on the substance of peace.” He continued:
Our purpose in this action is… to save the lives of brave men – and to save the lives of innocent women and children. It is to permit the contending forces to move closer to a political settlement. And tonight, I call upon the United Kingdom and I call upon the Soviet Union – as cochairmen of the Geneva Conferences, and as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – to do all they can to move from the unilateral act of de-escalation that I have just announced toward genuine peace in Southeast Asia.”
Only then did Johnson address the political crisis at home:
“There is division in the American house now. There is divisiveness among us all tonight. And holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the progress of the American people and the hope and the prospects of peace for all peoples…. And believing this as I do, I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year…. 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.
History did not play out as Johnson hoped. His Democratic successors were successively marginalized (Eugene McCarthy), assassinated (Robert Kennedy) and defeated at the ballot box (Hubert Humphrey). Nixon prolonged the war for another five years at a tremendous cost in lives, resources and opportunities.
Biden’s should speak about more than just domestic politics in the next days and months. He should announce a peace initiative to end the Ukraine war, and an embargo on funding and weapons deliveries to Israel until it withdraws its forces, and forges a peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction agreement with the chosen representatives of the Palestinian people. Such initiatives would help bring peace to two areas of the world where it is desperately needed, as well as secure victory for Biden’s successor. It would also grant Biden himself a measure of historical redemption.
