Politics & Power Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

A presidency that sold itself as an engine of collective uplift ends by warning that the engine is about to seize. Johnson’s sentence begins with a sweeping “we” - not the royal we, but the coalition we: civil rights activists, labor, liberal Democrats, even reluctant moderates who’d been pulled into the Great Society’s moral logic. “What we won” casts policy victories as hard-earned spoils of unity, not gifts from Washington. Then comes the diagnosis: suspicion, distrust, selfishness, politics. The list is blunt on purpose. He doesn’t name Vietnam, the antiwar movement, the fracturing Democratic Party, or the urban unrest; he implies them all. The subtext is that the country’s quarrel has become so total that even legitimate disagreement now looks like sabotage.

Context makes the renunciation land like both sacrifice and indictment. In March 1968, Johnson faced collapsing approval, Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent challenge, Robert Kennedy’s looming candidacy, and a war draining legitimacy faster than legislation could replenish it. By stepping aside, he’s trying to reclaim the mantle of national steward: the leader who puts stability above ego. It’s also a tactical move to quiet a party civil war and preserve negotiations abroad by removing himself as a political target.

The rhetorical trick is that Johnson frames his exit as an act of continuity. He leaves, he suggests, so “what we won” can survive him. Yet the line “and politics” is the tell: he’s scolding the very democratic contest he’s fleeing, implying that partisan struggle has become a luxury the nation can’t afford. It’s an elegy for consensus delivered by a man who no longer believes he can command it.