The Last Days of the President

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Posted on 12/14/2024 8:00:35 AM PST by DallasBiff

“I’m going to enjoy the time I’ve got left,” Johnson told friends when he left Washington in January, 1969, a worn old man at sixty, consumed by the bitter, often violent, five years of his presidency. He had never doubted that he could have won the 1968 election against Richard Nixon if he had chosen to run for another term. But in 1967 he launched a secret actuarial study on his life expectancy, supplying personal histories of all the males in the recent Johnson line, himself included. “The men in the Johnson family have a history of dying young,” he told me at his ranch in the summer of 1971, “My daddy was only sixty-two when he died, and I figured that with my history of heart trouble I’d never live through another four years. The American people had enough of Presidents dying in office.” The prediction handed to Johnson was that he would die at the age of sixty-four. He did.

(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...

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1 posted on 12/14/2024 8:00:35 AM PST by DallasBiff

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