In 1968, a Democratic president proposed de-escalating an unpopular war to help his party. Biden needs to act now.

The unpopular Democratic president unexpectedly announced he would not run for reelection, and he was replaced on the ticket by his vice president. The U.S. was involved in a war overseas, and in part, as a consequence, millions of weary voters had turned against the administration. The Republican candidate said he had a plan for peace. Pollsters agreed that the Democrat was significantly behind.

Then, five days before the election, the president announced a major peace initiative. The Democrat suddenly narrowed the gap. In the end, the Republican did barely win, but the experts said that the peace proposal had nearly carried the Democrat into office.

The year was 1968. The president was Lyndon Johnson; his vice president was Hubert Humphrey; the Republican was Richard Nixon; the overseas war was in Vietnam.

The lesson for 2024 is obvious. The Biden administration should immediately stop all arms shipments to Israel, and start forcing Benjamin Netanyahu into an immediate ceasefire. Such a bold move could push Kamala Harris to victory.

But if Biden continues to let Israel get away with murder, and Harris loses, Americans will have no one to blame but Biden and the Democrats. And they should at least also partly blame the pro-Israel lobby, which will have once again incentivized our elected officials to put another country ahead of our own.

Israel will try and block any American peace initiative. Netanyahu does not want the fighting to stop, because — as many analysts point out — the crisis enables him to hold on to power, and its end would force him into a postponed reckoning with the Israeli electorate. Nor does Donald Trump want a truce in the Mideast. Trump recognizes that the conflict alienates normally Democratic voters in the swing state of Michigan and elsewhere and also contributes to the broader sense that the world is a more dangerous place than during Trump’s presidency. Ongoing warfare allows him to vaguely promise that he will bring peace, much as his predecessor Nixon did 56 years ago.

At this late stage, Netanyahu would surely stall, hoping for a Trump victory in two weeks. But Biden’s move would still be decisive, just as 56 years ago Lyndon Johnson’s promise that the U.S. was dramatically changing course away from war and toward peace did boost his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. The details of this decision, along with a thorough analysis of the election, are available in Theodore H. White’s classic, The Making of the President 1968. White reported that in late October Nixon had led in a major opinion poll by eight points; just two days after the U.S. peace proposal, Humphrey had closed the gap to two.

On the eve of the 1968 election, large numbers of U.S. forces had been fighting in Vietnam for nearly four years. U.S. citizens were regularly promised that there was “light at the end of the tunnel,” but the war continued and worsened. Antiwar candidates had done well in Democratic primaries early that year, but many angry Democratic voters feared that Humphrey would continue the war, so they promised to sit the election out. Once they were offered an alternative, even tentatively, many returned to the Democrats.

Today, U.S. responsibility for the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and now Lebanon is less direct, but recent opinion polls show that a majority of Americans — 61 percent — say the U.S. should play a role in diplomatically resolving the war. What’s more, only 14 percent of Democrats expressed any confidence in Benjamin Netanyahu, and would surely welcome additional American pressure — just as their predecessors did in 1968. Michigan’s electoral votes, and possibly other swing states, could hang in the balance.

There is already no love lost between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu. Bob Woodward’s latest insider account says that the president, among other epithets, has called Netanyahu “a fxxxing liar.” 

The 1968 parallel is ominous for another reason. Hubert Humphrey, despite his flaws, was a pro-labor, pro-civil rights stalwart who could have continued moving the U.S. in a progressive direction. By contrast, Richard Nixon was a dark eminence, who kept the war in Southeast Asia going for another seven years and who started to clear the way for Ronald Reagan. In 2024, we are at an even more dangerous crossroads.