THE LAST TIME JERRY NADLER SAID A SITTING PRESIDENT SHOULD’T RUN AGAIN, LBJ BOWED OUT

THE LAST TIME JERRY NADLER SAID A SITTING PRESIDENT SHOULD’T RUN AGAIN, LBJ BOWED OUT

I’m definitely getting old.

I clearly recall the first time that Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) tried to force an incumbent Democratic President out of a reelection campaign.

The year was 1968, sometime in January or February, and I was a sophomore at Queens College, part of the legendary City University of New York. (Aside from me, Queens College’s best known alumni are Paul Simon and Jerry Seinfeld.) I was caught up in the anti-war movement, and as a progressive young Democrat, wanted LBJ out, and an anti-war candidate in. The only Democrat willing to stand up to LBJ and run against him on the war, was Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy. A group of anti-war Dems on campus were organizing students to work for McCarthy in the primaries, and I went to their first meeting. (This was before RFK entered the race. I jumped to him the day he later announced. I am referring to the real RFK, a hero of mine, not the sniveling lunatic of a son, whose disgrace the real RFK does not have to endure.)

When I got to the meeting, in a classroom in the Social Sciences building, I was greeted by a familiar face: Jerry Nadler, who had been a year ahead of me at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Stuy High, as we called it, was a specialized science and math school that accepted a minuscule percentage of thousands of applicants…