Forty years ago yesterday, March 31, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson shocked the nation and the world by announcing that he would not seek re-election as President of the United States. He had won a landslide victory in 1964 after becoming President in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He had successfully worked with Congress to enact many historic bills and programs, such as the Voting Rights Act, signed with Martin Luther King, Jr. at his side, and the War on Poverty. His accomplishments in social legislation rivaled President Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, Johnson had presided over an increasingly escalating and unpopular war in Vietnam, which along with issues of civil rights, social injustice and a cultural generation gap, had divided the country perhaps more than at any time since the Civil War. Many at the time believed that Johnson’s announcement not to run made it likely that Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had announced on March 16, 1968 that he would oppose Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination, would be nominated and elected president. Senator Kennedy was opposed to Johnson’s war policies, while acknowledging that he and his brother had in part shared in policy errors in Vietnam. Johnson’s speech, however, was largely a peace overture in which major aspects of policies of those opposed to the war were adopted. This allowed the potential of a rapprochement between Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been allied with Johnson on civil rights but opposed the war, and gave Bobby Kennedy the opportunity to shift his major focus from the war to other issues central to his campaign, goals championed by Dr. King, of social justice and equal opportunity for all people, particularly related to issues of poverty, racism and alienation between identity groups and generations. The co-founder of World Campaign and Planet Earth Foundation, Keith Blume, facilitated coordination of a speech at the University of San Francisco by Senator Kennedy on some of the above issues after President Johnson’s speech on peace overtures in Vietnam and withdrawal from the campaign. Tragically, what appeared for a moment to be an historic opportunity for healing and progress on many levels, was dealt blows from which an entire generation may never have fully recovered, with the killing of Dr. King only a few days after Johnson’s speech, and the killing of Senator Kennedy two months later. Do you believe that President Johnson’s turnabout on the Vietnam War with peace overtures, and withdrawal from the campaign for the presidency, forty years ago yesterday, would have made it more likely that a quicker end to the Vietnam War would have occurred, as well as substantially greater progress achieved on issues of poverty, race, and social justice for all Americans, and related issues worldwide, had Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy not been killed shortly thereafter?