HOW H.S.T. WITHDREW

ON March 29, 1952, 16 years and two days before Lyndon Johnson served his notice of noncandidacy, Harry S. Truman appeared at Washington's National Guard Armory, where some 6,000 Democrats had collected for a ritual $100-a-plate Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. For months, the nation had been speculating about whether Truman, at 67, would run for re-election to a second full term, and as the President launched into a give-'em-hell harangue, partisans at the dinner smiled that Old Harry was off and running again.

Like Johnson, Truman was mischievously delighted by his own surprises. Not until near the end of his peroration did Truman deadpan: "I shall not be a candidate for reelection. I shall not accept a renomination."

Of the four "accidental Presidents" in this century-Vice Presidents who succeeded upon the deaths of their predecessors--Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge were at the crests of their popularity when they declined second full terms. Johnson and Truman were both in shoal waters. In Truman's case, three Democratic Senators -- Oklahoma's Robert Kerr, Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and Georgia's Richard Russell--were avowed candidates against him, and earlier that March Kefauver had embarrassingly defeated the President in the New Hampshire primary; just four months before, Truman's popularity polls had skidded to an alltime low of 23%.

More important, Truman was hagridden by a long, apparently stalemated Asian war. While the Korean armistice negotiations begun ten months before remained in limbo, Republicans were sniping mercilessly at the Administration, hissing about Deepfreezes and mink coats, Communism and corruption in Government. More than ever, Truman was ready for the peace of Independence, Mo. In fact, he had made his withdrawal decision a full three years before, confiding it, like Johnson, to only a few intimates. In a memorandum to himself early in 1950, Truman wrote: "Eight years as President is enough."

A major difference between the Truman and Johnson decisions is that the discontent with Truman was tame compared with the virulent hatreds that Johnson aroused. Then, too, except for the Dixiecrats who threatened to bolt as they had in 1948, the intraparty feud that Truman faced was minor. His really serious problem would have been trying to defeat the probable G.O.P. candidate, Dwight Eisenhower.

Even so, two days after Truman's announcement, the New York Herald Tribune published an editorial curiously similar to those that other papers would run 16 years later: "The effect of this withdrawal upon the political scene should be to clear the air and to clarify the issues. A campaign in which he participated would have turned inevitably on negative, disruptive arguments."

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