JFK wanted to fix ‘soft Americans,’ so he turned to pro athletes

Several of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s relatives have condemned his endorsement of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a “betrayal” of the Kennedy family’s values. But in at least one significant way, Kennedy is overtly trying to tap into the legacy of his uncle, Democrat John F. Kennedy - by focusing on improving the physical health of American citizens.

While experts are skeptical of some of his stances, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is touting a “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, aimed at priorities such as reducing consumption of processed foods and soda and increasing federal health spending on “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches.”

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JFK made getting Americans into shape a major theme of his presidential campaign against Richard M. Nixon in 1960, warning that the era’s “soft American” posed a threat to national security. Kennedy rolled out a National Sportsmen for Kennedy Committee with dozens of athletes, including some of the country’s biggest current and former stars. Among them: MLB’s Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio and Hank Aaron; the NFL’s Johnny Unitas; and the NBA’s Bob Cousy.

This year’s Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, recently launched Athletes for Harris, which includes 15 Pro Football Hall of Famers, including Emmitt Smith, Drew Pearson and Calvin Johnson. Trump, a former United States Football League team owner, has the backing of former sports stars such as baseball slugger Darryl Strawberry, boxing champion Mike Tyson and football legend Lawrence Taylor. (In 2016, Trump repeated JFK’s critique of a weakness afflicting America but added the NFL to the mix, lamenting that “football has become soft like our country has become soft.”)

When Kennedy announced his sports committee in October 1960, he framed the issue in stark terms:

“In the difficult years ahead - when our nation must lead the world to peace - we must not only be strong as a nation but as individuals,” the announcement read. “Far too many of our young people are rejected from military service because they are in poor health or in poor physical condition. A national program of physical fitness is as important to our success as a democracy as is a national program for economic growth. Certain members of the world community think we have gone soft both as a nation and as individuals.”

The term “soft” was a buzzword of the time, when “soft on Communism” was one of the worst epitaphs you could lob at a political opponent. It was the height of the Cold War, and politicians of both parties were obsessed with keeping up with the Soviet Union in every aspect of life.

“There was the perception that the Soviets were hard, that they were physically fit and very spartan, and that Americans had become soft,” said Joel P. Rhodes, a history professor at Southeast Missouri State University who wrote about the Kennedy fitness initiative in his book, “Growing Up in a Land Called Honalee: The Sixties in the Lives of American Children.”

Rhodes said in a recent interview that some people in that era were concerned that affluence was undermining Americans and that the nation’s kids were “becoming overly mothered.”

The list of athletes signing up for Kennedy’s committee was striking. Among the other well-known names: basketball player Elgin Baylor, baseball player Orlando Cepeda, football player Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb and Olympic track star Ralph Metcalfe.

JFK had a special bond with Musial, the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder and future Hall of Famer who was near the end of his career. When they first met during the campaign, Kennedy had told him: “They tell me you’re too old to play ball and I’m too young to run for president. I have a hunch we’ll fool ’em.” On Election Day 1960, JFK was 43, and Musial was two weeks shy of his 40th birthday.

Some high-profile athletes also signed up for the rival “Dick Nixon Sports Committee,” which the GOP candidate welcomed at an August event. Among those in attendance were football star Frank Gifford, Washington Senators sluggers Harmon Killebrew and Jim Lemon, and Florence Chadwick, a long-distance swimmer who 10 years earlier had set a women’s record for crossing the English Channel.

But Nixon, who was vice president at the time, didn’t announce his group with anything approaching Kennedy’s flourish - in fact, the famously unathletic politician was downright self-deprecating. “Here I am, a third-string tackle, a poor golfer,” he told the group. “I can’t swim … and I never could play baseball.”

As if to reinforce his reputation, that same day Nixon was admitted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center with an infected knee, two weeks after banging it against a car door. But the strapping Kennedy was not the picture of fitness he projected on the campaign trail, suffering from a host of health issues, such as serious back problems and Addison’s disease.

Other prominent athletes backing Nixon included football legend Red Grange and baseball stars Ted Williams, Ernie Banks, Jackie Robinson and Ty Cobb. (Nixon was a huge sports fan, and when he became president years later, he would write a nearly 3,000-word story for the Associated Press naming his list of all-time greatest baseball players.)

A UPI humor columnist wrote an October 1960 piece proposing an “Olympiad of politics” pitting Kennedy’s athletic backers against Nixon’s.

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Building on Eisenhower initiative

Kennedy’s predecessor, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, alarmed by research showing American kids lagging behind those in other countries in fitness measures, held a President’s Conference on the Fitness of American Youth at the Naval Academy in 1956. Ironically, Eisenhower couldn’t attend because of an operation, so his vice president, Nixon, wound up addressing the group, which included MLB Commissioner Ford Frick, Hall of Fame baseball player Rogers Hornsby, NBA star George Mikan and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

“We are not a nation of softies, but we could become one if proper attention is not given to the trend of our time, which is toward the invention of all sorts of gadgetry to make life easy,” Nixon said, according to an AP story at the time - using language similar to that invoked by Kennedy four years later.

“The super athlete is not our primary concern. He will take care of himself. It is the boy or girl with ordinary physical abilities who should receive the major share of attention,” Nixon told the delegates. A month later, Eisenhower created the President’s Council on Youth Fitness by executive order.

After Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election, he continued to hammer those poor softies, penning a Sports Illustrated cover story that December headlined “The Soft American.” The president-elect called American kids’ poor physical fitness a “menace” to national security.

In that article, he cited studies that found a decline in physical fitness among America’s youth: “The findings showed that despite our unparalleled standard of living, despite our good food and our many playgrounds, despite our emphasis on school athletics, American youth lagged far behind Europeans in physical fitness.”

“Of course, modern advances and increasing leisure can add greatly to the comfort and enjoyment of life,” he wrote. “But they must not be confused with indolence, with, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, ‘slothful ease,’ with an increasing deterioration of our physical strength.”

In the Soviet Union, Kennedy wrote, the United States faced “a powerful and implacable adversary” that would require a physically fit citizenry to confront. He sprinkled in the words “vigor” or “vigorous” nine times; decades later, people still associate him with those words.

A month after his inauguration, JFK convened a conference on physical fitness and reorganized the president’s council, naming legendary Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkinson its chairman.

“We do not want in the United States a nation of spectators,” Kennedy told a fitness conference at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare on Feb. 21, 1961. “We want a nation of participants in the vigorous life.”

Rhodes, the professor, said that Kennedy’s emphasis on physical fitness allowed him “to contrast the vigor of the New Frontier compared to this grandfatherly Eisenhower. Kennedy is the youngest president ever elected, receiving the torch from the oldest man who had ever been elected” to that point. At 43, Kennedy was a generation younger than Eisenhower, who was 70 when he left the White House, the first president to reach that milestone in office.

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Bringing back a Teddy Roosevelt challenge

The new president was not above fat-shaming America’s youth in a way that wouldn’t fly today.

“There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their week's exercise,” Kennedy said in an April 1962 speech.

As part of his fitness push, JFK reprised a 1908 challenge by former president Theodore Roosevelt to the Marines, to march 50 miles in 20 hours. JFK’s brother and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, sported leather Oxford shoes as he hiked 50 miles of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in snow and slush in February 1963. Many regular Americans took up the challenge, too.

“Things have reached the point where all the President has to do is drop a hint and the whole country is off and walking,” the Boston Globe observed in a Feb. 11, 1963, front-page story. “College students, postmasters, Boy Scouts, marines, airmen and even sports editors are tumbling over each other in their willingness to accept President Kennedy’s recent fitness challenge.”

The Kennedy administration waged an extensive fitness publicity campaign featuring print, radio, TV and display advertising. Among the messaging was an ad showing a man with a bulging stomach next to the headline, “Is this the shape of things to come?” and warned, “Easy living is sapping the strength and vitality of our children.”

The President’s Council on Physical Fitness (slightly renamed from the Eisenhower era) distributed more than 200,000 copies of its fitness program and encouraged schools to participate during the 1961-62 school year, leading to an increase in the number of kids who passed a physical fitness program, according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. (One of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s proposals is to issue new presidential fitness standards.)

JFK’s work on this and many other issues was cut short by his assassination in 1963. Five years later, a Washington woman formed a new National Sportsmen for Kennedy group on behalf of his brother’s presidential campaign, starting with the athletes that had backed JFK and headed by Musial. After RFK, too, was assassinated, the New York Times described his draw for athletes, which could also have explained their original attraction to JFK. The June 8, 1968, story read:

“Kennedy supporters spoke often of the identification athletes felt with the Senator. He had energy, ambition, perseverance, physical courage and a sense of his body. He appealed to the younger men of the country, and athletes are young. Also, athletes were attracted by the Kennedy camp’s glamour and will-to-win, two of the intangibles that had brought them into sports in the first place.”

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