2 - Profile in Vigor: John F. Kennedy and the Quest for Athletic Excellence

Summary

On July 15, 1960, upon accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for the upcoming presidential election, John F. Kennedy introduced the metaphor of the ‘New Frontier,’ an image that would become emblematic of his entire presidency. In Kennedy’s imagery, it signaled the turning of a new leaf in American history, with a new generation of decision-makers ready to address the challenges the nation faced. Rather than sticking to past policies, Kennedy insisted, new efforts were required, new sacrifices needed to be made for the United States to persevere in the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. In his speech, Kennedy declared, “[T]he New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.”

As soon as Kennedy won the election, he made good on this pledge. In an unprecedented article in Sports Illustrated, which had grown into the nation’s leading sports magazine with 1 million weekly readers by 1960, the president-elect addressed one particular arena in which, in his view, this competition would be crucially played out: he urged the American people to change their attitude toward physical fitness. In the much-noticed article, tellingly titled “The Soft American,” Kennedy proclaimed:

[T]he Greeks prized physical excellence and athletic skills among man’s great goals and among the prime foundations of a vigorous state … This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting … Thus, in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.

With this clarion call for action, Kennedy not only linked individual physical fitness with the prowess of the state. He also reminded Americans that, in his assessment, present conditions were insufficient in view of the Cold War challenges ahead. Thus, from the outset of his presidency, Kennedy put the quest for physical fitness at the very top of his agenda. In fact, he made it a cornerstone of his ‘New Frontier.’