The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency

Chapter 15. John F. Kennedy: Swimming into Politics

In 1962 President John F. Kennedy published “The Vigor We Need,” an article in Sports Illustrated. Vigor, or “vigah,” as JFK pronounced it, might have summed up Kennedy’s short life and brief presidency. Because he was seldom healthy, he had to feign the vigor and vitality that came naturally to other members of his family. Yet, when he sailed, golfed, or played football, he performed these sports with natural grace and gritty determination. To be sure, John F. Kennedy exuded “vigah” and vitality. He was a war hero who had been awarded the Naval Star and Marine Medal for heroism after the sinking of his PT-109. He appeared youthful, tanned, and relaxed. He played an occasional round of golf, but not the interminable rounds of Dwight Eisenhower. He was a devoted family man, or so it appeared. He inspired young people to bestir themselves, to become a nation of doers rather than spectators, and to expect more from themselves than from their government. Kennedy ushered in the age of presidential sports. Not that he appeared regularly on television at baseball or football games or at pro-am tournaments . JFK came to the presidency on the cusp of a boom in televised sports. In the fall of 1960, he forged ahead of Nixon on the strength of his showing in the >rst televised debate. He appeared healthy and animated, whereas Nixon looked pale and sweaty as the heat of the television lights transformed his appearance. Although Nixon actually was the healthier of the two (in spite of a knee injured getting out of the car), black-and-white television proved that it could transform reality. What we did not know about Kennedy ran far deeper than the image that he projected in the debates and in his brief presidency. Many of us were barely aware that he was the son of Wall Street manipulator and pre–World War II appeaser, Joseph P. Kennedy. Nor did we know that Joe Kennedy had spent millions of dollars to further the political and presidential prospects of his son Jack. Nor that JFK’s athletics had been curtailed because he had Addison’s dis15 John F. Kennedy Swimming into Politics ★ ★★ ★★★★★ ★ ★★ ease, a malfunction of the kidneys, and that more than once he had been administered the last rites of the Catholic Church, or even that his healthy tan was an attempt to cover up a sallow and sickly complexion. When we looked at this slim, athletic specimen, most of us knew nothing of Jack Kennedy’s struggle against countless ailments and disabilities that kept him from competing in sports. Of course, we knew of his chronic back problems, but not of the medications that enabled him to avoid disabling pain and chronic ailments. Indeed, the vigor he needed as president had to be supplied by a medicine chest of pharmaceutical remedies, including cortisone , adrenal extracts, tranquillizers, uppers, and downers. That said, John Kennedy was a natural athlete, far more talented and accomplished than most Americans realized. While George Washington rode 202 ★ flight from washington Lieutenant John F. Kennedy at the controls of his command, PT-109. Assigned to the Solomon Islands in 1943, Kennedy’s craft was rammed by a Japanese destroyer, sinking his fragile ship and throwing the survivors into the shark-infested waters. Kennedy’s remarkable four-hour swim to an unoccupied island, towing a wounded crewman by his teeth, stands as the most remarkable athletic performance in battle by any future president since George Washington’s heroics in the Pennsylvania wilderness two centuries before. Courtesy of John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston. on horseback through Revolutionary War battles and ultimately to the presidency , Kennedy made a series of equally fateful swims. ★ Prelude to the Swim “Great crises produce great men and great deeds of courage,” John Kennedy wrote in Pro>les in Courage, his best seller written during his long convalescence after surgery in the 1950s.1 John F. Kennedy’s crises began when he was a teenager and continued for the rest of his life. Illness and ailments had kept him from regularly engaging in sports as a student at Choate School. When he was a sophomore, he was so sick that the school sta= feared for his life. “Actually, he came very close to dying,” his friend Lem Billings later recalled. Prayers were said for him in chapel. In addition to lying in the school in...