JFK and the clarion call to rigor, action, and physical fitness

President John F. Kennedy utterly rejected what we today call “body positivity” — “the assertion that all people deserve a positive body image, regardless of how society and popular culture view ideal shape, size, and appearance.” If anything, Kennedy contributed to the prevailing — and today, disparaged — expectation that bodies ought to look a certain way.

Kennedy, the author of “The Soft American,” verily believed that the vitality, stamina, and overall physical well-being of the American people would strengthen the nation (and Western civilization by extension), whereas atrophy and inactivity would render us a society in decline. Ease-induced, entertainment-laden inertia, he said, would wilt the robust American dream of the entrepreneur and pioneer and shrivel the nation.

“If there was one thing that sickened Jack Kennedy, it was the flabby American parked in front of the television set in the middle of a noble spring day,” Sports Illustrated, for whom Kennedy occasionally wrote, remembered shortly after the president’s untimely death. “He referred to this contemptuously as ‘spectating.’ And over and over again he warned that a nation that spends all its time spectating must fail. He subscribed to the words of Homer: ‘There is no greater glory for a man while yet he lives than that which he achieves by his own hands and feet.’”

Most of us would associate the failure of a nation with purely political causes — corrupt leaders, the onset of tyranny, economic decline, etc. Kennedy, however, appeared to believe a nation could fall simply by watching too much TV. He maintained that American history, “perhaps better than the history of any other great country, vividly demonstrates the truth of the belief that physical vigor and health are essential accompaniments to the qualities of intellect and spirit on which a nation is built” [emphasis added].

He did not say these things because he was “fatphobic” or judgemental. Kennedy understood the very pragmatic benefits of healthy living. Firstly, and most obviously, an army of portly or scraggly boys, he knew, could not protect America as well as an army of hardy, strong men could.

Post-World War II, this proved to be a haunting concern. As the Kennedy Library described, “many Americans worried that US citizens, especially the young, were growing overweight and out of shape. The nation’s economy had changed dramatically, and with it the nature of work and recreation changed. Mechanization had taken many farmers out of the fields and much of the physical labor out of farm work. Fewer factory jobs demanded heavy labor. Television required watching rather than doing. Americans were beginning to confront a new image of themselves and their country, and they did not always like what they saw.”

Secondly, as one of the last presidents to champion the American spirit of the pioneer, Kennedy recognized the crucial link between physical strength and mental acuity. If America stopped growing, if “We the People,” surfeited with entertainment and conveniences, stopped taking risks and saying Yes to the impossible, that indefatigable spirit that had animated us from the spring of our youth would eventually burn out.

Americans needed a frontier — an environment in which to explore, test, and push the possibilities of their “almost-chosen” land. As historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in his 1839 “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” pioneering had become so intrinsic to the American way of life, that America simply could not survive without it. Though the most obvious “frontier” — the Western frontier — was closing, a new one would inevitably take its place.

“From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance,” he wrote. “The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that, to the frontier, the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom -- these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.”

“Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

More than a century later, Kennedy worried that that “wider field for… exercise” may have been lost. Encouraging activity and fitness was about more than just how Americans looked; “spectating” would result in national stagnation, a lost drive for forming a more perfect Union. Americans would cease to accomplish great things if they resigned themselves to listless passivity. Indeed, this appears to be why the president urged the nation to send a man to the moon.

“We choose to go to the moon,” he declared in his ode to American progress. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

This is what Theodore Roosevelt called the “strenuous life.” Kennedy pushed the nation to drive its flag into the untouched surface of the moon precisely because it was difficult, because he would rather physically and mentally dynamic Americans fail in pursuit of the impossible than enervated bystanders not try at all. “Movement has been [the] dominant fact” of American life, opined Frederick Jackson Turner; Kennedy determined to remind the nation of that fact.

But Kennedy aimed higher than just the moon. His preoccupation with physical fitness bespoke an even greater concern for the preservation of American exceptionalism, which hinged, he argued, on vitality and rigor.

“The same civilizations which produced some of our highest achievements of philosophy and drama, government and art, also gave us a belief in the importance of physical soundness which has become a part of Western tradition; from the mens sana in corpore sano of the Romans to the British belief that the playing fields of Eton brought victory on the battlefields of Europe,” he said. “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.”

“It was men,” he wrote on another occasion, “who possessed vigor and strength as well as courage and vision who first settled these shores and, over more than three centuries, subdued a continent and wrested a civilization from the wilderness. It was physical hardihood that helped Americans in two great world wars to defeat strong and tenacious foes and make this country history's mightiest defender of freedom.”

Whether or not America would continue to be a strong nation, whether or not she would continue to be a great nation, asserted Kennedy, would depend on whether or not Americans rose to the physically taxing challenge of their boundary-pushing, history-changing land.

Of course, JFK expressed such sentiments over 60 years ago; if he worried about television viewership in 1963, one can only imagine what he might think today. In 2024, more than ever, Kennedy’s injunction challenges us to break outside our stagnant boxes and reverse the trends of social sclerosis.

Are we willing to brave the impossible? Are we willing to embrace the strenuous life, to push ourselves into a new, dangerous, and uncharted frontier? The future of our Republic demands it of us. But perhaps our bodies are not ready for it. Only you and I can say for certain.

As Kennedy concluded his 1963 article, “The Vigor We Need,” “it is absolutely clear that the ultimate responsibility for the fitness of the American people rests on the cooperation and determination of school boards and town officials, on thousands of community leaders, and on millions of fathers and mothers. Only through your effort,” he enjoined the American people, “can we hope to continue to move steadily toward a stronger and more vigorous America.”

This is our clarion call to action. Together, let us commit to “shaping up” for the fight to come. “[A] a stronger and more vigorous America” is, indeed, worth it.