During the Cold War, the Kennedys worried we were too fat to fight
So the 50-mile trek challenge was born
“Physical fitness is the basis of all the activities of our society,” John F. Kennedy wrote in a 1960 issue of Sports Illustrated. But something was keeping the King of Camelot up at night. Americans were getting “soft,” literally, as in fat.
“A single look at the packed parking lot of the average high school will tell us what has happened to the traditional hike to school that helped to build young bodies,” Kennedy wrote. Though he would cite many reasons for Americans to slim down — “the capacity for thought, for work, and for the use of those skills vital to an expanding and complex America” — his fat-shaming was motivated by another concern: the Cold War. It wasn’t so much that that we were too fat to fight, but that American dad bods weren’t exactly striking fear into the hearts of our enemies. We needed to swap our muffin tops for six packs so we could beat the Commies.
An avid sportsman himself, Kennedy made physical fitness a priority of his presidency. In the coming years, he would establish a number of fitness programs and set off a bizarre endurance craze that rivaled some of today’s Iron Mans and ultramarathons.
Kennedy was sounding early alarm bells for what would become an American epidemic. Though people in the 1950s were comparatively much thinner, many cite the period as the beginning of American obesity. In 1954, Life magazine ran an article entitled “The Plague of Overweight,” noting increasing numbers of heavy Americans. In 1962, only about 13 percent of Americans were classified as obese. In the coming decades, that number would nearly triple.
The 1950s were the perfect storm for weight gain. As Americans flocked to suburbs and became increasingly reliant on cars, there were fewer opportunities to walk. By 1959, the vast majority of homes had a television, and couch potatoes proliferated. Between 1950 and 1968, the white-collar workforce grew by nearly 60 percent, meaning that more people were pinned to their desks. Meanwhile, the American diet was changing, as the food industry became increasingly industrialized. It was Campbell Soup’s heyday, and quick-to-prepare, highly processed foods flew off supermarket shelves. Manufacturers added sugar to nearly everything, and then funded a series of studies arguing that sugar wasn’t really that bad.
Military officers had been lamenting the lack of fitness in their recruits since the Eisenhower administration. In the mid 1950s, a study revealed that American kids didn’t stack up against kids from other countries, stoking fears about the military’s ever-worsening future. Before Kennedy, the idea of the government getting involved in the nation’s physical fitness made people uneasy, conjuring unwanted parallels. According to the John F. Kennedy Presidential library, “a state-ordered fitness program seemed a little ‘red,’ even fascist.”
But Kennedy saw American waistlines as very much the government’s business. He established a Youth Fitness Congress, and reinvigorated the flagging Youth Fitness Council, which set to work disseminating a new fitness curriculum. The curriculum had the same name as his Sports Illustrated article, “The Soft American.” Of course, it was a suggestion only, lest it look too much like the Hitler Youth.
In 1963, General David Shoup came across a 1908 executive order from Teddy Roosevelt stating that all Marines must be able to walk 50 miles in 20 hours. He sent the order to Kennedy, and Kennedy replied wondering if the Marines could do that now. The challenge was on.
All over the country Marines laced up their boots and walked for an entire day and through much of the night. At Camp Lejeune, where Shoup was stationed, 34 officers completed their 50-miler under Roosevelt’s time limit, trudging along rain-soaked patches of grass in steel helmets, carrying 25-pound packs. In Little Rock, Arkansas, a captain, who had likely worn through his shoes, shuffled the last 20 miles in his socks.
But it wasn’t just the Marines who took up the challenge. As Life reported in 1963, “soon everyone was in the act,” setting off an epidemic of blisters and swollen feet across the nation. Boy scouts, fraternities, and high school students made the trek. Though much of the fervor seemed testosterone-fueled, women and girls went too. A ten-year-old boy from Bloomington, Indiana, came in under the 20-hour limit, wearing a coonskin cap and a 15- pound pack. Many failed. A young girl with an unexplained footprint on her chest limped along to mile 38, until a “rescue truck came along and she just couldn’t resist.”
Doctors began expressing concern about the 50-mile test. “It’s a stunt now, and just a little silly,” one said. He argued instead that people should train for long distances slowly, not take the full plunge into 50.
And then the president’s own brother, Robert Kennedy, decided to join in — without training. The 37-year-old attorney general made the 50-mile journey in 17 hours and 50 minutes, accompanied most of the way by his imposing black Newfoundland, Brumis. When he arrived at Camp David, he admitted to being “a little stiff” and received a foot massage “and admiration” from his wife, Ethel.
Bobby Kennedy echoed his brother’s concerns in another article in Sports Illustrated that appeared that year. The piece argued for the need to improve the U.S. Olympic team, and Bobby, like his brother, was seeing red. “Part of our nation’s prestige in the Cold War is won in the Olympic games,” he wrote. “The success of Red-bloc countries in the Olympics and other international competitions has given these nations the appearance of strength.”
The Youth Fitness program that Kennedy helped to revitalize still exists today, though childhood obesity numbers have more than doubled since then.
