🌊 JFK, LBJ, and the Presidential Fitness Craze

Editor’s note:

So four stories before we get to today’s deep-dive: Texas and New York are engaged in an abortion showdown (free). Venezuela says it’s cracking down on drug trafficking. SpaceX moves into mobile phone service. And Trump condemns “evil” in North Carolina (free). 

That’s that. Now, to today’s deep-dive.

By Rob McGreevy

In 1955, an Austrian back surgeon and a female rock climber walked into President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s White House and shook him to his core.

The pair – Dr. Hans Kraus and his mountaineer pal Bonnie Prudden – presented to a White House luncheon the findings of a research study on childhood fitness that Kraus had conducted across the US and Europe.

Years earlier, Kraus and his research partner, Sonja Weber, developed the Kraus-Weber test to assess the physical fitness of children between the ages of six and 16. They administered the test to 4,400 children in America and roughly 3,000 children in Europe and found that American kids were woefully less fit than their European counterparts. 

Kraus-Weber (or the K-W test) was a six-part test designed to test the strength and flexibility of a child’s back and core muscles. When administered to Europeans, 91.3% of the kids across the pond passed all six tests. Only 8.7% failed at least one of the tests. But in America? 57.9% of American kids failed at least one.

When Kraus and Prudden presented this information to Eisenhower, it lit a fire under him, so much so that it prompted Sports Illustrated to label it “The Report That Shocked The President.” 

Eisenhower, already reeling from reports of American WWII and Korean War draftees being physically unfit, sprang into action. He signed Executive Order 10673, establishing the President’s Council on Youth Fitness. 

Chaired by then-VP Richard Nixon, the new council introduced the first Presidential Fitness Test, in partnership with the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (AAHPER). 

The Presidential Fitness Test, born of a seemingly simple desire to improve the well-being of America’s children, would evolve into one of the most polarizing facets of American education. Today, we look at its roots, how it fell out of fashion, and whether it’s coming back.

The original Presidential Fitness Test was based on a simple fitness exam. Its first iteration consisted of six activities: Sit-ups, shuttle run, broad jump, 50-yard dash, softball throw, and pull-ups (or modified pull-ups for girls).

Yet the test wasn’t without critics: Some Americans feared it was going to “Hitlerize” the American youth, according to a 1957 Sports Illustrated report.

“The program for physical fitness under government tutelage sounds awfully similar to Hitler's and Mussolini's youth programs,” one concerned Pennsylvanian reportedly told the magazine. “Let there be no compulsory business. That's using totalitarian methods.”

Nothing of the sort followed – Eisenhower lacked the power to mandate it in schools – but the test catalyzed a growing fitness movement that would accelerate under the next president, John F. Kennedy. 

Shortly before taking office, JFK penned a 1960 op-ed titled “The Soft American” that lamented the decline of American physical prowess. Kennedy lauded the Greeks, the Romans, and other progenitors of human civilization who emphasized maintaining a robust populace.

The Greeks, Kennedy wrote, “prized physical excellence and athletic skills among man’s greatest goals and among the prime foundations of a vigorous state.”

“Thus 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,” Kennedy continued.

In office, JFK mobilized his considerable command of media to convince governors to embrace testing within their state’s public schooling system. But it was his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who added fuel to the fitness fire and turned it into a staple of the public school system.

Still facing dismal childhood fitness outcomes and still saddled with an inability to federally mandate youth fitness tests, Johnson teamed up with AAHPER in 1966 to create an incentive program called the “Presidential Physical Fitness Award.” The award went to children who scored in the top 15th percentile of each of the six AAHPER tests. 

The situation thus remained for the next 46 years: A non-mandated test that incentivized kids to be physically fit. 

Over time, the test’s critics came to outweigh its supporters, and in 2012, President Obama eliminated it altogether, retiring it in favor of his Presidential Youth Fitness Program. 

This August, Dr. Charles Corbin, who served on George W. Bush’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and helped Obama develop new guidelines, explained the decision to eliminate the test as such: “The teachers were objecting to the skill-related fitness because they perceived that most kids didn’t have a chance to improve much because of heredity, because of kids who matured earlier or were older in their class,” he said.

“They were also critical of the president’s award because it was for the 85th percentile and most kids didn’t have a chance, in fact less than 1 percent could achieve that,” Corbin said. 

But this summer, after a 13-year gap, President Trump announced plans to bring back the award.

The revival takes place amid a broader political shift in the way our leaders think about – and talk about – physical fitness. 

Both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have promoted their own physical challenges. Last month, they introduced a joint “Pete and Bobby Challenge.”

“100 push-ups. 50 pull-ups. 10 minutes,” the DoD said in a YouTube video that showed the secretaries doing slo-mo pull-ups to a trap beat. “We're making America healthy again.”

But it’s not just Republicans: Earlier this month, New York City’s liberal mayoral candidates scrambled to mock frontrunner Zohran Mamdani for struggling to bench press 135 pounds at a campaign event in Brooklyn. 

Mayor Eric Adams, currently trailing significantly in the polls, posted a video of himself pressing the same weight with relative ease: “64 vs. 33. A lifetime of hard work vs. a silver spoon. The results speak for themselves,” he tweeted. “The weight of the job is too heavy for ‘Mamscrawny.’ The only thing he can lift is your taxes.”

Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo took a shot, too: “This guy can't bench his own body weight, let alone carry the weight of leading the most important city in the world.”

To some on the left, the renewed emphasis on physical fitness is a symptom of toxic, macho culture. A New York Times article criticized the “Bobby and Pete Challenge” for setting an arbitrary fitness goal and quoted a trainer as saying that “pushing for such high numbers without the necessary strength foundation can quickly lead to poor form, overcompensation and a high risk of injury, including serious muscle strains or tears.”

Meanwhile, to others, the new fitness push is nothing new – just a return to the “good ‘ole days” of bipartisan fitness as emphasized by Eisenhower, JFK, and LBJ.

Editor’s Note

We’re curious to hear your thoughts on this story, and specifically as to whether you think the emphasis on fitness makes a difference. America has some of the least fit and most overweight children in the world. What will it take to turn that around? Can the White House lead the way? Let us know by replying to this email.

Lots of positive feedback in response to the NTKs — we hope you all continue to enjoy the content!

Jodie wrote:

Clay asked:

Editor’s response: The Current contains bullet point news summaries, whereas these are full articles; they’re around twice as long with more detail.

And Woody said:

Editor’s Note: Thank you so much, Woody! Subscribers like you make Roca possible!

And find our latest stories below in case you missed them:

Thanks for reading,
Max and Max