When the President decried and bemoaned "The Soft American."

"Throughout our history we have been challenged to armed conflict by nations which sought to destroy our independence or threatened our freedom."

The young men of America have risen to those occasions, giving themselves freely to the rigors and hardships of warfare. But the stamina and strength which the defense of liberty requires are not the product of a few weeks' basic training or a month's conditioning. These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity. Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.

Thus, in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.

That was 1960. I don't think JFK wrote his own material, but I note his/"his" absurd dependence on pairing one word with another that means almost the same thing:  rigors and hardship...  stamina and strength... real and immediate. Many, many more in the full article: vigor and determination...  effort and determination... vigor and muscle tone... soft and inactive... physical development and prowess... health and vigor... vigor and vitality...

It is the type of pleonasm that is, I think, called a merism. This literary device has marked legal writing. (Kennedy was a lawyer, as was his prime ghostwriter Ted Sorenson, which might explain the literary tic.)  Check out this list of what are called legal doublets: "aid and abet," "all and sundry," "acknowledge and confess," etc. etc.

There's also hendiadys, which is more poetic than redundant (as in "sound and fury" to mean "furious sound").

So... sharpen up your body and your mind. (Kennedy's "Soft American" article warns us that without a fit body, we can't reach optimal mental functioning.)

I got started on this topic after reading the comments to Sunday's post "Meade's Pull-Up Challenge," where there's much talk of the pull-up/chin-up distinction, and jaed said:

This is making me remember the John F. Kennedy Presidential Fitness Challenge (or whatever it was called) from grade school. Once a year.

Most of the exercises were gender neutral, but for whatever bizarre reason, girls were required to do chinups with palms facing forward (pullups?), while boys could do them with palms facing the body. This always peeved me. I could do several the boy way - as could most of the girls - but not even one the girl way - also same as most of the girls. Doing them with palms facing forward is harder. So why did we have to do them the hard way?

It's strange how minor and never-explained unfairnesses stick with you for so long.

Here's some detail about JFK's fitness program from the JFK library. In addition to the testing of school children, people were challenged to do a 50-mile hike:

In late 1962, President Kennedy discovered an executive order from Theodore Roosevelt challenging U.S. Marine officers to finish fifty miles in twenty hours. Kennedy passed the document to Marine Gen. David M. Shoup. The president suggested that Shoup bring it up as his own discovery and challenge modern day marines to duplicate this feat. Kennedy went on to say that:

Should your report to me indicate that the strength and stamina of the modern Marine is at least equivalent to that of his antecedents, I will then ask Mr. Salinger to look into the matter personally and give me a report on the fitness of the White House Staff.

In conversations with his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, Kennedy left no doubt that "look[ing] into the matter personally" would involve Salinger walking fifty miles himself. A well-padded individual with a sense of humor, Salinger turned his efforts to avoid the hike into an open joke. He finally released a statement on February 12, 1963, in which he publicly declined the honor. Attorney General Robert Kennedy undertook the hike, clad in leather oxford shoes, and completed the full distance through snow and slush. Salinger pointed to him as proof of the administration's fitness.

I'd say — if I were blogging back then — that RFK demonstrated mental unfitness in picking those shoes. Here's the Life Magazine article about it, replete with a photo of Bobby and his dog Brumus and Bobby and his wife Ethel Kennedy. Brumus accompanied Bobby on his hike. Ethel massaged Bobby's foot in the photo op.

Here's an ad from that time, with negative imagery of a sort I don't think you'll see today in fitness promotion:



Bonus 60s memorabilia: "Shapes of Things":