The fitness divide: what happened after JFK told America to take a hike.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Column

FIFTY YEARS AGO this month, in the pages of Sports Illustrated, president-elect John E Kennedy told the country that its "growing softness" and "increasing lack of fitness" were a "menace" to U.S. security. "Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America," Kennedy exclaimed. But a 15-year research study showed that Austrian, Swiss, and Italian schoolchildren had outperformed their American counterparts in a series of strength and flexibility tests by a huge margin.

Perhaps envisioning an invasion of wiry Swiss tots against which we would have no defense except a vast stockpile of 20,000 nuclear warheads and 2.5 million tubby soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Kennedy vowed to make push-ups and jumping jacks a federal priority. "This is a national problem, and requires national action" he wrote. "The federal government can make a substantial contribution toward improving the health and vigor of our citizens."

It was the first time the federal government had taken such an avid interest in the abs of the body politic. Under President Kennedy's watch, the Presidential Council on Youth Fitness stepped up its efforts considerably, creating radio, TV, and newspaper ads, even enlisting Superman and Snoopy to help spread its fitness message to America. Half a century later, our gross national flabbiness has only expanded. In August, Lt. General Mark Herding told The New York Times that "the soldiers we're getting in today's Army are not in as good shape as they used to be.... This is not just an Army issue. This is a national issue"

In the civilian world, on-duty firefighters are more likely to die from heart attacks than fires. The Los Angeles Police Department hired a fulltime diet coach in 2008 to arrest the runaway waistlines of its officers. Over the last decade, obesity rates have leveled off compared to the rapid growth they experienced in the 1980s and '90s, but we're still one of the fattest nations on earth. In 2009, more than a third of America's adults qualified as obese according to the most commonly used metric for determining obesity, the Body Mass Index.

Yet at the same time the country displays a national vigor that would have left Kennedy and his cohorts gasping for air. In 2009, a record 467,000 people completed a marathon in the U.S., up 9.9 percent from the previous year. Around the country, 88 marathons reported more than a thousand finishers, also a...