In 1977, President Carter was trying to set an example for economy and modesty in government by cutting back on Presidential perks. He decommissioned the Presidential yacht, grounded some of the Presidential aircraft, dispensed with the fancy matchbooks on Air Force One, and cut back on the use of limousines by staff members. He had to modify some of these decisions later, but the public generally approved of his efforts. I learned that he was also planning to decommission the Presidential retreat at Camp David. I sent a message to him urging that before making that decision, he visit Camp David, because I was sure he and his wife, coming as they did from the rustic surroundings of Plains, Georgia, would be captivated by it. They were. They kept Camp David, and it was the site of the most important achievement of his Presidency—the 1979 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. Perhaps more important, it was a welcome refuge for the Carters throughout their time in Washington.
Why should one who has a reputation for playing political hardball be so solicitous about a President from the other party? Because while recreation is useful for all people, I believe it is absolutely indispensable for whoever holds the toughest job in the world.
When I visited Moscow in 1972, Brezhnev told me that all top Communist Party officials were expected to take off a month each year for vacation. This was not because the party cared whether Brezhnev bagged his annual quota of wild boar, but because it believed time off would enable the top officials to do a better job.
We can’t require our Presidents to take time off for recreation, but we should applaud them, not criticize them, when they do. Only someone who has served as President knows how much it takes out of a person.
Woodrow Wilson, a mental giant with a great capacity for work, used to suffer from blinding headaches. He could get relief only by going to Bermuda or some other vacation spot. Herbert Hoover went to Florida and to a fishing camp in the mountains near Washington. Franklin Roosevelt went to Warm Springs, Georgia. Harry Truman went to Key West. Lyndon Johnson went to his Texas ranch. Kennedy went to Hyannisport and Palm Beach. Occasionally some eager-beaver investigative reporter will count up the number of days the President is away and compare it to the time spent in Washington. But while a President may leave the White House, the office always goes with him. The measure of a President’s leadership is not how many hours he spends at his desk or where the desk is, but how well he makes the great decisions. If getting away from the Oval Office helps him make better decisions, he should get away.
While a President should not be defensive about his need for recreation, he should avoid giving the impression that he has not devoted enough time to his job. Theodore Roosevelt, whose most severe critics would never accuse him of being shy about publicity, drew the line on publicizing his recreational activities. In a letter to William Howard Taft, who was campaigning to succeed him in 1908, he urged Taft to keep mention of his fishing and golf out of the press. The American people, he wrote, regard politics as “a very serious business and we want to be careful that your opponents do not get the chance to misrepresent you as not taking it with sufficient seriousness.”
Dr. Robert Hutchins, the University of Chicago’s highly regarded chancellor in the late 1940s, once said, “When I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.” I doubt if that rule should apply to college presidents. I know it should not apply to Presidents.
I saw first hand how much Eisenhower needed exercise to give him relief from the tensions of the job. Without it, he would pace the floor of the Oval Office like a caged lion. When he did finally have a chance to get away, his temperament would change completely. One day he presided over a National Security Council meeting where there was a very heated discussion of some controversial foreign-policy issues. Afterwards, he invited me to ride to Burning Tree golf course with him. For the first five or ten minutes of the drive, he continued to talk about the issues. Then he shifted gears suddenly and started to talk about the upcoming golf game.
One of his most difficult decisions was asking for the resignation of his chief-of-staff, Sherman Adams. He had asked Meade Alcorn, the Republican national chairman, and me to try to convince Adams that he should resign. When I told Adams that I believed that was Eisenhower’s wish, he did not want to take my word for it. He said that he would have to go in and talk to “the boss.” He went directly to the Oval Office. The meeting did not last long, but it must have been a terrible ordeal for both men. A little later, as I was leaving the White House to go back to my office in the Capitol, I saw Eisenhower by himself, hitting five irons on the White House lawn. That was his way of breaking the tension that might have devastated someone else.
When I took office in 1969, I noticed that the wood floor near a door that leads to the Rose Garden was pitted with small puncture marks. I could see immediately that they had been left by Eisenhower’s golf cleats. I asked my staff to replace that portion of the floor and carve up the old piece to distribute to some of Eisenhower’s old friends as souvenirs.
While I am now a firm believer in plenty of recreation and exercise for anyone in public life, I must admit that I did not set a good example during my years in Washington. I took no regular exercise from the time I graduated from college in 1934 until after I was elected to the Senate in 1950. I did not hit a golf ball until I was thirty-eight. Eisenhower was the one who shamed me into taking up the game seriously. He invited me to play with him at Burning Tree in the spring of 1953. Unfortunately for him, he took me as a partner, gambling that I had to be better than my 20 handicap. Eisenhower was a very competitive man. He played to win and hated to lose. If his partner played the wrong cards in bridge or blew a hole in golf, he did not hesitate to show his displeasure. We lost the match and the bet. He talked to me like a Dutch uncle. “Look here,” he said. “You’re young, you’re strong, and you can do a lot better than that.”
I had learned in the Navy that when your superior officer makes a suggestion, you should take it as a command. For the first time, I took some lessons and began to play regularly. Four years later, I had a 12 handicap. In 1959 I had to drop golf because the upcoming Presidential campaign required all of my time. During my White House years, I played only two or three times a year. I did not feel that the demands of those extraordinarily busy war years permitted any more, either practically or symbolically. Bud Wilkinson, my fitness adviser, urged me to exercise regularly. I promised I would, but I never got around to it. I did bowl occasionally and went swimming whenever I visited Camp David, San Clemente, or Key Biscayne. I could have gone swimming at the White House as well, but shortly after the inauguration in 1969 I decided that the press corps should be moved out of their crowded quarters in the West Wing, near the President’s office, into more adequate surroundings. So we drained the indoor pool and filled it up again with reporters and TV producers. Some of the old-timers complained about being “pushed in the pool,” but I believe most of them would now agree that it was a better use of space to make it available to the working press rather than for the enjoyment of the President and members of his staff.
Some medical experts believed my lack of exercise contributed to the phlebitis that caused me such difficulty in 1974 after I left the White House. But far more important than physical health, although directly related to it, is mental health. When you feel better, you think better. The major purpose of exercise and recreation is to change the pace, to rest the mental muscles used for work and exercise others. Recreation plays an indispensable role in recharging your emotional batteries and refreshing your attitude. No matter how mentally or physically tired I was, after a day or two at Camp David I came back the next week with a totally new perspective and renewed energy—ready, as Chief Newman used to say, “to hunt bear with a switch.”
What kind of recreation is preferable depends on each individual. For example, I hate calisthenics. I get tired just watching Jane Fonda promote her workout tapes on television. But I can’t deny that they get results. President Reagan looks ten years younger than he is in part because he thoroughly enjoys his morning workouts.
There is far more to recreation than just exercise. Roosevelt got relief from the enormous pressures of World War II by turning to his stamp collection or enjoying a game of poker with close friends. Hoover, like Carter, was an excellent fisherman. Both wrote books on the pastime. Like Harry Truman, I occasionally relaxed by playing the piano. One of my most pleasant memories is how pleased he was when I flew out to Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1969 and presented to him, for display in the Truman Library, the piano he and his daughter Margaret had played in the White House. If I had followed my daughter Tricia’s advice, I might have chosen music as my profession. In 1956, when she was ten years old, she was taking piano lessons and I was trying not too successfully to convince her how important it was to practice. She finally turned to me and said, “Daddy, you should have practiced more when you were a little boy. If you had, you might have become famous and gone to Hollywood and they would have buried you in a special place.”
In a delightful article, “Painting as a Pastime,” Winston Churchill observed that worry is an emotional spasm which occurs when the “mind catches hold of something and will not let it go.” The only way to deal with this condition, he went on, is to “gently insinuate something else into the mind’s convulsive grasp. If this something else is rightly chosen—the old undue grip releases and the process of recuperation and repair begins. The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance to a public man.” For Churchill most of the time and Eisenhower part of the time, that elusive “something else” was painting.
While not as physically dangerous as his heart attack two years before, Eisenhower’s stroke in 1957 was a much more emotionally painful ordeal. I remember going to the White House residence as soon as he was able to see visitors. He received me in a small room that had been converted to a painting studio. He told me a little about his ordeal. There was nothing wrong with his thinking processes; he just could not find the words to match his thoughts. What was fascinating was that throughout our talk he was busily engaged in painting a portrait of Prince Charles that he gave Queen Elizabeth when it was completed. Painting, like golf, was a life-saver for him.
People sometimes ask what a seventy-seven-year-old former President does for exercise and recreation. Again, I do not set a very good example. I have never gone hunting, and fishing just isn’t my bag. I tried deep-sea fishing once as a teenager and gave it up because I used to get seasick. When I told Churchill in 1954 of my problem, he said, “Don’t worry, young man, as you get older, you will outgrow it.” I was forty-one years old at the time. Incidentally, he proved to be right. I did outgrow it but too late to become a good fisherman. After the Republican Convention in 1952, Eisenhower tried to teach me how to cast for trout. It was a disaster. After hooking a limb the first three times, I caught his shirt on my fourth try. The lesson ended abruptly. I could see that he was disappointed because he loved fishing and could not understand why others did not like it as well as he did.
I don’t ski or play tennis. Perhaps because of the chess analogies that are frequently used to describe relations between nations, people often ask me whether I play the game. I don’t, but my grandson Christopher plays well enough already to give his father a run for his money. While I don’t play bridge, it isn’t because I don’t like it. I played a number of times in the summer between my first and second years at Duke. But I enjoyed it so much that I knew I could become addicted, so I have never played it since. The one and only time I played gin rummy was in 1944, on a twelve-hour flight from Guadalcanal to Hawaii in the belly of a C-54 transport. The learning process was so expensive that I decided to stick to poker, which I still play once a year with Walter Annenberg and other members of the Benevolent Marching and Philosophical Society of Philadelphia.
I go to an occasional baseball, football, or basketball game. My most vivid memory of a sports event was seeing my first major league baseball game on July 4, 1936. The Yankees crushed the Senators in a doubleheader. A rookie outfielder for New York, Joe DiMaggio, hit a home run into the sun bleachers at Griffith Stadium where I was sitting. The next time I saw the Yankees play on the Fourth of July was on a blisteringly hot Monday afternoon in New York forty-seven years later. Dave Righetti threw a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox—his first, and mine as well. I shall never forget the high drama of the moment when he struck out Wade Boggs, the best hitter in baseball, with a high inside fastball for the final out.
I quit golf ten years ago. It was a hard decision, because I enjoyed the game. It combines physical exercise, stimulating competition, and warm companionship. And it has another advantage that the non-player cannot possibly appreciate. George Smathers, with whom I served in the House and Senate, once told me that golf courses are on the most beautiful real estate in the world. I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but he was right. No one could help but get a lift out of playing such spectacular golf courses as Cyprus Point, Augusta, Oak Hill, Baltusral, Bel Air, or the Valley Club near Santa Barbara.
Playing abroad is also an interesting experience. The girl caddies on Japan’s immaculately groomed courses may not understand much English, but they are all great diplomats. Whenever you hit a ball, whether it goes into the bunker or out of bounds, they always say, “Good shot, good shot.” There is no better balm for a bruised ego.
So why did I give it up? There were two reasons. From the time Eisenhower gave me that lecture about improving my game, I tried to follow his advice. One day in late 1978, I broke 80. I must admit it was on a relatively easy course in San Clemente, but for me it was like climbing Mt. Everest. I knew I could never get better, and so the competitive challenge was gone. Breaking 80 was an even greater thrill than getting a hole-in-one. Incidentally, I did get a hole-in-one once, but I don’t remember much about it, except that it was on the third hole at Bel Air on Labor Day, 1961, I used a MacGregor six iron and a Spaulding Dot ball, and my partner Randolph Scott birdied the hole.
The other reason I quit golf was the decisive one. I had to meet a deadline for my third book, The Real War. I simply could not do it and also find four hours a day to play golf. This time, however, I found a substitute. In 1969, I asked President de Gaulle what he did for exercise. He told me that he believed that walking was the best thing a leader could do for his mental, physical, and emotional health. I now follow his advice and walk four miles a day. While I miss the competition and fellowship, I get three times as much exercise as I would playing a round of golf and riding between holes in a cart.
I find that when I am writing a speech, article, or book and run into a mental block, it is best to put the work aside. An idea or phrase will come to me on a quiet walk alone at five-thirty the next morning. Walking, combined with swimming when the season allows it, has proved to be exactly the right combination for me.
But I hasten to add that what works for me may not work for others. What is important is that everyone should find time from his busy life for recreation and exercise. Leaders in all fields should insist on it, not only for themselves but for their employees. Especially in high-powered professions such as politics, business, and the law, net performance is sometimes confused with gross hours. To impress partners, ambitious young associates at top law firms make sure their office lights are on all night and arrange to have themselves paged on Saturdays even if they’re not around. Young executives or political aides vie to be the last one out at night and the first one in the next morning. But I would rather have a well-rested subordinate in by nine with a good idea or two instead of one who is in by six-thirty and asleep at his desk with his tie in his coffee by seven.
No one should feel guilty for interrupting his work with a little fun, so long as he does not take it a step further and assume that having fun is the sole purpose of work.
Sometimes I am asked, “Was it fun being President?” This trivializes a very profound question. Any leader welcomes the responsibility and exercise of power. Otherwise he would not pay the price of getting and keeping it. Being in power enables him to realize his life’s ambition of making a difference for the better for his nation and the world. Being President is hard work. A President can enjoy great victories or suffer disappointing defeats. Successful Presidents are those who can take each in stride, recognizing that both are inevitable parts of the job.
Recreation is a means to an end, not the end itself. You don’t want to be President so that you can have fun. You want to have fun so that you can be a better President. The same is true in many other fields. Writing is not much fun, either. But when you create a book, an article, or a speech, it gives you far more enjoyment than making a birdie in golf.