Political Football
To be clear, liberal and conservative presidential candidates alike have professed love for football and sought the endorsements of top players. Take Nixon’s 1972 opponent George McGovern. Football players appealed to blue-collar workers, McGovern campaign staff not so much: “Long haired McGovern advisors get beat up in bars, football players didn’t,” historian Jesse Berrett pointed out in a recent phone interview.
In fact, the game’s popularity with presidents stretches back to the early twentieth century. Though he never played, Teddy Roosevelt frequently lauded football as a means to build character and is widely credited with saving it from extinction. Eisenhower played competently at West Point before an injury ended his football career. Nixon’s successor arguably the greatest athlete to ever hold the office of president, Gerald Ford, famously starred for the University of Michigan. Nixon, however poorly, had also played the sport while an undergrad at Whittier College in California. He extolled its virtues regarding team building and individual character. The sport, as Nixon, Eisenhower, and later Ronald Reagan would agree “teaches you how to win and lose as a team, how to accept a loss, how to play fair,” Berrett added.
That being said, few candidates wielded their fandom as Nixon did. Football served as a means to build an electoral base, particularly from the office of the presidency. By the 1970s, Nixon began “to use the sport to construct an electoral coalition that would, he hoped, sustain him into a second term and win the Republican Party in the White House for a generation,” Berrett observed in his 2018 book, Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics. In researching the book, Barrett also utilized the Jack Kemp and Mary McGrory Papers, both housed in the Library’s Manuscript Division.
Football crossed lines of geography, race, and class. Media portrayals only furthered the game’s appeal to “average Americans.” Fans embodied “Middle America in the raw … the Silent Majority at its noisiest,” wrote Time. Historian Arthur Schlesinger cast tweedy aspersions onto vice president Agnew for his basement “rumpus room” filled with “Lawrence Welk records and his Sunday afternoons with the Baltimore Colts. Agnew,” Schlesinger wrote, was “the archetype of the forgotten American who had made it.”
