It’s President Day! Let’s Recall President Eisenhower’s “Baseball Secret”

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It’s President Day! Let’s Recall President Eisenhower’s “Baseball Secret”

“When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a major league baseball player. My friend said that he’d like to be President of the United States…Neither of us got our wish!” -Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States

The tradition of United States presidents throwing out the first ball of the season in Washington started with President Taft, but by the glint in his eyes in the photo below, it appears President Eisenhower wasn’t timid about taking his turn. Looking on as Ike prepares to toss the first pitch on Opening Day, 1960 are Nationals’ owner Clark Griffith, Vice President Richard Nixon, and Griffith’s nephew and future Nats’ owner, Calvin Griffith.

At West Point, Eisenhower tried out for the baseball team but didn’t make it. He was later quoted as saying, “Not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, maybe my greatest.”

Dwight Eisenhower had a life-long love of baseball. Growing up in a relatively poor Kansas family, young Dwight often declared his ambition to one day be a baseball player “like Honus Wagner.” But after high-school graduation he partook in a deception that could conceivably have gotten him disqualified from West Point, making his later glorious military and political career unlikely.

Before entering West Point, Ike evidently played baseball for money, disguising himself behind the pseudonym “Wilson” to avoid jeopardizing his amateur standing which was necessary to play college football and baseball. Playing under a pseudonym, although common, would have opened the young cadet to the charge he technically had deceived West Point and its vaunted honor code. In order to try out, he had to attest he had never played sports for money. Had he made the varsity, it certainly would have increased his risk of exposure and possible expulsion.

I guess we can all be thankful that Cadet Dwight Eisenhower didn’t make the West Point varsity baseball team. What seemed like a personal disaster to the young Eisenhower may in retrospect have been good fortune for the entire Free World!

Gary Livacari

Photo Credits: “Nationals On Parade,” by Mark Stang; and public domain

Information: Edited from the article, “Eisenhower’s Baseball Secret,” by Michael Beschloss