Our national pastime is returning. Fans are ready for the two words they’ve longed to hear since last October: “Play ball!” It’s the perfect time to revisit a presidential baseball secret.
Of all our presidents, President Dwight Eisenhower may have been the game’s biggest fan. He was crazy about it. The man who brought down Hitler and later gave us interstate highways was a born jock. And he was a pretty good one, too.
Eisenhower lived, breathed and ate sports while growing up in Abilene, Kan. Which made him a typical American teenager. He played center field on his high school team; his older brother Edgar played first base.
Ike was the third of six brothers. The Eisenhower boys had lots of intelligence, but the family had little money. So it made sense that Ike pursued an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy because it provided a free education.
He arrived at West Point with a heart overflowing with dreams, like most young men. More than anything, he wanted to be a famous ballplayer.
Ike dutifully tried out for the varsity baseball team. But he didn’t make it.
He later called it “the greatest disappointment of my life.” He also enjoyed football, so he turned to it for his Plan B. He made Army’s varsity football team the next year (even playing against the legendary Jim Thorpe) until a knee injury forced him to give up the game.
Yet not making the baseball team may have been a blessing in disguise, because Ike had a potentially-explosive secret. After finishing high school in 1909, he spent two years working at a creamery to help pay Edgar’s way through the University of Michigan. He also played baseball for money under an alias. Though politics was still decades off in his future, the teenage Eisenhower was already thinking like a politician by keeping his options open.
Taking money, regardless how small the amount, would have ended his amateur status. If he had made the Army team, and had word of his earlier play for pay leaked out, he would have been expelled for breaking the Academy’s Honor Code. His career would have been over before it began. There would have been no Ike as commander of the D-Day invasion, no “I Like Ike” buttons, no Eisenhower in the White House. So naturally he did his best to keep his secret hidden.
Until the end of World War II, that is. Returning to a hero’s welcome in New York City, he took in a New York Giants-Boston Red Sox game. Giants’ General Manager Mel Ott asked Eisenhower if it was true he had once played semi-pro ball. Caught up in the excitement of the moment and with reporters listening nearby, he blurted out that yes, he had played under the assumed name “Wilson,” then said it was “the one secret of his life.” (He apparently forgot his wartime affair with his British military chauffeur Kay Summersby.)
The story made it into print, forcing Ike to do damage control a few days later. He told the Associated Press that he had taken “any job that paid money” during his pre-college days.
But the cat was out of the bag. The book Going Home to Glory by Eisnehower’s grandson David recounts a story related to him by former Brooklyn Dodgers public relations man Arthur Patterson. While watching a game with Ike once, Patterson said he recalled hearing that two young men named “Wilson” had played in the Kansas Central League in 1909. Which player was Wilson and which was Eisenhower, he asked.
“I was the Wilson who could hit,” Ike shot back. Then he quickly added, “That’s between you and me.”
As presidential scandals go, this one wasn’t a biggie. And it’s easy to sympathize with Eisenhower, too: The man who led Americans into combat and through the Cold War wasn’t above cutting a few corners just to play the game we all love.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
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