The importance of physical fitness to the new administration was underscored both by a conference convened only a month after the inauguration and by a significant reorganization of the President’s Council. Eisenhower’s Council Director, MacCarthy, was quickly eased out and a replacement found in Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, a highly successful University of Oklahoma football coach. True to Kennedy’s style, the new executive for the Council was named a Special Consultant to the President, making it more than ever the President’s Council. Rather than continue the delegatory distance that Eisenhower had fostered, Kennedy attempted to identify fitness initiatives directly with the office of the President. In this effort, the Kennedy administration was surprisingly successful. The President's Council unquestionably became President Kennedy's Council. In fact, the council's origins in the Eisenhower administration have been largely forgotten by those who grew up in that time.
Kennedy’s success was not just a matter of bureaucratic changes. Unlike his predecessor, Kennedy addressed the issue of physical fitness frequently in his public pronouncements and assigned new projects to the council. Perhaps Kennedy's most famous intervention in the area of fitness, and an indicator of the extent to which the Council became identified with him, was the fifty-mile hike. The idea of the hike developed from Kennedy's discovery in late 1962 of an executive order from Theodore Roosevelt challenging U.S. Marine officers to finish 50 miles in twenty hours. Kennedy passed the document on to his own marine commandant, Gen. David M. Shoup, and suggested that Shoup bring it up to him as his, Shoup's, own discovery, with the proposal that modern day marines should duplicate this feat. Shoup, of course, responded speedily, and the President went on to say that:
Should your report to me indicate that the strength and stamina of the modern Marine is at least equivalent to that of his antecedents, I will then ask Mr. Salinger to look into the matter personally and give me a report on the fitness of the White House Staff.
In his conversations with his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, Kennedy left no doubt that "look[ing] into the matter personally" would involve Salinger walking fifty miles himself. A well-padded individual with a sense of humor about himself, Salinger turned his efforts to avoid the hike into an open joke, finally releasing a statement on February 12, 1963, in which he publicly declined the honor. As justification, he pointed instead to Attorney General Robert Kennedy's completion of the hike as proof of the fitness of the administration. The President's brother had undertaken the hike on an impulse, and although clad in leather oxford shoes, had slogged the full distance through snow and slush.
But the real impact of the fifty-mile hike was with the public at large, which took the hike as a personal request and a challenge from their President. Furthermore, responsibility for the President's challenge was identified to lie with the President's Council. This put the Council in a tricky position. To disavow the hikes would undermine its declared purposes. On the other hand, the Council wanted no part of having the hikes thrust on it as a program by an overenthusiastic public. As a compromise, the Council sent out a cautious press release recommending a moderate, gradual program of walking for exercise. For the more persistent, the Council prepared a background letter explaining the origin of the hike, again suggesting a sensible walking regimen, and stating emphatically that government agencies were not sponsoring or rewarding hikes.
The fifty-mile hike fad demonstrated just how far the President's Council had come. Instead of laboring to drum up interest in its work, the Council was in the position of having to restrain the public's zeal for a program it had embraced spontaneously. In fact, this was exactly the way the Eisenhower Council and its director Shane MacCarthy had thought the Council should operate. The fitness mission was supposed to develop at the grassroots level, with the Council merely there to advise and guide. But the staff and members of the Eisenhower Council underestimated the need for such advice and guidance. When the Kennedy administration took up the fitness message, it was promoted to a degree unseen since Theodore Roosevelt himself. Not only was the President consistently addressing the issue at every opportunity that speech and print allowed, the Council itself had begun a major publicity campaign through the National Advertising Council. Although the Council on Youth Fitness had certainly been aware of the need for publicity during the Eisenhower administration, promotional efforts were fitful and largely consisted of local public relations projects such as fitness poster contests for young people.
In contrast, the campaign that the Kennedy Council undertook with the help of the National Advertising Council was organized, extensive, media-savvy, and above all, countrywide. Material was produced for print, radio, television, and display advertising. For broadcast alone, 650 television kits and 3,500 radio kits were sent out. The fifty-thousand dollar budget for the campaign compared favorably with the National Advertising Council's work on War Bonds or Forest Conservation. All of this was in addition to the continued encouragement through public relations outlets. The physical fitness theme even appeared in the comics page, as seventeen major syndicated comics creators took up the subject, the most notable being Charles Schulz of "Peanuts" fame.
Possibly the oddest contribution to the effort was the "Chicken Fat Song." Written by Meredith Willson, creator of The Music Man, and sung with enthusiasm by Robert Preston, the actor most responsible for that musical's success, the “Chicken Fat Song” was produced in a three-minute, radio-friendly version and a six-minute version to accompany schoolchildren during Council-approved workout routines.