Presidential recreation - 20 August 1993

The president of the United States is on holiday, so why shouldn't we be. Question, How would you know at once if you read it, "the president is on holiday", that it was written by an Englishman? "On holiday", that's why, is exclusively British.

Well perhaps not, perhaps Australians said but as surely non-American as "in hospital". Americans are either in the hospital or have been hospitalised, if they're rich in a personalised room. We've not really come to that. Though I noticed sadly on my recent trip to London that nowadays the English too no longer have personal notepaper but personalised, but even in that short five word sentence "the president is on holiday", there's another clue to a Briton's hand, the word holiday itself. America has holiday, national holidays, for instance – Independence Day, Labour Day, but American's themselves go on vacation or take a vacation.

I was interested to know when this came about. Both the Oxford and Sir William Craige's, originally Craige's great dictionary of American English, give it a star as being an Americanism when it means a protracted holiday. The word itself is much older and meant release, freedom from – as in the question put in 1531 "what vacation had they from the wars?" The first entry in the American sense is 1844 from John Russell Lowell not a blinding innovator in language, so the word must have been in popular speech when he wrote about the small factory towns of New England, "I wish they would have a vacation in the dog days, stop the mills and let all the girls rest".

Well it was announced from the White House on Tuesday evening that on Thursday the 19th, President and Mrs Clinton and their daughter Chelsea will arrive for a 10-day vacation on Martha's Vineyard, a spreading triangular island lying off the coast of Massachusetts just south, no more than a ferry ride, south of the long curving fish-hook peninsular of Cape Cod. "Martha's Vineyard is just about 20 miles long and nine miles wide and it says here was permanently settled in 1642 in the 18th century became a whaling centre and is today a land of old small towns, new cottages, high cliffs, a plain of unbroken forest bounded by white sails, salt water, wild fowl and the steady pull of an ocean breeze." That was written in the mid-1930s. However, Martha's Vineyard in common with many other places retains the gifts that God gave but man has been very busy in the past 60 years breaking up the forest, piling on the new cottages, the lunch counters, the second-hand car lots and reproducing his kind at an extravagant rate.

It was being described by a newspaper reporter the other day as an adorable rural island retreat all a-twitter over the president's visit, but picture any island that small whose winter population of 13,000 is boosted by vacationers seeking an adorable rural retreat to, well through the summer, 90,000. What has not been remarked on is the boldness, the actual audacity of the White House in announcing that the president is going to take a 10-day vacation. It shows that Mr Clinton is now well enough settled in the presidency without much fear that people are going to accuse him of fiddling while America burns, which happens to every president.

Of course before now you've seen pictures of the president jogging most days and – occasionally – and for an hour or two swinging a golf club, but it's always pointed out that he was doing a speech or visiting a hospital or a homeless shelter nearby and just grabbing an off hour in order to preserve his sanity. You can't announce a full-blown vacation unless you're convinced that the people know you deserve it and everybody knows by now that Clinton works about 16, 17 hours a day. He is the hardest working president we've had since I wonder who, Jimmy Carter I suppose, though a lot of his sweat and bother was resented by many of his aides because he could not delegate authority, he had to do everything himself. So much so, I don't recall any picture of Carter taking a holiday, perhaps he never had one.

But I can think at once of two presidents who in time had to suppress their sporting hobbies or indulge them in stealth. Sometime after the halo had faded from the brow of the great conquering General Eisenhower, when he'd been in the White House a year or two, he converted a piece of the White House grounds into a putting green. The horror of it, the Democrats wasted no time in calculating how many gardeners might have been employed or how many hungry children could be fed on that patch of White House greenery.

For his last two years, President Eisenhower ducked off down to Augusta, Georgia and didn't invite the press; he got into trouble for that too. And, in the end, he couldn't wait to depart the White House and straightened out his a cursed duck hook where nobody watched. For the moment you are succeeded in the presidency, your hobbies, habits, foods, ideas eccentricities are dead matter. Where is George Bush spending his vacation, nobody knows or cares.

When the man first gets to the White House, there is of course a mount of curiosity among the media about what games, sports he's interested in in his spare time. This curiosity was soon satisfied in the early days of President Harry Truman; sports, he announced is a lot of damn nonsense. But the usual president always has a nervous moment, himself thinking first of votes, which by that time has become an instant reflex. He would like very much to announce his passionate devotion to baseball and football, the two games peculiar to America whose fans could if they choose amass more votes for any one candidate than the voters of any other combination of games. But suppose the president isn't very good at either game or in the knowledge of them. There is no way of pretending to be knowledgeable about American football if you're not since it's a tense combination of chess, physics and armoured warfare.

Nixon almost choked on football metaphors, he thought them up so often that mostly rousing idiomatic cry as to hold the line or out muscle them, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, break through, give your all. This was suspicious because it suggested the truth that he'd never been much of a footballer himself. Whereas Gerald Ford who wasn't very good with idioms of any kind had been an American a college footballer of national reputation when college football was supreme.

Ronald Reagan, however good or indifferent good at his small college as a player, he really knew the game. His first job was as a radio sports announcer, so as a melancholy juncture in his film career when he seemed to be slotted forever into humdrum B film roles, he heard that his studio was going to make a film about an American folk hero, a Norwegian immigrant who became Notre Dame's football star and America's most famous coach. From Reagan's point of view, the movie was just as much about one George Gipp a player of some talent, but the main thing was he died young of pneumonia and written into the film as a heartbreaking deathbed scene where Gipp arose on one elbow and begged the great coach Knute Rockney, win one for the Gipper, and died. This role appealed to Reagan, both as a footballer and as a born hero. "Who's the Gipper?" The head of the studio asked?" A disgusted Reagan said, "A lot of people you have on the contract don't know a football from a cantaloupe." Reagan got the role. Much more important first as governor of California and then as president he told a story of George Gipp with a suitable moral punch to audiences small and mighty. Better still, when he went campaigning especially the second time round, he would end a speech with that shy twist of the head a modest grin and a begging inflection "Well, folks, win one for the Gipper".

George Bush was probably the best all-round athlete there's ever been in the White House, but people began to get so roiled up about his seeming indifference to the domestic woes of the country that they resented his vacations and for the last year or two the White House clamped down on pictures of him doing what he often did in one day, golfing, fishing, yachting, touch football and back to golf.

By the way, there hasn't been a really good golfer in the presidency. Wilson played it genteelly, Harding took lessons from the great Bobby Jones, did no good, golf was not really Harding's bag, he was known privately as a sporting man, which in his day meant a taste for what were ambiguously known as sporting ladies. Incidentally, the expert in that game was John Kennedy, but the media convention of the day was to look the other way.

Before Kennedy, way before, I mean before Roosevelt who played weekend golf before, at the age of 40, he was paralysed, fishing was the presidential sport of choice. Coolidge fished for want of nothing better to think off. Hoover was a considerable, something of a master fly fisherman. I suppose Clinton will be seen with a rod provided it's understood that he's after the Southerners' beloved fried catfish. I guess his main sport, if that's what you can call it, is jogging. A very odd way to keep fit, especially if you make yourself so hungry that you have to look out at once for the Big Mac and by his own admission the president does have a weight problem. When the jogging fad came in, I worried for a time maybe golf should be supplemented or driven by some jogging. I relaxed when my own doctor said, "The only time I jog is when I'm late for the funeral of a patient who jogged".

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