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Roosevelt was presented with a small black bear that had been injured and restrained. Though he did refuse to shoot the exhausted animal, he had someone else kill it with a knife. 24

    Winston Churchill observes while FDR fishes at Shangri-La, the presidential retreat that later was known as Camp David.
    Most other sportsmen chose the more placid pursuit of fishing. New Yorker Martin Van Buren was one of the first presidential fishermen. Franklin Pierce loved the recreation, and it was rarely far from his mind (he mentioned fishermen or fishing rights in all four of his State of the Union addresses). Chester A. Arthur preferred angling in Canada. Cleveland found the Adirondacks more to his liking, while Eisenhower was an avid fly fisherman. Unlike Ike, Herbert Hoover never took a sick day or a vacation during his entire presidency, opting instead to labor sixteen-hour days in an effort to fix the Great Depression. Only after defeat in the 1932 elections did he allow himself weekends in the Shenandoah, where he cast his line into the rushing streams.
Two presidents who thoroughly despised hunting were Lincoln and Grant. The former could not bring himself to kill, and the latter hated the sight of blood.
    7 . SWIMMING
    Today commonly viewed as a sport of the upper classes, swimming was initially equated with poverty. Dipping in rivers and streams not only provided a simple form of entertainment for early Americans; it also was often their primary means of bathing. Tubs and clean water were conveniences of the wealthier strata, and millions of citizens went without indoor plumbing until well into the twentieth century (the White House did not have indoor bathroom facilities until the Hayes administration in the late 1870s). 25
    The stigma of commonness did not bother John Quincy Adams, and he looked forward to swimming in the Potomac on a daily basis. In his fifties, President Adams could swim the river’s breadth, so long as the weather and the water’s pace were agreeable. Not until Theodore Roosevelt would the Potomac see another executive swimmer, and he liked it cold. In contrast, his polio-stricken cousin preferred the eighty-eight-degree waters of Warm Springs, Georgia, which he first visited three years after contracting polio in 1921. FDR also installed the first swimming pool in the White House, which he kept lukewarm. The balmy waters were therapeutic for Roosevelt, and he found them liberating because they allowed him to do something that had been impossible since he was thirty-nine—stand under his own power.

    The media critiques Gerald Ford’s form in the new White House pool. Portrayed as a clumsy man, Ford was actually one of the most athletic individuals ever to become president.
Gerald R. Ford Library
    Kennedy was a child of the sea, and he spent long hours sailing or swimming. The latter activity offered a cardiovascular workout without straining his ailing spine, and he too kept the pool at the Executive Mansion warm. LBJ also partook of the presidential waters, often conducting meetings with political figures while he waded. Never athletic as a child, Johnson was among the least-fit presidents, and swimming was essentially the only routine exercise he did while in office. Though the former naval officer was also a fine swimmer, Richard Nixon had the FDR pool covered over to make space for the West Wing pressroom. The Fords compensated by building an in-ground pool on the South lawn.
John Quincy Adams and TR swam in the Potomac the same way JFK and LBJ swam in the White House pool—naked.
    8 . MUSIC
    Oddly, very few presidents were blessed by the muse Euterpe. Thomas Jefferson practiced violin up to three hours a day and played duets with fellow Virginian Patrick Henry. He collected sheet music from across the East Coast and Europe, and as with food and wine, he preferred Italian and French but could play nearly anything. While a diplomat in Paris during the summer of 1785, he broke his wrist severely