Citizen-in-Chief: The Second Lives of the American Presidents
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Citizen-in-Chief: The Second Lives of the American Presidents
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Overview
“[A] remarkably revealing history.…This well-researched, opinionated account does a fine job of filling a surprisingly empty historical niche.”
—Publishers Weekly
Citizen-in-Chief, The Second Lives of the American Presidents, is a smartly researched, surprising, often witty, and always revealing look at former presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush. Authors Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss offer readers entertaining true stories of the radical turns, provocative rehabilitations, and tragic trajectories of presidential lives after the White House. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calls Citizen-in-Chief, “an engrossing book, Benardo and Weiss tell a fascinating tale,” and he properly states that where our nation’s leaders went after leading is often “more interesting than the presidency itself.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061974724 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2009 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 677 KB |
About the Author
Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss are husband and wife and the coauthors of Brooklyn by Name. Their writing has been published in The New York Review of Books, New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. They live in Brooklyn, New York, with their son and daughter.
Read an Excerpt
Citizen-in-Chief
The Second Lives of the American Presidents
Chapter One
Getting Solvent
The Financial Journey of Past Presidents
It is a national disgrace that our Presidents . . . should be cast adrift, and perhaps be compelled to keep a corner grocery for subsistence. . . . We elect a man to the Presidency, expect him to be honest, to give up a lucrative profession, perhaps, and after we [are] done with him we let him go into seclusion and perhaps poverty.
Millard FillmoreI never had a nickel to my name until I got out of the White House, and now I'm a millionaire, the most favored person for the Washington Republicans. I get a tax cut every year, no matter what our needs are.
Bill Clinton[Gerald Ford] has become the presidential equivalent of Joe Louis, who ended his days as a greeter for a Las Vegas hotel.
Richard Cohen, The Washington Post . . . . . .
Returning by train on his own dime and moving into his mother-in-law's house, Harry Truman found his January 1953 exit from the White House a sobering experience. With no Air Force One to guarantee a soft landing, no million-dollar transition fund to help him segue into private life, no plush office awaiting administrative staff, the former president confronted a subdued and humbling homecoming.
Nearly half a century later, Bill Clinton's departure could not have been more different. Forsaking Little Rock and removing to New York, Clinton left office blessed with a rich array of perks and a wide-open opportunity to capitalize on his fame. Waiting in the wings were a host of record-setting bookdeals for him and his wife, unprecedented speaking fees (over $9 million his first year alone), and an eight-thousand-square-foot office space in Harlem that would become headquarters for his worldwide fund-raising operations. The ex-presidency, once a burden to bear, now had the marks of la dolce vita.
Compensation for presidents and ex-presidents alike has long been a contested question. The opening salvo in the debate occurred during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when Benjamin Franklin proposed that a president receive no recompense whatsoever. Franklin wanted to diminish what he believed was human nature's overriding passion: avarice. Two stays in England before the Revolution convinced him that corruption was inherent to English political life, and helped seed his "Utopian Idea" of a nonsalaried chief magistrate in America. "That we can never find men to serve us in the Executive department, without paying them well for their services," he declared, was a false premise and one that risked creating institutional birth defects.
Franklin's advice went unheeded. The convention decided to grant the commander-in-chief a twenty-five-thousand-dollar salary and a rent-free mansion. Yet what appeared to be a generous offer was not generous enough. Although Congress occasionally allocated separate funds, presidents were generally expected to use their personal income to finance the standard accoutrements of White House life—public receptions, banquets, furnishings, and staff. Many ended up saving nothing during their tenure, and most left the office deep in debt. Thomas Jefferson found himself eight thousand dollars in the hole simply from the invoices accrued during his final year in power.
Compounding the pain of debt, once out of power most presidents were loath to engage in the kinds of commercial pursuits that might have restored them financially. Republican ideas of virtue, nurtured and fostered by the Founding Fathers, held that commerce was a stain on the reputation of the presidency and something to be shunned. For decades, most departing presidents felt compelled to uphold an informal obligation to refrain from exploiting the symbolic power of their former position.
Not until after the Civil War were the financial restraints on former presidents finally adjusted. The new capitalist ethic altered the playing field: generating income from commercial transactions was no longer perceived as antithetical to the country's value system. The ruthless accessories of capitalism's forward march—graft, acquisitiveness, and inequality—benefited the ex-presidential class. According to historian Henry Graff, "Puritan America was trying to find moral justification for the relatively easier accumulation of money," and singled out robber barons, corrupt bosses, and rapacious industrialists as villainous exceptions to the rule. For the rest of America, there was no shame in turning a legitimate business profit—and former presidents were hardly blamed for pursuing a decent living after leaving office, whether in law, business, writing, or speaking for pay.
Surpluses and Deficits of the Virginia Founders
In the beginning, George Washington acknowledged his kismet. The only one of the early Virginia presidents not to be enveloped by the tyranny of arrears, Washington wrote in 1799 that "Were it not for occasional supplies of money in payment for lands sold within the last four or five years to the amount of upwards of $50,000," he too would have been mired "in debt and difficulties."
Washington's good fortune was a product of diligence and foresight. Having acquired his first piece of land in western Virginia's Shenandoah Valley before turning twenty, and educated himself on Pennsylvania investments during the French and Indian War, Washington was seasoned in the burgeoning business of land speculation. (He also bore witness to the regrettable circumstances of others who gambled poorly and landed in debtors' prison—friends like Henry Lee and Robert Morris, the latter who, before meeting such a fate, had been celebrated as the "Financier of the Revolution.")
Out of office, Washington ventured conservatively and forswore borrowing on assets purchased with loans, pledging "never [to] undertake anything without perceiving a door to the accomplishment in a reasonable amount of time with my own resources." His prudence paid off. Moreover, Washington was rarely beset by the challenge of managing distant lands; there was never a shortage of people eager to assist the retired general-president in administering his real estate. Reluctant to use his position for financial gain when in power, once out of office he became "shameless, asking government officials and private individuals to assess the value of tracts, see to surveying and improvements, advise him as to the reliability of respective buyers, [and] collect sums due to him."
Citizen-in-ChiefThe Second Lives of the American Presidents. Copyright © by Leonard Benardo. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
What People are Saying About This
“A lively, insightful, and illuminating examination of an underexamined yet influential American institution: the postpresidency. Benardo and Weiss show how our chief executives’ ‘second lives’ are as diverse—and as rich in uplifting tales and cautionary ones—as their time at the pinnacle of power.”
“The afterlife of a president, a dimming of the spotlight and a final chance at buffing the reputation, can sometimes be more interesting than the presidency itself—at least it is in this engrossing book. Benardo and Weiss tell a fascinating tale.”