POLITICS:The Cash-In Club
Fund, John H.
P O L I T I C S The Cash-In Club by John H. Fund HE DEATH OF GERALD FORD has put the issue of what to do with our former presidents front and center. Greater longevity means we are likely...
...His willingness to lease himself out as part of a foursome for golf games held by wealthy businessmen became a running joke—the “Rent a Duffer” program...
...By my lights, I much prefer them to be making money than inserting themselves into the Middle East conflict à laJimmy Carter, who recently compared Israeli policies to South African apartheid...
...After his retirement to the desert resort of Rancho Mirage, California, he quickly pocketed $1 million for his memoir and another $1 million for a five-year NBC television contract...
...Newsweek magazine estimated he was pulling down a $1 million a year annual income by the early 1980s...
...It’s clear that with the modern expresidency the bucks keep landing in front of them...
...Compared to Carter and Clinton, Gerald Ford was a model of decorum...
...From Bill Clinton’s retirement in 2001 to 2004, when Ronald Reagan died, we had five...
...Some Democrats railed against such excesses...
...When Betty Ford went to her hairdresser in Palm Springs, she was often accompanied by four Secret Service agents...
...F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 5 1...
...When he became president in 1974 at the age of 61 his total net worth was a measly $256,000...
...Not that there wasn’t material to wonder about...
...Former Rep...
...But letting our former Leaders of the Free World have free rein to use their experience and notoriety is both quintessentially American and also a real improvement over how most of our retired leaders have been treated...
...As Samuel Johnson, the British writer of the first dictionary, noted, “A man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he is engaged in making money...
...No former president even got a pension until Congress granted the first one to Harry Truman in 1958...
...A Bogata-based business group paid Secret Service agents...
...His diplomatic efforts in North Korea on behalf of the Clinton White House helped cement a deal that allowed that outré regime to harness nuclear weapons...
...Truman was, of course, famous for saying “the buck stops here...
...I guess for some people having Clinton drop by is the fastest way to get on the map...
...In 1978, the New York Times went so far as to criticize Gerald Ford for endorsing a collection of medals of all the presidents: “We wish we could earn his way without dragging the presidency into it...
...According to his wife’s financial disclosure statements, last year he pulled in a staggering $7.5 million for 42 speeches, an average of some $170,000 per talk...
...I personally witnessed people passing out flyers on a street in Berne, Switzerland, offering free seats to a Bill Clinton speech that was sponsored by a mysterious businessman that no one in the country had ever heard of...
...him $800,000 for four days of appearances in Latin America...
...Bill Clinton acts as if he never left office, and is even now plotting a comeback of sorts by acting as Senator Hillary’s unofficial campaign 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 J O H N H . F U N D With the exception of an aborted and bungled attempt to join Ronald Reagan’s ticket at the 1980 GOP convention in Detroit, Ford completely abandoned politics and devoted himself to commerce...
...Some people turn up their noses at the ways some of our former presidents rake in the bucks...
...Let’s be grateful if former presidents eschew diplomacy and merely make money the way Gerald Ford did...
...He mostly spent his postpresidential years ensuring he would be on the sunny side of the street financially...
...The late Democratic Sen...
...When Betty Ford went to her hairdresser in Palm Springs, she was often accompanied by four Certainly, Ford made mistakes...
...URIOUSLY, ALL SUCH COMPLAINTS about former presidents ended as soon as Bill Clinton left office...
...At some point, the Secret Service cocoon around ex-presidents does become ridiculous...
...Greater longevity means we are likely to have more of them hanging around...
...manager...
...John H. Fund, The American Spectator’s Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...Other presidents have also been a nuisance...
...John Kasich told me that Ford visited him in 1997 to lobby against a proposed restriction on presidential perks...
...At the time, Ford was enjoying not only $4 million a year in Secret Service protection but a federally funded staff of six along with office space...
...Many liberals claim that Jimmy Carter has been our finest ex-president, citing his innumerable books and unflagging efforts at promoting his version of peace...
...Bill Clinton certainly keeps his own Secret Service detail on the move...
...The children of former presidents are only entitled to Secret Service protection until the age of 16, but Chelsea Clinton continued to get such protection for several years even though she was a college graduate and earning a good salary in corporate America (she now works for that most unregulated of entities, a hedge fund...
...In reality, Carter has been the very model of what not to be out of office: an inveterate scold and sanctimonious bore...
...How should they behave...
...Columnist Nolan Finley calls him “the leading voice of the America is Evil club” for cozying up to every stray dictator he can from the late Yasser Arafat to Hugo Chavez...
...P O L I T I C S The Cash-In Club by John H. Fund HE DEATH OF GERALD FORD has put the issue of what to do with our former presidents front and center...
...He gave an average of 30 speeches a year for fees in the $15,000 to $20,000 range...
...He wisely declined to join any corporate boards until he had been out of office for four years, but by 1987 he was soon sitting on eight of them for fees of up to $30,000 a year, and was consulting for several others for even larger annual sums...
...Another firm handed him $125,000 just for having him drop by a teleconference center in New York to make a short talk...
...Lawton Chiles used to joke that Ford cost the government so much money every time he delivered a speech that the taxpayers could save a few bucks by paying him to stay home...
...It’s also true that he should have been more carefully attuned to the extent of taxpayer resources that supplemented his lifestyle...
...Ulysses Grant died in poverty...
...At some point, the Secret Service cocoon around ex-presidents does become ridiculous...
...His bank account held exactly $1,282...
...Last fall, he got into an unseemly row with Chris Wallace of Fox News that had him wagging his finger and badgering the newsman for daring to ask about his record in fighting Osama bin Laden...
...He certainly had a right to...
Vol. 40 • February 2007 • No. 1
