When Harry Truman left office in 1953 his sole income was his Army pension of $112.56 per month. To make money Truman wrote a memoir, sold off some family farm property and would have been content to live out his days in Independence, Missouri on the proceeds of these transactions and his army check. Congress, perhaps a bit embarrassed by his austerity, passed the Former Presidents Act in 1958 providing past presidents (at this point just Truman and Hoover) a pension of $25,000 per year.
In a recent C-Span feature on presidential librararies Brian Lamb aired an interesting clip of former President Truman speaking about the post-presidency and profit. Transcript of Truman video below.
Former President Harry Truman:
...a president can't promote the fact that he's been president. If he does he's not in the right frame of mind and so when I thought about those things I thought about other presidents who had been through the same prorgram that I had and it was interesting as could be. Some of them when they became presidents were rich men, some of them were just in the same financial situation as I was myself and those men who had had to go ahead and do what was necessary to make a living did not under any circumstances use the fact that they had been president to promote their own welfare and benefit and that's one of the great assets that the country has had. Presidents of the United States are men who understand what it means to be the chief executive of the greatest country in the history of the world and that's all there is to it.
I had offers from, oh, half a dozen people who wanted to pay me a great big salary. One in particular told me that he wanted to give me a hundred thousand dollars a year to be chairman of the board of his organization and I said to him 'Why didn't you make that offer to me when I was working out on the farm for ten years? I'd have been happy have it' – and then he left, he knew very well where I'd put him. He was trying to exploit the presidency of the United States and that I wouldn't stand for.
Former President Bill Clinton made $51,855,599 making speeches from 2000-2007. That's on top of...
[Clinton's] presidential pension now totals $171,900. The government picks up the $354,000 annual rent on his 8,300-square-foot office in Harlem, and pays his office staff to a maximum of $160,000. The Feds reimburse travel, postage, telephone, and printing expenses, not to mention providing a Secret Service detail.
Is ANY speech worth that kind of money? Or is an association with the former President of the United States what is for sale? The rich and powerful who show a willingness "to exploit the presidency of the United States" are disgusting people. The former President who enables them is vulgar pig.