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The Truman Show: The Fraudulent Origins of the Former The Truman Show: The Fraudulent Origins of the Former
Presidents Act Presidents Act
Paul F. Campos
University of Colorado Law School
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Paul F. Campos,
The Truman Show: The Fraudulent Origins of the Former Presidents Act
, 2022 MICH. ST.
L. REV. 1 (2022),
available at
https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1580.
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THE TRUMAN SHOW:
THE FRAUDULENT ORIGINS OF THE FORMER
PRESIDENTS ACT
Paul Campos
*
2022 Mich. St. L. Rev 1
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1
I. HISTORY OF THE FORMER PRESIDENTS ACT ............................... 5
II. THE MYTH OF HARRY TRUMAN’S FINANCIAL RECTITUDE ....... 10
III. HARRY TRUMAN’S FINANCES ................................................... 21
A. The Memoirs ..................................................................... 35
B. Other Writing, Lecturing, and Guest Appearance Fees .... 39
C. Sale of the Truman Family Farm ...................................... 40
D. Truman’s Post-Presidential Income Adjusted for
Inflation and Relative Income ........................................... 43
E. Harry Truman’s Post-Presidential Net Worth ................... 45
CONCLUSION: HARRY TRUMAN AND THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA 49
INTRODUCTION
On January 6, 2021, a seditious mob incited by President
Donald Trump invaded and ransacked the Capitol in an attempt to
stop a joint session of Congress from certifying Trump’s defeat in
the previous November’s election.
1
In the days immediately following, many people demanded that
President Trump be impeached for a second time for his role in
triggering the attack.
2
A number of these people pointed out that,
* Professor of Law, University of Colorado. I thank Akhil Amar, Isaac
Campos, Rick Collins, Brad Delong, Wayne Gazur, Jennifer Hendricks, Erik
Loomis, Robert Nagel, Greg Polsky, and Sloan Speck for their comments and
suggestions.
1. See Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe & Razzan Nakhlawi, A Mob Insurrection
Stoked by False Claims of Election Fraud and Promises of Restoration,
WASHINGTON POST (Jan. 9, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-
security/trump-capitol-mob-attack-origins/2021/01/09/0cb2cf5e-51d4-11eb-83e3-
322644d82356_story.html [https://perma.cc/CDE4-KNCN].
2. See John Fritze, Momentum for Trump Impeachment Soars as Some in
GOP Say It’s Warranted After Capitol Riot, USA TODAY (Jan. 10, 2021),
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/10/trump-impeachment-
momentum-soars-following-riot-u-s-capitol/6603398002/ [https://perma.cc/Z565-
HJ7X]. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump on January 13, 2021,
2 Michigan State Law Review
should Trump be convicted by the Senate, he would lose the many
benefits bestowed on ex-presidents by the Former Presidents Act
(FPA), the federal statute enacted in 1958 that first granted both a
pension and an array of other valuable taxpayer-funded privileges to
former Presidents.
3
By 2020, the provisions of the FPA were providing former
presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama more
than one million dollars per year each in government benefits.
4
(Former President Carter was receiving $480,000 in annual
benefits).
5
For many commenters, the prospect of Donald Trump
receiving a comparable level of taxpayer largesse to help subsidize
his post-presidential lifestyle was an additional compelling reason to
eject Trump from the White House via impeachment and
conviction.
6
As this series of events illustrated, the Former Presidents Act is
a statute of considerable symbolic political significance.
7
That
significance is also illustrated by the fact that, more than sixty years
exactly one week after the attack on the Capitol. One month later, on February 13,
the Senate voted to convict Trump by a margin of 57–43, thus, falling short of the
two-thirds majority required for conviction under the Constitution. See Dareh
Gregorian, Trump Acquitted in Impeachment Trial; 7 GOP Senators Vote with
Democrats to Convict, NBC NEWS (Feb. 13, 2021),
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-acquitted-impeachment-
trial-7-gop-senators-vote-democrats-convict-n1257876 [https://perma.cc/48HS-
E3AX].
3. See Former Presidents Act, 3 U.S.C. § 102. The relevant text of the
statute reads that its benefits are available to any former president “whose service in
such office shall have terminated other than by removal pursuant to section 4 of
article II of the Constitution of the United States of America.” See id. This would
seem to indicate that a president must be removed from the presidency to lose the
benefits of the Act. The Constitution, however, specifies that the Senate can go on to
disqualify someone convicted by it from “hold[ing] and enjoy[ing] any Office of
honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.” See U.S. CONST. art. I, § 3, cl. 7. The
Office of the Former President—the position created by implication for former
presidents by the Act—is arguably such an office, although the question has never
been subjected to judicial interpretation.
4. See Demian Brady, Congress Should Roll Back Perks to Ex-Presidents
Costing Taxpayers $4 Million Annually, NAT’L TAXPAYERS UNION FOUND. (Nov. 25,
2020), https://www.ntu.org/foundation/detail/congress-should-roll-back-perks-to-ex-
presidents-costing-taxpayers-4-million-annually [https://perma.cc/Y6DY-ZS7E].
5. See id.
6. See Kurt Bardella, Trump Doesn’t Deserve Post-Presidential Benefits.
Remove Him and Ensure He Won’t Get Them, USA TODAY (Jan. 12, 2021),
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/01/12/impeach-trump-deny-millions-
benefits-after-presidency-column/6624252002/ [https://perma.cc/K3VC-X36D].
7. See id.
Campos The Truman Show 3
after its enactment, the FPA has remained a subject of ongoing
controversy within Congress itself.
8
In recent years, several bills
intended to significantly curtail the benefits it provides have been
proposed by members of both parties.
9
One of these bills reached
President Obama’s desk, where he vetoed it late in his second term.
10
Given all this, it is remarkable that the FPA has been almost
completely ignored by the legal academic literature.
11
Indeed, this
Article represents the first sustained critique of the statute’s origin
and purposes.
This Article argues that, rather than paring back the benefits it
provides, the FPA should simply be abolished altogether.
12
The FPA
is a bad law that has never had any reasonable basis in public policy.
And precisely why it has always been such a bad law is revealed
most clearly by examining what turns out to have been the statute’s
unimpeachably fraudulent origins.
The FPA came into being because former president Harry
Truman made a series of representations to both Congress and the
public regarding the supposedly problematic financial situation he
faced during the five and one half years that passed between the end
of his presidency and the statute’s enactment.
13
These representations
provided the purported factual basis for enacting the statute in the
first place; furthermore, these financial difficulties continue to be
cited whenever the fact that taxpayers provide millions of dollars per
year to ex-presidents becomes a matter of public attention and
comment. Indeed, more than sixty years after the FPA’s enactment,
Truman’s financial struggles remain essentially the only justification
that is ever put forward, in either academic or popular literature, for
8. See id.
9. See, e.g., Presidential Modernization Act of 2019, S. 580, 116th Cong.
(2019); Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of 2019, H.R. 1496, 116th Cong.
(2019).
10. See Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of 2016, H.R. 1777,
114th Cong. (2016).
11. A student note published in 1975 discussed the relevance of the Former
Presidents Act to potential congressional actions designed to punish a former
president who had not been removed from office via the impeachment clauses. See
Patrick E. Mears, Presidential Pensions and Impeachment: A Proposal for Reform,
9 U. MICH. J.L. REFORM 163, 163–64 (1975).
12. See id. at 183–84 (discussing a repeal of presidential retirement
benefits); infra notes 155–159, and accompanying text.
13. See DAVID MCCULLOUGH, TRUMAN 963–64 (1992).
4 Michigan State Law Review
the existence of the extremely generous benefits package all former
presidents continue to enjoy.
14
As we shall see, the supposedly difficult post-presidential
economic situation faced by Harry Truman was a complete
fabrication created by Truman himself via what can only be
characterized as a series of shockingly dishonest and radically
misleading statements to Congress and the public.
15
Drawing on
recently released documents from Bess Truman’s personal files, this
Article demonstrates that, contrary to the claims of all his major
biographers—who seem to have relied exclusively on Truman’s own
representations regarding his financial situation when evaluating it—
Harry Truman was in fact a very wealthy man on the day he left the
White House.
16
Part of the reason he was so wealthy is that, during
his elected term, he misappropriated essentially all of a government
expense account worth $2.2 million in 2021 dollars.
17
He then
became much wealthier shortly afterwards by cannily exploiting his
status as a former president to greatly increase his already great
wealth.
18
In short, this Article reveals that what to this day remains the
unchallenged narrative about Harry Truman’s post-presidential
circumstances—that he was struggling financially because of his
laudable refusal to take advantage of his status as a former president
to ameliorate his financial problems, and that the Former Presidents
Act was a reasonable response to Truman’s difficulties—is not
merely inaccurate, but rather a precise inversion of the truth.
The Former Presidents Act was, from its inception, the product
of a fraud on the public.
19
The exposure of that fraud now, more than
sixty years later, provides a particularly compelling reason for
getting rid of a statute that would never have been passed in the first
place if Congress and the public had been aware of the extent to
which they were being manipulated to give a very rich man yet more
public money, after that man had already extracted, both legally and
14. See, e.g., George Packer, America’s Star System, NEW YORKER (July 22,
2013), https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/americas-star-system
[https://perma.cc/HYC8-HG3S].
15. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 962–64.
16. The major biographies of Truman are id., ROBERT H. FERRELL, HARRY
S. TRUMAN: A LIFE (1994), and ALONZO HAMBY, MAN OF THE PEOPLE: A LIFE OF
HARRY S. TRUMAN (1995).
17. See infra notes 167–170 and accompanying text discussing Truman’s
expense account.
18. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 932.
19. See id. at 963–64.
Campos The Truman Show 5
illegally, many millions of dollars from the very public upon which
he was now making further financial demands.
20
This Article is also a study of how confirmation bias and a
general failure to appreciate the actual significance of nominal dollar
figures in an era of both continual inflation and continual economic
growth can both transform an obvious fiction into a universally
accepted historical narrative, and a narrative that has flourished for
decades in the face of what always should have been recognized as
overwhelming evidence that it bore no relationship whatsoever to the
historical reality.
21
This Article has three parts. Part I examines the past, present,
and potential future of the Former Presidents Act.
22
Part II explores
the initial creation and remarkable persistence of the legend of Harry
Truman’s financial struggles, including his much-lauded purported
refusal to ameliorate those struggles by exploiting his post-
presidential fame.
23
Part III employs several until now unpublished
archival sources to document Harry Truman’s actual financial
situation, from the day he left the White House, until the Former
Presidents Act was passed five and one half years later.
24
The Article
concludes by considering why the Truman legend has persisted for
so many years and why debunking that legend can help us see clearly
now how indefensible the Former Presidents Act has always been.
25
I. HISTORY OF THE FORMER PRESIDENTS ACT
Prior to the passage of the Former Presidents Act in 1958,
federal law provided no post-presidency benefits for former
presidents.
26
This should not, in retrospect, have been particularly
surprising. For one thing, the presidency had always been an office
held for just a few years rather than being the sort of sustained career
20. During his eight years as president, Truman earned $7.75 million in
official salary, in inflation-adjusted 2021 dollars. He also converted to personal
savings all or almost all of the $2.2 million (in 2021 dollars) expense account
available to him over the last four years in the White House. See infra notes 154–
162 and accompanying text.
21. See MCCOLLOUGH, supra note 13, at 962–64.
22. See infra Part I.
23. See infra Part II.
24. See infra Part III.
25. See infra Conclusion.
26. See WENDY GINSBERG & DANIEL J. RICHARDSON, CONG. RSCH. SERV.,
RL34631, FORMER PRESIDENTS: PENSIONS, OFFICE ALLOWANCES, AND OTHER
FEDERAL BENEFITS 1 (2016).
6 Michigan State Law Review
path normally required for the acquisition of significant, long-term
pension benefits.
27
Beyond that, during the twentieth century, the
presidency had been occupied by men who came from wealthy
families, had made fortunes of their own, went on to other prominent
government service, died in office or shortly afterwards, or who
shared some combination of these traits.
28
No former president found
himself in a situation in which public financial support for his post-
presidential life seemed in any way warranted.
29
Indeed, one needed
to go back to the financial struggles of Ulysses Grant—who in the
last few months of his life wrote what turned out to be an extremely
successful memoir that secured his family’s economic future—to
find an example of a president whose post-presidential years were
marked by financial problems.
30
By the time Harry Truman left the White House, Herbert
Hoover—who became a very wealthy man long before becoming
president—had spent the previous twenty years as the nation’s only
living former chief executive.
31
Thus, it was that, with the exception
of a short-lived scheme concocted in 1912 by Gilded Age
industrialist Andrew Carnegie proposing to privately fund pensions
for ex-presidents, and a pair of bills introduced in Congress later that
same year that both died in committee, the idea of providing pension
benefits for the nation’s former chief executives had been largely
ignored.
32
All this changed shortly after Harry Truman left office in
January of 1953.
33
Suddenly, the perceived need to provide former
presidents with extensive government benefits became a focus of
sustained legislative attention.
34
A bill authorizing such benefits
passed the Senate in 1955, but was never acted on by the House.
35
27. See id.
28. See id. at 1, 4, 23. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt came from wealthy
families; William Howard Taft went on to serve as a Supreme Court justice after his
presidency; Woodrow Wilson’s wife was wealthy, and Wilson died less than three
years after leaving office; Warren Harding died in office; Calvin Coolidge died less
than four years after his presidency ended; and Herbert Hoover had made a fortune
in business prior to holding elective office. See id.
29. See id.
30. See generally ULYSSES S. GRANT, THE PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF ULYSSES
S. GRANT: THE COMPLETE ANNOTATED EDITION (John F. Marszalek et al. eds.,
2017); see GINSBERG & RICHARDSON, supra note 26, at 1, 19.
31. See GINSBERG & RICHARDSON, supra note 26, at 1, 23–24.
32. See id. at 19–20.
33. See id. at 20.
34. See id.
35. See S.1516, 84th Cong. (1955).
Campos The Truman Show 7
Truman evidently became increasingly impatient with Congress’s
failure to provide him with financial support.
36
He wrote privately in
January of 1957 to House Majority Leader John McCormack, and
later that year to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, in letters that
complained about his financial circumstances and about the
unwillingness of Congress to help him enjoy a comfortable
retirement.
37
Truman informed Rayburn bluntly that, if something
was not done, he was going to engage in what he implied might be
potentially unseemly commercial exploitation of his status as a
former president in order to help pay his bills.
38
Then, in early 1958,
Truman became the first former president to appear in a television
interview on famed journalist Edward R. Murrow’s program See It
Now.
39
Truman employed the occasion to complain bitterly to a
massive national television audience about how America ignored the
financial needs of former presidents.
40
Truman’s lobbying efforts soon bore fruit when the FPA was
signed into law by President Eisenhower in August of 1958.
41
According to one of its sponsors, the purpose of the FPA was to
provide former presidents with enough financial security that they
would not be forced “to write and lecture to gain a livelihood in their
final days.”
42
Another supporter of the FPA emphasized, when
speaking in support of the predecessor bill that failed to pass three
years earlier, that the purpose of such legislation was to help make
sure that former presidents did not engage in “business or [in an]
occupation which would demean the office he has held or capitalize
upon it in any improper way.”
43
The FPA provides an annual pension to former presidents equal
to the salary of Cabinet Secretaries—currently $219,200 per year.
44
It
36. See OFF THE RECORD: THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HARRY S. TRUMAN 310
(Robert F. Ferrell ed., 1980) [hereinafter OFF THE RECORD].
37. See id.; Harry S. Truman to Sam Rayburn, August 13, 1957, Sam
Rayburn Library, Bonham, Texas [hereinafter Truman to Rayburn]; MARIE HECHT,
BEYOND THE PRESIDENCY: THE RESIDUES OF POWER 187 (1976).
38. “Sam, I’m not lobbying for the bill,” wrote Truman, as he lobbied for
the bill. But if it did not pass, he added, “I must go ahead with some contracts to
keep ahead of the hounds.” See id.
39. The program aired on February 2, 1958, on CBS; Murrow’s interview
with Truman had taken place almost exactly a year earlier. See infra note 217 and
accompanying text.
40. See id.
41. See supra note 3.
42. 85 CONG. REC. 18,942 (1958).
43. S. Rep. No. 84-205, at 2 (1955).
44. See supra note 3 and accompanying text.
8 Michigan State Law Review
also authorizes the use of taxpayer money to provide former
presidents with health benefits, office space, staff salaries,
communication costs, office equipment, printing costs, supplies, and
travel expenses.
45
(Lifetime Secret Service protection for former
presidents is provided by another statute).
46
In addition, it helps fund
former presidents’ transition to their post-presidential lives and
provides benefits to the surviving spouses of deceased former
presidents.
47
The value of these benefits is considerable. For example, in
fiscal year 2020–2021, the General Services Administration (GSA)
anticipated that taxpayers would provide $1.147 million in benefits
for former President Obama, $1.171 million in benefits for former
President George W. Bush, $1.117 million in benefits for former
President Clinton, and $480,000 in benefits for former President
Carter.
48
Between 2000 and 2020, the GSA and the Congressional
Research Service estimate that these four former presidents received
a total of approximately $56 million in government benefits, in
constant 2020 dollars, from the provisions of the Former Presidents
Act.
49
(Again, this figure does not include the costs of lifetime Secret
Service protection).
50
The fact that all these men have, primarily as a consequence of
their status as former presidents, made vast sums of money since
leaving office yet have continued to receive such generous public
support during their strikingly lucrative post-presidential careers has
not gone unnoticed by various people across the political spectrum.
51
45. See id.
46. The FPA provides funds for Secret Service protection only to the extent
such benefits are not provided elsewhere in federal law. Former presidents are
currently provided lifetime Secret Service protection under the Former Presidents
Protection Act of 2012, H.R. 6620, 112th Cong. This Article takes no position on
how much Secret Service protection former presidents should be provided, which in
any event is something that would not be affected by the revocation of the FPA.
47. See supra note 3.
48. See Brady, supra note 4, at 5.
49. See id. at 2.
50. See Former Presidents Protection Act of 2012, H.R. 6620, 112th Cong.
(2012).
51. Although as this Article illustrates, estimates of the net worth of ex-
presidents tend to be inherently suspect, all sources agree that former presidents
Clinton, Bush, and Obama each currently have net worths in the tens of millions of
dollars, and their publicly documented paid activities certainly support these
estimates. See Brady, supra note 4, at 5.
Campos The Truman Show 9
Indeed, several bills have been introduced in Congress intending to
pare back the benefits provided by the FPA significantly.
52
Congressional attempts to rein in the benefits conferred on our
increasingly wealthy former presidents are not new: For example,
beginning in 1979 when the law was barely twenty years old,
Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida waged a decade-long campaign to
create tighter restrictions on the subsidies the FPA provided.
53
In
recent years, as former presidents have found ever-more lucrative
ways to cash in on the celebrity their time in office has conferred on
them, potential legislative reform of the FPA has become an
initiative that has drawn growing bipartisan support.
54
This support culminated, for the time being, in 2016, with
Congress’s passage of the Presidential Modernization Act of 2016.
55
This law would have provided former presidents with a $200,000
annual pension and a $200,000 expense account to use as they saw
fit.
56
The expense account, however, would have been reduced on a
dollar-for-dollar basis to the extent that a former president’s adjusted
gross income exceeded $400,000 per year.
57
Given the current annual
incomes of our living former presidents, this limitation would, as a
practical matter, eliminate the expense account for all of them.
58
President Obama vetoed the bill.
59
In a statement accompanying
the veto, he agreed that the pensions and allowances provided to
former presidents under the FPA were in need of reform.
60
But he
argued that the bill as drafted would have unintended consequences,
including “requiring the General Services Administration to
immediately terminate salaries and benefits of office employees and
to remove furnishings and equipment from offices.”
61
The president
also stated that if the bill became law, it would damage the GSA’s
52. See supra note 9 and accompanying text.
53. See Charles Stafford, Ex-presidents live well – too well?, ST.
PETERSBURG TIMES, Mar. 13, 1988, at 5D.
54. See, e.g., Presidential Modernization Act of 2019, S. 580, 116th Cong.
(2019); Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of 2019, H.R. 1496, 116th Cong.
(2019).
55. See Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of 2019, H.R. 1496,
116th Cong. (2019).
56. See id.
57. See id.
58. See id.
59. See Veto Message from the President: H.R. 1777, Barack Obama,
Notification of the Veto of H.R. 1777, the “Presidential Allowance Modernization
Act of 2016” (July 22, 2016).
60. See id.
61. See id.
10 Michigan State Law Review
“ability to administer leases and negatively impact operations, with
unanticipated implications for the protection and security of former
Presidents.”
62
In his message, President Obama added that he was willing to
work with Congress to craft a bill that more appropriately addressed
the valid concerns surrounding the current structure of the FPA.
63
Given, however, that he vetoed the bill with just a few months
remaining in his second term, it is not surprising that no revised bill
was produced during his administration.
Undeterred, congressional reformers have continued to pursue
the goal of reforming the FPA.
64
In 2019, both the House and the
Senate considered The Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of
2019.
65
The House version of this bill was substantially similar to the
bill President Obama vetoed three years earlier; it passed the House
via voice vote on October 16, 2019.
66
The Senate version of the bill
featured an important difference from the House version: As drafted,
it would apply only to future former presidents, excluding all current
former presidents, as well as President Trump.
67
It was approved by
the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on
June 27, 2019.
68
No further action took place regarding this
legislation for the remainder of the 116th Congress, meaning that any
reform of the Former Presidents Act would now have to be
reintroduced and considered during President Biden’s new
administration.
II. THE MYTH OF HARRY TRUMAN’S FINANCIAL RECTITUDE
Attempts to reform the Former Presidents Act usually focus on
the supposedly radical change that has taken place in recent decades
in the attitudes of former presidents toward exploiting the financial
opportunities available to them. Harry Truman is almost always
presented in such arguments as the exemplar of how once upon a
time, presidents were more scrupulous about maintaining the dignity
62. See id.
63. See id.
64. See Presidential Modernization Act of 2019, S. 580, 116th Cong.
(2019); Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of 2019, H.R. 1496, 116th Cong.
(2019).
65. See S. 580; H.R. 1496.
66. See H.R. 1496.
67. See S. 580
68. See id.
Campos The Truman Show 11
of the office by not taking full advantage of such opportunities.
69
Thus, these arguments assert while at one time it made sense to
encourage and reward such scrupulousness with a public subsidy of
post-presidential circumstances, those circumstances have changed.
Today, when former presidents choose to earn enormous sums from
publishing memoirs, giving speeches, and so forth, this subsidy is
much harder to justify.
For example, the distinguished sociologist Jerome Karabel
provided an eloquent version of this argument in a 2017 New York
Times op-ed.
70
Karabel noted that, when he was leaving the
presidency, Harry Truman was supposedly presented with all sorts of
lucrative offers from the private sector, including six-figure contracts
to sit on corporate boards or serve in other largely symbolic
positions.
71
Truman turned them all down, writing later that “I could
never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that
would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the
presidency.”
72
Karabel points out that Truman was reduced to subsisting on an
income of $13,564.74 during the first full calendar year of his post-
presidency.
73
(Karabel does note that this sum was equivalent to
about $120,000 in 2017 dollars).
74
He then observes that Truman was
only able to exit subsequently from what he describes as the former
president’s financial difficulties by selling his memoirs to Life
magazine for what he terms a “goodly sum.”
75
The article goes on to discuss the increasingly grotesque orgy
of post-presidential monetization of the office that former presidents
have pursued in recent decades.
76
Karabel notes that Barack Obama,
who had left office three months earlier, had just agreed to give a
speech for $400,000 at a conference run by a Wall Street firm.
77
(He
does not mention that, a few weeks earlier Obama and his wife
69. See, e.g., Jerome Karabel, $400,000 for One Speech? For Ex-
Presidents, It Is Now the Norm, N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 27, 2017),
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/400000-for-one-speech-for-ex-
presidents-it-is-now-the-norm.html [https://perma.cc/HT45-236P].
70. See id.
71. See id.
72. See id.
73. See id.
74. See id.
75. See id.
76. See id.
77. See id.
12 Michigan State Law Review
Michelle had signed a book deal for the reported record-breaking
sum of $65 million).
78
Karabel documents how Obama’s cashing in on his presidency
is merely in line with the behavior of every president going back to
at least Gerald Ford:
In accepting the fee, Mr. Obama joins a recent tradition of presidents
monetizing their time in office by earning lucrative sums from speeches,
corporate directorships, foreign corporations and other private interests.
This tradition began with Gerald Ford, who accepted membership on
corporate boards of companies such as 20th Century Fox and American
Express after leaving office. Capitalizing on the presidency escalated
decisively when Ronald Reagan accepted $2 million for a pair of speeches
at Japan’s Fujisankei Communications Group. (In today’s dollars, about
twice that amount.) And it reached its current-day apex with Bill and
Hillary Clinton, who earned a combined $139 million from such
undertakings, including $35 million from speeches to financial services,
real estate and insurance companies.
79
He then once again returns to the striking contrast between all this
and Harry Truman’s financial rectitude:
Mr. Obama’s decision to accept the fee from Cantor Fitzgerald embodies
an enormous attitudinal shift in the past six decades. When the financially
strapped Mr. Truman turned down generous offers, he declined without
hesitation, believing that it would violate his own sense of dignity as well
as the dignity of the presidency. But no such normative constraints obtain
in a society where the disruptive entrepreneur is the cultural hero, the
public servant is held in low esteem, and inequality has risen to its highest
levels since the 1920s. What was unbecoming in 1953 is now considered
appropriate.
80
Here, Karabel is merely echoing what has become an endlessly
repeated narrative reproduced by all of Harry Truman’s biographers
and replicated over and over again in both popular and academic
discourse. This narrative is that Truman faced significant financial
difficulties in the years immediately after his presidency and that
these difficulties were the key factor in the passage of the Former
Presidents Act five and one half years after Truman left office.
Another op-ed, published originally in the Boston Globe and
then widely reprinted, helps illustrate how fully this narrative has
become the standard account of why we have a Former Presidents
78. See Constance Grady, What the Obamas’ $65 Million Book Advance
Actually Means, VOX, (Mar. 2, 2017),
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/2/14779892/barack-michelle-obama-65-
million-book-deal-penguin-random-house [https://perma.cc/2X35-KNP2].
79. See Karabel, supra note 69.
80. See id.
Campos The Truman Show 13
Act in the first place.
81
In it, author Jeff Jacoby excoriated the
unseemly greed of recent former presidents, especially in light of the
generous pension benefits now provided to them by federal law.
82
Jacoby’s piece, entitled in the version published in the New York
Times “Harry Truman’s Obsolete Integrity,” began by quoting
historian David McCullough on how, when Truman left the White
House and returned to Independence, Missouri, he got no support
from the government beyond his modest Army pension and was so
financially strapped he had to take out a bank loan and move back
into the ramshackle old house that had belonged to his mother-in-
law.
83
Yet Truman refused the easy money offered to him by those
wishing to take advantage of the prestige of associating their
enterprises with a former president.
84
The op-ed concludes:
According to the National Taxpayers Union, Clinton will reap a lifetime
pension payout of more than $7 million, assuming a normal lifespan. The
senior George Bush can expect to bank more than $3 million; for Carter,
the total will likely top $4 million. Clearly the age when former presidents
could find themselves in dire financial straits is long gone. Sadly, so is the
sense of integrity and propriety that once kept men like Truman from
devoting their post-presidency to money-grubbing. It wasn’t only the buck
that stopped with the 33d president. The avarice did, too.
85
Both of these op-eds, like so much of both the popular and
academic commentary regarding how Truman’s post-presidential
behavior provides such an edifying contrast to the greedy
maneuverings of more recent presidents, depend on the purported
facts contained in David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992
biography Truman.
86
Regarding this topic, Truman’s other major
biographers have told essentially the same story relayed by
McCullough’s influential work, which today remains the standard
biography of the life of the thirty-third president of the United States.
87
81. See Jeff Jacoby, Ex-presidents’ Big Payday, BOS. GLOBE (Feb. 28,
2007),
http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/02/28/ex
_presidents_big_payday/ [https://perma.cc/U4MR-AHT6].
82. See id.
83. See id.
84. See id.
85. See id.
86. See generally MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13.
87. See, e.g., FERRELL, supra note 16, at 387 (repeating McCullough’s
claim, via Truman himself, that Truman made “very little money” from his
memoirs); see also HAMBY, supra note 16, at 626, 628 (citing Truman’s supposedly
14 Michigan State Law Review
Here is how McCullough describes Truman’s financial
situation when he left the White House in January of 1953:
He had come home without salary or pension. He had no income or
support of any kind from the federal government other than his Army
pension of $112.56 a month. He was provided with no government funds
for secretarial help or office space, not a penny of expense money, and
while he and Bess had managed to put aside part of his $100,000-a-year
salary as President during his second term, primarily in government bonds,
it was in all probability a modest amount. . . . In fact, it is known that
Truman had been forced to take out a loan at the National Bank in
Washington in his last weeks as President, to tide him over, though the
amount was never disclosed.
88
McCullough goes on to describe how Truman had, with his two
siblings, inherited the several hundred acres of land that constituted
the Truman family farm, but he asserts that Truman probably had
little in the way of liquid assets, and that he and Bess moved into
Bess’s mother’s old house—which was apparently in a state of some
disrepair—out of financial necessity more than anything else.
89
Certainly, as things were, there could be no extravagant living. In effect
they were land-rich only. The estate of the supposedly well-to-do Madge
Wallace [Bess Truman’s mother], not including the house, totaled all of
$33,543.60, which after being divided four ways among Bess and her
brothers, left Bess with a cash inheritance of $8,385.90. Indeed, among the
reasons why they had come back to Independence and the old house was
that financially they had little other choice.
90
McCullough then notes that, in the twentieth century, no
former president had been faced with money worries after leaving
office until Truman left Washington with so little in the way of
tangible assets. Yet, McCullough insists, Truman refused to stoop to
monetizing his fame to ease his financial burdens:
meager return on the memoirs). “The memoirs had two purposes: to make him
financially independent and to deliver a vigorous defense of his presidency. In the
end, neither was achieved.” Id. at 626. Hamby concludes that while Truman had
“managed to save a bit of money” during his years in the White House, in retirement
he and Bess were nevertheless “far from rich.” See id. at 628.
88. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 14, at 928. McCullough provides no
source for the story that Truman had been forced to take out a bank loan during the
last weeks of his presidency, to “tide him over” upon his return to Independence.
This story has been repeated many times since McCullough published it. See, e.g.,
Jacoby, supra note 81.
89. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 14, at 928. This assertion represents a
curious mistake on McCullough’s part, as earlier in the book he describes in detail
both how Truman’s mother Martha Ellen lost the farm to creditors in 1940, and how
Truman eventually bought it back after he became president.
90. Id.
Campos The Truman Show 15
[Unlike his recent presidential predecessors] Truman had neither wealth to
sustain him nor any particular prospects at the moment, no plans for future
employment. His only intention, as he said, was to do nothing—accept no
position, lend his name to no organization or transaction—that would
exploit or “commercialize” the prestige and dignity of the office of the
President.
91
McCullough then relates that Truman appeared to have turned
down a number of such offers, although, with the exception of a
proposition from a Miami real estate developer, concrete evidence
for them has not survived in Truman’s personal files. “In any event,”
McCullough writes, Truman “had turned them all down and would
continue to do so. His name was not for sale.”
92
This is the core of the standard narrative regarding Harry
Truman’s post-presidential finances, which is still very much with us
today. Truman left the White House with little money and no real
assets to speak of beyond some farm land, yet he refused to sully the
dignity of the office of the President by lending the name of a former
president to enterprises that wished to exploit it.
93
In addition,
Truman felt bound, by his own account, to spend considerable sums
on answering the correspondents and dealing with the speaking
invitations that inevitably fill a former president’s mailbox.
94
Thus it
was that, five and one half years after Truman returned to
Independence, Congress justifiably chose to ameliorate his financial
situation by enacting the Former Presidents Act.
Here we should note that, in relating Truman’s immediate post-
presidential circumstances, McCullough must deal with a striking
fact that would seem by itself to upend this entire narrative: Just
three weeks after leaving the White House, Truman sold the rights to
his memoirs to Life magazine for what he himself called, in a letter
to Dean Acheson, the “fantastic sum” of $600,000.
95
Indeed,
McCullough acknowledges that this was “truly a fantastic sum in
91. Id. at 929.
92. See id.
93. See id.
94. According to one report, Truman made the (facially absurd) claim that,
after he returned to Independence, it cost him $30,000 a year to reply to mail and
requests for speeches. See Don Bonafede, Life After the Oval Office: Caring for Ex-
Presidents Can Cost a Bundle, 17 NAT’L J. 1953, 1945 (1985). This would represent
first-class postage costs for nearly one million pieces of mail. In fact, the Schedule C
attachments to Truman’s tax returns in the five years immediately after his return to
Independence reveal that his office was spending between $330 and $429 per year
on postage. See Truman Taxes, infra note 132.
95. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 932.
16 Michigan State Law Review
1953.”
96
(Adjusted for inflation, this would be equivalent to $6.05
million in 2021).
97
Naturally readers might ask, how is this massive
book contract in any way congruent with McCullough’s claims that
Truman struggled financially in the years after he left the White
House prior to the passage of the FPA and the sale of the Truman
family farm in the late 1950s?
McCullough’s explanation is that Truman ended up realizing
just a $37,000 net profit on the memoirs after taxes and expenses.
98
His basis for this claim is a letter that Truman wrote to House
Majority Leader John McCormack in 1957, which Truman wrote as
part of his lobbying campaign to get Congress to grant him
retirement benefits. Truman insisted that he was not asking for a
pension:
In order to be able to transact the business of writing the Memoirs and to
meet the tremendous burden of handling the largest volume of mail in the
State, I had to rent an office in Kansas City and the total overhead from
the period from February 1953 until November of last year, 1956,
amounted to a sum over $153,000.00. Had it not been for the fact that I
was able to sell some property that my brother, sister and I inherited from
our mother I would practically be on relief but with the sale of that
property I am not financially embarrassed.
I don’t want a pension and do not expect one but I do think 70% of the
expenses or overhead should be paid by the Government—the 30% is
what I would ordinarily have been out on my own hook if I hadn’t tried to
meet the responsibilities of being a former President.
As you know, we passed a Bill which gave all five star Generals and
Admirals three clerks, and all the emoluments that went with their office
when they retired.
It seems rather peculiar that a fellow who spent eighteen years in
government service and succeeded in getting all these things done for the
people he commanded should have to go broke in order to tell the people
the truth about what really happened. It seems to me in all justice a part of
this tremendous overhead should be met by the public.
96. See id.
97. See CPI Inflation Calculator, U.S. BUREAU OF LAB. STAT.,
https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm [https://perma.cc/8VMH-XNCF]
[hereinafter CPI Calculator].
98. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 963.
Campos The Truman Show 17
I don’t want any pension and never have wanted any because I’ll manage
to get along but I am just giving you the difference in the approach
between the great General and myself on the Memoirs. My net return will
be about $37,000.00 total over a five year period! It was a package deal. I
receive no royalties.
I would never have given you this information if you hadn’t asked for it.
99
The sarcastic allusion to “the great General” is a reference to
Truman’s resentment over the fact that Dwight Eisenhower had been
allowed by the IRS to treat the $635,000 he received for his wartime
memoirs as a capital gain because Eisenhower was not a professional
writer. The difference at the time in the tax treatment of capital gains
and ordinary income meant that this ruling saved Eisenhower an
enormous sum in tax liability. According to McCullough, “[a]t the
time the Eisenhower question was at issue, the [Truman] White
House had intervened; now [in 1957] the Eisenhower White House
declined to become involved.”
100
(McCullough does not mention that
the public outcry over Eisenhower’s windfall led to legislation,
signed by Truman, that required such sales going forward to be
treated as ordinary income).
101
In any event, per McCullough’s account, 94% of the income
from Truman’s memoirs was eaten up by taxes and the expenses,
meaning that with this $37,000 net profit spread out over the six
years during which Truman received the installments on the
$600,000 gross, what appeared initially to be “a fantastic sum” ended
up doing little to ameliorate Truman’s financial struggles.
102
The continuing pervasive influence of McCullough’s portrayal
of Harry Truman’s supposed post-presidential economic struggles is
illustrated by many sources. I have listed just a few of such sources
as examples below.
*The current 11,700-word Wikipedia article on Truman, which
draws heavily on McCullough’s work, has a subsection entitled
“Financial Problems” covering Truman’s post-presidency. The
article asserts that since Truman’s “earlier business ventures had
99. OFF THE RECORD, supra note 36, at 346–47. The last line of this letter
implies that McCormack, who had not been born the previous day, was at least
initially reacting to Truman’s claims of financial stress with some skepticism.
100. MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 963.
101. See Eisenhower Taxes on Memoirs Cited; Treasury Ruled He Could
Pay 25% Capital Gains Tax Rate as an Amateur Writer N.Y. TIMES, Sept. 28, 1952,
at 64.
102. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 963.
18 Michigan State Law Review
proved unsuccessful,”
103
Truman “had no personal savings” when he
left the White House. The article repeats McCullough’s claim that
Truman needed to take out a bank loan to tide him over at the end of
his presidency, and also recounts the story of how Truman netted
only $37,000 on the sale of his memoirs. The subsection concludes
by noting that, when Congress passed the Former Presidents Act,
Herbert Hoover, the only other living president at the time, “also
took the pension, even though he did not need the money; reportedly,
he did so to avoid embarrassing Truman.”
104
In a 2013 New Yorker piece on post-presidential compensation,
George Packer claimed that Truman’s economic situation after he
left the White House was so tenuous that “for a few years he barely
survived on an Army pension of $112.56 per month, until his
memoirs sold well.”
105
(In fact, Truman received a flat fee for his
memoirs). Packer asserted that “word of Truman’s near-poverty
spurred Congress to pass the Former Presidents Act.”
106
A 2016 analysis of the Former President’s Act produced by the
federal government’s Congressional Research Service asserted that
the law’s passage was “prompted largely by former President
Truman’s financial difficulties.”
107
This analysis noted that when
Truman returned to Independence, “he reportedly said it cost him
$30,000 a year to reply to mail and requests for speeches.”
108
It went
on to describe some of Truman’s lobbying efforts to pass the
legislation and quoted Truman’s 1957 letter to Speaker of the House
Sam Rayburn, in which Truman informs Rayburn that if the bill does
not pass, he will be forced “go ahead with some contracts to keep
ahead of the hounds.”
109
In his essay “Truman in Historical, Popular, and Political
Memory,” political scientist Sean J. Savage wrote that in the late
1950s Truman was disappointed by the initial sales of his memoirs,
and that as a result he “was determined to improve his meager
103. This is a reference to business failures Truman had suffered more than
thirty years earlier.
104. See Harry S. Truman, WIKIPEDIA,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman (last visited Mar. 14, 2022). The
anecdote that Hoover took the FPA pension only to avoid embarrassing Truman is
also much repeated in contemporary discussions of Truman’s post-presidential
financial circumstances.
105. See Packer, supra note 14.
106. See id.
107. See GINSBERG & RICHARDSON, supra note 26.
108. See id.
109. See id.
Campos The Truman Show 19
retirement income” as well as his historical reputation.
110
In order to
advance both goals, he gave “a series of paid lectures at Columbia
University in 1959 and published another book, Mr. Citizen, in
1960.”
111
Well-known, presidential historian Michael Beschloss asserts
that when Truman left the White House, “his notion of how an ex-
president should behave” led him, unlike more recent presidents, to
turn down opportunities to make money off his name.
112
Beschloss
writes, “This left him feeling sufficiently short of money that he
asked Congress to create a pension for ex-presidents, which it did.”
113
A 24/7 Wall Street analysis, which was reprinted in USA
TODAY and transformed into a Wikipedia article on the net worth of
U.S. presidents, estimates Truman’s peak net worth as less than one
million dollars in 2016 dollars—apparently considerably less, as the
article ranks Truman tied for last with six other presidents who the
article claims never achieved a peak net worth of at least one million
dollars in 2016 dollars.
114
A January 14, 2021, article arguing for impeaching and
removing Donald Trump pointed out that doing so would render
Trump ineligible for the many benefits bestowed by the Former
Presidents Act, and noted that the passage of the FPA in 1958
especially benefitted “former president Harry Truman, who, even
with the sale of his memoirs, was quite poor.”
115
On the day Joe Biden became president, a CNN article
analyzed what effect a Senate conviction of Donald Trump would
110. See Sean J. Savage, Truman in Historical, Popular, and Political
Memory, in A COMPANION TO HARRY S. TRUMAN 16 (Daniel Margolis, ed.).
111. See id.
112. See Michael Beschloss, For Harry Truman, the Buck Stopped with a
Brush with Bankruptcy, N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 16, 2016),
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/business/for-harry-truman-the-buck-stopped-
at-a-brush-with-
bankruptcy.html#:~:text=This%20year%2C%20Donald%20J.,case%2C%20have%2
0included%20multiple%20bankruptcies [https://perma.cc/6YWF-Q55P].
113. See id.
114. See Michael B. Sauter et al., From Washington to Trump: This is the
Net Worth of Every American President, USA TODAY (Nov. 5, 2020),
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/11/05/the-net-worth-of-the-american-
presidents-washington-to-trump/114599966/ [https://perma.cc/XGM6-JW7M].
115. See Thomas J. Balcerski, How to Treat a Disgraced Ex-President,
BULWARK (Jan. 14, 2021), https://thebulwark.com/how-to-treat-a-disgraced-ex-
president/ [https://perma.cc/4DAT-GRTH].
20 Michigan State Law Review
have on his finances.
116
The article noted the possibility that a
conviction in the Senate would strip Trump of the benefits of the
FPA.
117
This article asserted that the law was passed because former
President Truman “was experiencing financial problems.”
118
On that same day, a Vox analysis of Donald Trump’s post-
presidential benefits under the Former Presidents Act asserted that
the law was passed by Congress “in large part due to embarrassment
over the fact that former President Harry Truman had little income
beyond a military pension for many of his early years out of
office.”
119
A January 27, 2021, Reuters article, explaining how
impeachment and conviction might affect Donald Trump’s post-
presidential benefits, asserted that the Former Presidents Act was
passed “to provide financial relief to former president Harry Truman,
who left office in 1953 facing debts from unsuccessful business
ventures that predated his time in office.”
120
These examples are merely representative: For decades now,
innumerable sources in both the academic and popular literatures
have told the same story about how Truman’s financial struggles
provided the original justification for creating a system of munificent
taxpayer-funded benefits for former presidents. But as we are about
to see, that original justification was based on nothing but a series of
fantastical lies told by a man who, for whatever reason, was willing
to give a preposterously inaccurate account of his financial situation
to Congress and the public in the pursuit of public benefits he did not
by any stretch of the imagination need.
In fact, Harry Truman acquired an enormous personal fortune
during his years in the White House, and, contrary to his
116. See Chris Isidore, Here’s How Much Trump’s Presidential Pension is
Worth – If He Keeps It, CNN (Jan. 20, 2021),
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/20/business/trump-pension/index.html
[https://perma.cc/V84V-K7U5].
117. See id.
118. See id.
119. Ian Millhiser, Here Are the Perks Trump Will Get as Ex-Pgresident,
VOX (Jan. 20, 2021), https://www.vox.com/22240926/trump-perks-former-
presidents-act-pension-secret-service-office-space-staff-impeachment
[https://perma.cc/L8M6-6RTS].
120. Jan Wolfe, Why Trump’s Post-Presidency Perks, Like a Pension and
Office, Are Safe for the Rest of His Life, REUTERS (Jan. 27, 2021),
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-impeachment-benefits-
explai/explainer-why-trumps-post-presidency-perks-like-a-pension-and-office-are-
safe-for-the-rest-of-his-life-idUSKBN29W238 [https://perma.cc/97WD-XY3Y].
Campos The Truman Show 21
sanctimonious claims at the time, he subsequently exploited his
position as a former president of the United States to great effect to
make that fortune a good deal larger.
Remarkably, much of the evidence that this was so has always
been hiding in plain sight. And the fact that until now no one has felt
inclined to explore and then explode this particular bit of historical
hagiography says something about how resonant this particular
cultural myth continues to be.
121
Harry Truman was a very rich man who lied about his
considerable wealth in order to cajole Congress into passing the
Former Presidents Act. Contrary to the standard historical account,
that law has never had any reasonable justification—and least of all
any justification based on what turns out to be Truman’s fraudulent
claims about his supposed financial difficulties. Exposing that fraud
provides a powerful historically-based argument for repealing a law
that should never have been enacted in the first place.
III. HARRY TRUMAN’S FINANCES
Any analysis of a historical figure’s economic status must take
at least two major potential distortions into account: Inflation, and
relative wealth.
People are generally aware that, over time, inflation makes
nominal prices less and less meaningful relative to present prices.
122
Note that in the United States this has only become true fairly
recently. Because prior to the middle of the twentieth century,
periods of inflation alternated with deflationary periods, nominal
dollar values in, for example, 1940 were essentially comparable to
real dollar values during George Washington’s presidency nearly
150 years earlier.
123
But with the disappearance of deflation,
121. The historian Isaac Campos suggests to me that the failure to debunk
the myth of Truman’s post-presidential financial struggles may be related to a
general turning way in the discipline from what is sometimes referred to as “Great
Man” history, in favor of the many contemporary varieties of social history, that
focus more on the lives of ordinary people.
122. See Real, Relative, and Nominal Prices, ECONLIB,
https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/College/realrelativenominalprices.html
[https://perma.cc/BLG7-7W6B] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022).
123. For example, one historical CPI calculator concludes that $100 in 1795
would represent $115 of purchasing power in 1940. MEASURING WORTH,
https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/index.php
[https://perma.cc/D28R-WTFK] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022) (enter “1795” as the
22 Michigan State Law Review
continual inflation, whether sharp or mild, has made the difference
between nominal dollars and constant dollars grow ever-larger over
the past seven decades.
124
So, for example, the government’s Consumer Price Index
calculates that $100 in 1945 would have the same buying power as
$1,496 in 2021.
125
And while it is true that people are aware of this
fact in at least a general way, it is also true that many people,
including some highly educated and ordinarily perceptive observers,
fail to take inflation into account properly when making economic
judgments about the past.
But measuring the inflation rate is by itself a very incomplete
and inadequate way of measuring changes in both absolute and
relative wealth over time. Some other ways of measuring changes in
the real meaning of nominal dollar values include calculating labor
value (the multiple of the average wage that would be necessary to
buy a good or service), income value (the multiple of the average
income that would be necessary to buy a good or service), and
economic share (the worth of a good or service divided by total
economic output at a particular time).
126
We can appreciate, in at least a rough and ready way, why
inflation adjustments by themselves are not sufficient tools for
understanding changes in relative wealth over time by calculating the
amount of income that an individual or family would need at any
time to put that person or family at a certain point in the national
income distribution. So, for example, when Harry Truman began to
serve his full presidential term in 1949, the ninety-fifth percentile of
family income in the United States that year was $8,066.
127
Most
people are aware that, because this sum is expressed in nominal
“Initial Year”; enter “100” as the “Initial Amount”; and enter “1940” as the “Desired
Year”).
124. For a discussion of the economic and political significance of
continually inflationary economies versus economies in which nominal prices
fluctuate in the long term in both directions, see THOMAS PIKETTY, CAPITAL IN THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 102–03 (Arthur Goldhammer trans., 2014).
125. See MEASURING WORTH,
https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/relativevalue.php
[https://perma.cc/D28R-WTFK] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022).
126. See id.
127. See Historical Income Tables: Families, U.S. CENSUS BUREAU,
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-series/historical-
income-families/f01ar.xlsx [https://perma.cc/6TH4-NXKP] (last visited Mar. 14,
2022).
[hereinafter Income Tables].
Campos The Truman Show 23
dollars, comparing it to present economic values requires adjusting
for inflation. Thus, per the Consumer Price Index, $8,066 in 1949
would, in terms of buying power, be equivalent to $87,541 in
2021.
128
But, in regard to questions of relative income, this latter figure
by itself is still very misleading. A family income of $87,541 today
would place a family not in the ninety-fifth percentile of income, but
almost exactly at the national median.
129
To be at the ninety-fifth
percentile of family income today, a family would need an income of
$304,153—that is, a sum three-and-a-half times larger in constant,
inflation-adjusted dollars, than the comparable sum seventy years
ago. This should not be surprising given that America is an
immensely wealthier country today that it was in 1949: per capita
GDP was more than four times larger in 2019 than it was in 1949.
130
In what follows, I will adjust nominal dollar figures in two
ways: by accounting for inflation and by also accounting for changes
in relative wealth. So, for example, a family with an income of
$8,066 in 1949 would need an income today of $87,541 to simply
account for changes in the nominal prices of goods and services
between then and now, but would need an income of $304,153 to
enjoy the same relative degree of income, relative to other
Americans, that a family with an income of $8,066 enjoyed seventy
years ago.
This brings us to the following questions: What was Harry
Truman’s financial situation when he became president in April of
1945, how much wealth did he acquire in his nearly eight years in
the White House, and how much more did he obtain during the five
years immediately afterwards when he lobbied strenuously and
ultimately successfully for the passage of the Former Presidents Act,
which became law in August of 1958?
It is worth noting that much of the information I describe below
was publicly available even when Truman was pushing for the
enactment of the Former Presidents Act.
131
It is true that some of it
128. See MEASURING WORTH, supra note 125 (enter “1949” as the “Initial
Year”; “8066” as the “Initial Amount”; and “2020” as the “Desired Year”).
129. See id.
130. See Real Gross Domestic Product Per Capita, FRED ECONOMIC DATA,
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA [https://perma.cc/MFZ8-
DAKN] [hereinafter Real GDP].
131. For example, Truman’s salary was a matter of public record between
1935 and 1953, as were the basic financial details of the contract he signed for his
memoirs three weeks after leaving office.
24 Michigan State Law Review
has only become available in the last few years with the release of
Bess Truman’s personal papers to the public.
132
Yet the latter
documents merely supplement, rather than radically alter, a picture
that should have in at least its broad outlines been quite clear sixty-
three years ago when the FPA was enacted.
The kernel of truth that would eventually bloom into the myth
that Harry Truman left the White House with minimal financial
resources, and would remain in those circumstances until Congress
altered them with the passage of the FPA, is that when he ascended
to the presidency, Truman did in fact have a relatively modest net
worth. Truman made very little money prior to becoming a U.S.
senator in 1935 at the age of fifty. After he undertook what would
turn out to be a failed business venture—a men’s clothing store—in
the years immediately after his service in World War I, he secured a
position as a county administrator, with the help of Kansas City’s
Pendergast political machine, that paid $3,500 a year.
133
This was at
the time no more than a solidly middle-class income, though it did
have the advantage that his government salary could not be
garnished by the creditors who had lent him money to start the
clothing store.
134
And while Truman did finally acquire a large salary when he
was elected to the Senate—$10,000, which was several times more
than the income of the average American family—his expenses
during his Senate years were quite high: He lived in an expensive
area of Washington, he was maintaining a residence back in
Missouri, he was sending his daughter to an expensive private
college, and he was supporting various impecunious relatives.
135
132. Bess Truman’s personal files contain Harry Truman’s tax returns for
every year between 1935 and 1972, with the exception of 1936 and 1941. These
documents include, along with already public information such as Truman’s official
salaries, other financial data, such as what Truman claimed were his professional
expenses in the years after he left the White House, what he was paid to appear on
Edward R. Murrow’s program See It Now in 1957, and what capital gains he
received for selling the land that had been the site of the Truman family farm. They
also contain Truman’s own estimates of his net worth in December of 1953 and
January of 1959.
133. See Paul Campos, The Truman Show: How the 33rd President Finagled
His Way to a Post-White House Fortune—and Created a Damaging Precedent, N.Y.
MAG. (July 24, 2021), https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-
show.html [https://perma.cc/53AC-ZZKA].
134. See generally MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13; HAMBY, supra note 16.
135. See Joseph J. Thorndike, Tax History: Harry Truman’s Tax Returns
Have a Story to Tell, TAX ANALYSTS (Apr. 10, 2014),
Campos The Truman Show 25
One indication of the degree of financial pressure Truman was
under is that, in 1941, he decided to place his wife on his Senate staff
payroll where she soon became the highest-paid person on it.
136
The
evidence of exactly what work Bess Truman performed in this
position is not well documented.
137
(This arrangement became a
potentially damaging political embarrassment to Truman in the
summer of 1944 when he was being considered by President
Roosevelt for the vice presidential slot on that year’s Democratic
ticket).
138
Thus, it was that, when he turned sixty in 1944, Truman’s net
worth appears to have been only about $7,400. He owned no real
estate, nor apparently any stocks; per the extensive documentation in
Bess Truman’s financial files, the sum total of his life savings at the
time seems to have been about $2,400 in a savings account in the
Hamilton National Bank and $5,000 in savings bonds.
139
http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/1C91AC0FA1A9E39E85257D1
B0041C876?OpenDocument [https://perma.cc/WB33-PGXQ]
136. See Ferrell, supra note 16, at 168–69. Ferrell reports that Bess Truman’s
salary soon rose to $4,500, which made her one of the highest paid staffers in
Congress.
137. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 284. (“How much real work [Bess]
did would remain a matter of opinion among the staff, none of whom were as well
paid. At one point he advised her privately to ‘only just drop in and do some
signing’ of letters.”). Hamby remarks that the Trumans knew “they were skirting
impropriety,” and that “Bess never put in a standard forty-hour week at the office
and, indeed, seems to have been seldom seen there.” See HAMBY, supra note 16, at
262.
138. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 308. After Roosevelt named
Truman to the ticket, this did indeed become a campaign issue. Clare Booth Luce
referred in print to Roosevelt’s new running mate’s wife as “Payroll Bess,” which
infuriated Truman. See id. at 331.
139. One possible explanation for Truman’s pursuit during his immediate
post-presidential years of what were, given his now-great wealth, economically
trivial pension benefits, is that prior to becoming president he had in fact been in a
potentially quite precarious economic position. If FDR had not picked Truman to
replace Henry Wallace on the 1944 ticket, Truman could easily have lost his Senate
re-election bid in 1946, given that this turned out to be a wave election year for
Republican candidates. At the time, congressional pensions did not yet exist, and the
new federal Social Security program provided meager benefits for someone of
Truman’s age. A 62-year-old former senator with a modest net worth, who for
decades had had no profession other than holding elective office, and whose
political mentors had been swept from the scene, could well have faced serious
economic struggles in his old age. Perhaps Truman’s understandable monetary
anxieties in the years before fate carried him into the White House continued to
influence him, long after he had acquired a substantial fortune.
26 Michigan State Law Review
When President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Truman’s
income took a massive upward leap. Indeed, one thing that
discussions of Truman’s finances, even those undertaken by
otherwise careful and scrupulous biographers, invariably fail to take
into account properly is that, in the years that Truman occupied the
presidency, that office was vastly higher paid than it is today (the
president’s current salary is $400,000 per year).
140
Again, we can calculate how much higher the presidential
salary was then than it is today in terms of both inflation and relative
income. The president’s annual salary was $75,000 for the nearly
four years that Truman served in the office during the remainder of
what would have been President Roosevelt’s fourth term.
141
In the
fourth year of that term, Congress enacted legislation to raise the
presidential salary to $100,000 per year, although the constitutional
prohibition on altering a president’s compensation during that
president’s current term of office kept the new salary from going into
effect until Truman began to serve his new term in January of
1949.
142
(Exactly what role Truman played in this legislative process
is unknown, but it is fair to assume that the idea of enacting this raise
did not occur to members of Congress spontaneously).
These were, at the time, enormous sums. Here is the current
value of the salary Truman collected as president expressed in 2021
dollars.
143
Note that in 1945, he received a presidential salary for only
the last eight and one half months of the year:
1945: $847,622
1946: $1,084,568
1947: $921,626
1948: $839,866
1949: $1,109,951
1950: $1,132,938
1951: $1,131,185
1952: $1,044,965
140. See Tom Murse, Presidential Salaries Through the Years, THOUGHT
CO, https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-salaries-through-the-years-3368133
[https://perma.cc/GAT7-VJQN] (last updated Jan. 19, 2021).
141. See id.
142. See id.
143. See CPI Calculator, supra note 97.
Campos The Truman Show 27
But again, taking only inflation into account gives us a very
inaccurate picture of what these sums actually represented in the
middle of the twentieth century, at a time when the nation’s per
capita GDP was only about a quarter of what it is today.
144
Here is
the current value of Harry Truman’s presidential salary, expressed in
terms of relative income; that is, in terms of how much a person
would have to earn today to be in the same economic position
relative to other Americans as Truman was to the Americans of his
day during his time in office.
145
1945: $1,916,164
1946: $2,749,543
1947: $2,827,102
1948: $2,763,534
1949: $3,771,497
1950: $3,531,216
1951: $3,376,098
1952: $3,217,939
How large was this income at the time? IRS tax data indicate
that Truman’s salary during his first term was higher than the total
adjusted gross income of 99.8% of all taxpayers.
146
When his salary
was increased in 1949, this number went up even more.
147
We can further contextualize Truman’s presidential salary by
comparing it to the salaries of other people near the top of the socio-
economic system at the time. For example, that salary was fairly
comparable to the total compensation—not just the salary—of the
top corporate officers of America’s largest corporations.
148
A recent
study found that the median compensation of three highest paid
144. See Real GDP, supra note 130.
145. See CPI Calculator, supra note 97. These relative income calculations
represent the proportional difference between Truman’s salary and family income at
the 95th percentile of family income in the relevant years. That difference is then
applied to family income at the 95th percentile in 2019 (the most recent year for
which these data are available).
146. See BUREAU OF INTERNAL REVENUE, U.S. TREAS. DEP’T, STATISTICS OF
INCOME FOR 1945 (1951).
147. See 103 CONG. REC. S. 103, 198–221 (daily ed. Jan. 13, 1949).
148. See CAROLA FRYDMAN & RAVEN E. SAKS, HISTORICAL TRENDS IN
EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION: 1936-2003, at 44 (2005),
https://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/media/_media/pdf/Reference%20Media/Frydm
an%20and%20Saks_2005_Elites.pdf [https://perma.cc/6DNP-LJ9H].
28 Michigan State Law Review
corporate officers at the fifty largest companies in America in the
1940s was $97,577, i.e., less than Truman’s presidential salary at the
end of that decade.
149
Another striking comparison that illuminates how much money
Truman was making as president is provided by comparing it to the
salary of whoever was the highest-paid player in major league
baseball in each of the years he held the office. Truman’s salary was
higher than that of any major league player in six of his eight years
as president.
150
In two other years—1949 and 1950—it was exactly
the same as the record-breaking $100,000 salary Joe DiMaggio
received in those seasons.
151
(That figure remained the highest single-
season salary received by any major league player, until Willie Mays
was paid $105,000 in 1963).
152
But even these comparisons understate how much President
Truman was being paid in real world terms. Consider that, beginning
in January of 1949, the presidential compensation statute was
amended to not only raise the president’s salary from $75,000 to
$100,000, but also to give the president a $50,000 annual expense
account, to, per the enabling legislation, “assist in defraying
expenses relating to or resulting from the discharge of his official
duties.”
153
(This sum was equivalent to $561,000 in 2021 dollars).
154
The most noteworthy aspect of this change, for the purposes of
analyzing Truman’s finances, is that, initially, no disclosure
mechanism accompanied the creation of this expense allowance. On
the contrary, if Truman chose to pocket some or even all of this
money as personal income—this would, per the statute’s plain
language, be plainly illegal—there was no way for anyone else to
determine this had happened, since no expenditure of this money on
Truman’s part was taxable, or for that matter even reportable.
155
(As
we shall see, this was not, or should not have been, a merely
hypothetical concern). While Truman was legally required to use this
149. See id.
150. See Michael Haupert, MLB’s Annual Salary Leaders Since 1874, SOC’Y
FOR AM. BASEBALL RSCH., https://sabr.org/research/article/mlbs-annual-salary-
leaders-since-1874/ [https://perma.cc/Z56H-ZBZL] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022).
151. See id.
152. See id.
153. 103 CONG. REC. S. 103, 198–221 (daily ed. Jan. 13, 1949).
154. See id.
155. The relevant language in the statute created “an expense allowance of
$50,000 to assist in defraying expenses related to or resulting from the discharge of
his official duties, for which expense allowance no tax liability shall accrue and for
which no accounting shall be made by him.” See id.
Campos The Truman Show 29
money only for “defraying expenses related to or resulting from the
discharge of his official duties,” there was, at the beginning of
Truman’s elected term, no regulatory mechanism to stop Truman
from choosing to treat the money as a de facto—and tax-free—salary
supplement. Furthermore, there was no requirement that he return
any undrawn funds still in the account at the end of his presidency.
156
Indeed, the legislative history of the statute’s adoption reveals
that members of Congress were keenly aware of, and concerned
about, the possibility that the expense allowance might be abused in
some way.
157
Thus, an extensive floor debate in the Senate in January
of 1949, just days before the statute was passed, included two
separate attempts to amend the law’s language to guard against that
possibility.
158
The first amendment, proposed jointly by Senator Donnell of
Missouri and Senator Morse of Oregon, would have required the
president to provide an accounting, supported by vouchers, of any
funds drawn from the expense account.
159
After that amendment
failed to be adopted, other senators proposed another amendment
that would have required the president to provide a written
certification whenever he drew funds from the account that the funds
were being used to defray, in the words of the statute, “expenses
related to or resulting from the discharge of his official duties” and
for no other purpose.
160
This amendment generated a tie vote, thereby failing (at the
time, the office of the Vice President was vacant, so no tiebreaking
156. Indeed, a requirement that any unspent funds in the expense account be
returned to the Treasury was not added until 2004. See supra note 3. Significantly,
the $50,000 annual expense allowance has never been adjusted for inflation, despite
the fact that, in real dollars, it is now worth less than 9% of what it was worth when
Truman was benefitting from it. See id.
157. See CONG. REC. 169, 199, 220 (1949).
158. See id. at 199, 220. The debate regarding the bill took place in a hurried
and harried atmosphere, because of extreme time pressure: if the measure was not
signed into law before January 20 at noon, the provisions regarding altering the
president’s compensation would be constitutionally prohibited from applying to
President Truman’s new term that began on that day. This time pressure was so
extreme that the House did not even refer the bill to a committee prior to voting on
it, which led to complaints during the floor debates that the normal procedures for
consideration were not being followed.
159. See id. at 198, 199.
160. See id. at 217, 220.
30 Michigan State Law Review
vote was available).
161
Notably, several supporters of the more
stringent amendment, requiring an accounting of precisely what
expenses were being defrayed via the account, voted against the
certification requirement on the grounds that it constituted little more
than an empty formality.
162
It is also worth noting that at no point in either the Senate or
House debates on the bill did anyone suggest that an unscrupulous
president might simply pocket any excess funds in the expense
account; rather, the discussion revolved around the possibility of
improper expenditures being made out of the account, such as for
example using funds from it to help pay for campaign activities.
163
Soon after the creation of the expense account, further concerns
seem to have arisen about how it was actually being employed. In
any event, in 1951 the law was changed.
164
The revised statutory
language provided that “no accounting, other than for income tax
purposes, [] shall be made by [the president].”
165
In other words,
from that point on, any money Truman withdrew from the account
that was not used for defraying legitimate expenses incurred in the
discharge of the president’s official duties needed to be reported as
ordinary income to the IRS and taxed accordingly.
166
Notably,
Truman did not report that any funds from the expense account had
been converted to personal income on either his 1951, 1952, or 1953
tax returns.
167
161. See id. at 220. Until the passage of the 25th amendment, no mechanism
existed for filling the office of the vice president, if the vice president ascended to
the presidency.
162. See id. at 221.
163. See id. at 199–200.
164. See 3 U.S.C.S. § 102 (amended 1951).
165. See id. (emphasis added).
166. See id. Per the statute’s revised language, money that Truman withdrew
from the account and then spent on defraying official expenses would be deductible
from his income, but any money he withdrew that he did not then spend on such
expenses was to be treated for tax purposes as simply part of his salary. See id.
167. See Form 1040: U.S. individual Income Tax Return of Harry S. and
Bess W. Truman (1951),
https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs.taxnotes.com/2019/H_Truman_1951.pdf
[https://perma.cc/PN5D-YDFR]; Form 1040: U.S. Individual Income Tax Return of
Harry S. and Bess W. Truman (1952),
https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs.taxnotes.com/2019/H_Truman_1952.pdf
[https://perma.cc/6YA8-9NCR]; Form 1040: U.S. Individual Income Tax Return of
Harry S. and Bess W. Truman (1953),
https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs.taxnotes.com/2019/H_Truman_1953.pdf[https://per
ma.cc/K7DD-WVL4].
Campos The Truman Show 31
Whatever concerns regarding potential misappropriation of the
expense account funds may have motivated this statutory change
were in fact well warranted. A few months after leaving office, in
one of several handwritten wills preserved in Bess Truman’s
personal files, Truman let Bess know where some of that expense
account money had ended up: in a safety deposit box at the
Columbia National Bank in Kansas City.
168
“The cash in the box at the Columbia has been for emergency
use,” he wrote. “I kept it in the little safe in the White House as long
as I was there. It came out of the $50,000.00 expense account that
was not accountable for taxes. It should be put into bonds except
what you need for immediate use.”
169
Truman had access, over the four years of his second term, to a
total of $2.2 million, in 2021 dollars, in an account that he could,
given the initial absence of any reporting requirement, convert
covertly into a salary supplement. But that sum, as enormous as it is,
still constitutes a considerable understatement in regard to how much
money the expense account represented in relative economic terms.
Consider that, in terms of relative income, a family would have had
to earn $6.9 million in 2021 dollars to make as much money as that
extra $200,000 represented in that era.
170
But even this sum is an understatement of the value of that
money at the time. For the first half of his term, any money Truman
withdrew from this account for use as personal income was not
taxable, and when it became taxable in 1951, Truman did not report
any of the money he withdrew from the account on his tax returns.
The marginal federal income rate Truman was legally required to
pay on this income was 90%.
171
Given this, the value of the money
168. Draft will, Truman Financial Records, Harry S. Truman Library and
Museum, Independence, Missouri (Dec. 26, 1953) (copy on file with the author).
169. Id.
170. See Income of Families and Persons in the United States: 1950, U.S.
CENSUS BUREAU (Mar. 25, 1952),
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1952/demo/p60-009.html
[https://perma.cc/9W4J-SDHY]. The $200,000 deposited in the expense account
between 1949 and 1952 represented 5.69 times the sum total income earned by
families at the 95th percentile of family income over those four years. In 2019, the
95th percentile of family income was $304,153.
171. See Federal Income Tax Brackets (Tax Year 1950), TAX-
BRACKETS.ORG, https://www.tax-brackets.org/federaltaxtable/1951
[https://perma.cc/SU8J-Q6R9] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022). Indeed, it is quite
possible that, in after-tax terms, Truman was the highest salaried employee in the
United States in 1952. Note that if Truman had been paying the taxes he was
required to pay on the income from the expense account, he would have needed a
32 Michigan State Law Review
Truman pocketed from the account, in terms of relative income,
could be estimated to be equivalent to more than $10 million in 2021
terms. All this makes it that much more startling that the note to Bess
Truman quoted above reveals Truman was converting funds in the
account into literal cash, which he would then store in the White
House safe.
172
When we examine what Truman’s net worth was at the
time he left the White House, these facts will take on considerable
significance in regard to the question of how much compensation he
actually extracted from his presidency.
173
The windfall of the White House expense account also serves
as an indirect reminder that, in practical terms, the Truman
household was in a very different position than the captains of
American industry and baseball superstars who enjoyed similar
salaries to the president’s: Unlike those residents of the top of the
economic pyramid, the Truman family had little in the way of
personal expenses during their years in the White House.
During their time in office, presidents are responsible for some
personal expenses: for example, presidents must pay for their own
groceries—although not for the professional chef and kitchen staff
that prepare their meals—their clothes, and for various basic
household items.
174
But the vast majority of expenses that an upper
class family in America would normally incur—a mortgage, property
maintenance, utilities, medical care, transportation, and payments to
third parties to perform domestic labor—are paid for the president’s
family by the government. Consider that the White House employs a
full-time staff of nearly 100 people, along with 250 part-time
employees, to maintain the massive mansion, which every incoming
president is given a generous allowance to redecorate. Presidents
salary of $600,000 to net the same after-tax salary he netted in that year. IRS data
for 1955 indicate that only about 800 taxpayers in the entire nation reported an
income of $600,000 or more, and of course the overwhelming majority of that
income would have been from sources other than salary.
172. See Campos, supra note 133.
173. See infra Section III.E.
174. See Kevin Liptak & Cassie Spodak, White House Living Not Total Free
Ride, CNN POLITICS (June 10, 2014, 7:21 PM),
https://www.cnn.com/2014/06/10/politics/presidential-debt/index.html
[https://perma.cc/AA6K-6W8X]. The extent to which the $50,000 expense
allowance created in 1949 could be used to pay for the president’s day to day living
expenses was a matter that members of Congress themselves appeared to be
uncertain about at the time they created that allowance. See 103 CONG. REC. S. 103,
199 (daily ed. Jan. 13, 1949).
Campos The Truman Show 33
have their own taxpayer-provided private plane and helicopter,
movie theater, bowling alley, swimming pool, and vacation home.
175
Two countervailing factors should be taken into account when
considering how much of his compensation as president Truman was
able to save by the time he left the White House: First, during the
years Truman was in office, very high-income earners such as
himself were required to pay a very high effective federal tax rate.
As president, Truman paid an average of 49% of his official salary in
federal taxes.
176
This is about double the effective rate that someone
at a comparable relative income level would pay today.
177
Second,
during his years in the White House, Truman did have a number of
significant personal expenses that clearly would not have been
covered by the government. These included his daughter’s college
expenses, the cost of supporting his very elderly mother and his
unmarried, unemployed sister, and the costs of maintaining his
residence in Independence, Missouri where his wife spent much of
her time during Truman’s presidency.
Nevertheless, given Truman’s stupendous salary, the fairly
limited personal expenses the Truman family incurred during his
presidency, and most of all the striking fact that Truman’s official
salary was supplemented by what in 2021 dollars were more than
$550,000 per year of expense account funds, all or almost all of
which Truman could, and apparently did, choose to convert covertly
into personal compensation, it would have been reasonable for his
biographers to assume that during his years in the White House,
Truman saved nearly all, or even more than all, of what was still an
enormous official after-tax income. (As we shall see, such an
assumption would have been correct).
In sum, Truman earned approximately $9.5 million in official
salary in inflation-adjusted 2021 dollars, during his eighteen years in
Washington, and a vastly larger amount—around $30 million—in
relative economic terms. These figures make his complaints in 1957
to House Majority Leader John McCormack that “[i]t seems rather
peculiar that a fellow who spent eighteen years in government
service . . . should have to go broke” to write his memoirs sound
more than a little discordant.
178
Far from representing some sort of
financial sacrifice on his part, Harry Truman’s government service
175. See generally KATE ANDERSEN BROWER, THE RESIDENCE: INSIDE THE
PRIVATE WORLD OF THE WHITE HOUSE (1st ed. 2015).
176. See Thorndike, supra note 135.
177. See Statistics of Income For 1945, supra note 146, at 320.
178. OFF THE RECORD, supra note 16, at 347.
34 Michigan State Law Review
earned him a veritable fortune that was in relative economic terms
many times larger than the sums someone would receive today for
occupying the same positions.
179
Indeed, the idea, propagated so
successfully by David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
biography nearly thirty years ago, that Truman left the White House
with very little money, never made any sense on its face.
180
Let us now consider Truman’s purported financial struggles in
the five and one half years between the end of his presidency and the
passage of the Former Presidents Act. It is true that, as McCullough
notes, when Truman’s presidency ended he had no formal source of
income other than a small Army pension.
181
Over the next few years,
when he was lobbying Congress and the public for post-presidential
benefits, Truman made much of the fact that he was not exploiting
his tenure in office for financial gain—a claim that, as we have seen,
continues to be echoed constantly in discussions of the supposedly
less scrupulous behavior of more recent presidents.
182
The Former
Presidents Act, runs the argument, was justified by Truman’s
difficult financial circumstances and in particular by his refusal to
ameliorate them by taking economic advantage of his status as a
former president.
183
In fact, beginning almost on the day he left the White House
Truman employed his fame as a former president to make a
staggering amount of money.
184
Truman’s income between the end of
his presidency and the passage of the Former Presidents Act in
August of 1958 came from three primary sources: his sale of his
memoirs; other writing, lecturing, and guest appearance fees; and his
sale of the site of the Truman family farm to real estate developers.
185
179. Someone who today served as a United States senator for ten years, and
then president of the United States for eight years, would receive $4.94 million, i.e.,
about half of what Truman was paid in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars. See
Senate Salaries (1789 – Present), U.S. SENATE,
https://www.senate.gov/senators/SenateSalariesSince1789.htm
[https://perma.cc/JZ5Y-QZ47] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022). The latter sums do not
include the money from the presidential expense account that Truman converted to
personal savings. See 3 U.S.C.A. § 102 (West).
180. See supra note 16 and accompanying text.
181. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13.
182. See Karabel, supra note 69 and accompanying text.
183. See Campos, supra note 133.
184. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 932.
185. See Thorndike, supra note 135.
Campos The Truman Show 35
A. The Memoirs
Approximately three weeks after the end of his presidency,
Truman signed a contract with Life magazine to publish his
memoirs.
186
The contract was for a flat fee of $600,000.
187
Over the
next several months, Truman’s lawyers negotiated an arrangement
with the IRS, finalized in September 1954, to structure the payment
of the contract in a way that would reduce Truman’s tax liabilities
arising from it.
188
This deal stipulated that the payment of the $600,000 would be
made in six yearly installments of $100,000, rather than a lump sum,
and that Truman would be allowed to estimate ahead of the payment
of the installments what the deductible expenses incurred during
composition of the memoirs were likely to be.
189
This latter sum
would then be deducted from each yearly installment on a pro rata
basis, meaning that in each tax year during which the payments were
made, Truman would only be taxed on that portion of the payment
that represented his estimated net profit from the project.
190
Adjusted simply for inflation, this $600,000 contract would be
worth approximately $5.6 million in 2021 dollars.
191
Adjusted for
relative income, a similar book contract in 2021 would require a
payment to the author of $16 million.
192
As we have seen, the story of Harry Truman’s post-presidential
financial struggles has managed to survive in the face of these
staggering figures because of David McCullough’s widely cited
assertion that Truman netted “only” $37,000 on the contract, after
compositional expenses and taxes.
193
(It is worth noting that, at the
time, $37,000 was equivalent to more than three years of the total
pre-tax income of families at the 95th percentile of family income,
so even this was actually a very large sum, especially considering
that it purportedly represented Truman’s post-tax profit from the
186. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 932.
187. See id.
188. See Thorndike, supra note 135.
189. See id.
190. See id.
191. CPI Calculator, supra note 97.
192. This relative income figure is derived by comparing the 95th percentile
of family income in 1957 (the midpoint in the disbursement of the memoirs’
installment payments) with what Truman was owed under the contract, and then
applying the ratio between these two figures to the 95th percentile of family income
in 2019.
193. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 963.
36 Michigan State Law Review
contract. A comparable sum today would be nearly one million
dollars.)
194
In any event, it is difficult to convey adequately just how
absurd the assertion that Truman’s effective profit on the contract
was only $37,000 always was.
195
McCullough explains that 94% of
the value of the book contract never reached Truman himself
because McCullough accepts on their face the claims in Truman’s
1957 letter to House Majority Leader John McCormack that Truman
incurred $153,000 in expenses composing the book and answering
fan mail, and that Truman paid an 67% effective tax rate on the
earnings.
196
Even if we accept all these figures as accurate—in fact, as we
shall see, they were completely fictitious—Truman’s math still made
no sense whatsoever: If we deduct $153,000 from $600,000, and
then apply a 67% effective tax rate, the total profit from the memoirs
would have been $149,000, not $37,000. ($149,000 was at the time
equivalent to $1.4 million in 2021 dollars, and $4 million in terms of
relative income.)
197
In fact, a perusal of the Schedule C attachments to Truman’s
tax returns during the years when the installment payments on the
memoirs were made (1955 through 1960) reveals that Truman
enjoyed a net profit of at least $299,186 on the memoirs, although
the real number was probably a good deal higher.
198
Per those
schedules, Truman’s agreement with the IRS stated that he
anticipated spending $86,814.52 on the book’s production, leaving a
net profit, before tax, of $513,185.48.
199
Since in the years Truman
received the installment payments he paid an average effective tax of
41.7%, this yields a net profit, after expenses and taxes, of a few
hundred dollars short of $300,000.
200
Converted to 2021 dollars, this means Truman enjoyed, in
inflation-adjusted terms, a post-tax and expenses profit from the
194. See Income Tables, supra note 127.
195. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 963.
196. See id.; OFF THE RECORD, supra note 36, at 346.
197. See CPI Calculator, supra note 97. The relative income calculation is
derived by comparing family income at the 95th percentile at the time to Truman’s
purported net profit on the memoirs.
198. See Thorndike, supra note 135.
199. See Form 1040: U.S. Individual Income Tax Return of Harry S. and
Bess W. Truman (1955),
https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs.taxnotes.com/2019/H_Truman_1955.pdf. These
figures are laid out in the Schedule C attachment to Truman’s 1955 return.
200. See Thorndike, supra note 135.
Campos The Truman Show 37
memoirs of $2,866,000.
201
But again, in terms of relative income, this
is a radical underestimate: a writer today, to earn a comparable post-
tax profit on a book, would need to make approximately
$7,600,000—after taxes and expenses.
202
And indeed, Truman may have earned a good deal more from
the project. Truman’s tax returns in the years immediately after he
left the White House are full of what, to put it charitably, could be
characterized as some very puzzling numbers.
First, Truman’s Schedule Cs from his 1953, 1954, and 1955
returns—the years when all the work on the book’s production was
performed, and presumably paid for—indicate that Truman’s total
expenses incurred in the production of all his professional income,
added up to $41,667 for the three years combined, i.e., less than half
of what his lawyers estimated the expenses for producing the book
would end up costing him.
203
(Ordinarily, deductions for professional
expenses must be claimed in the tax years when the expenses were
incurred.)
204
A difficulty here is that if any or all of the $41,667 in
professional expenses Truman claimed between 1953 and 1955—this
is actually an enormous sum equal to $417,000 in 2021 dollars—
were incurred in the production of the memoirs, then Truman would
be double counting those expenses against his income. This is
because, according to his tax returns, all the deductible expenses
associated with the production of the book were supposed to be
reflected in the installment payments he received between 1955 and
1960, from which the book’s estimated production expenses had
already been deducted prior to calculating Truman’s tax liability in
each of those years.
205
On the other hand, if Truman was not double counting the
memoirs’ expenses, then according to his tax forms, he paid no less
than $265,453 in professional expenses between 1953 and 1960
when the last installment payment on the memoirs was made.
206
If we
201. See CPI Calculator, supra note 97.
202. This figure is derived by comparing Truman’s net profits from the
memoir, after taxes and expenses, to the 95th percentile of family income during the
years when he received the installment payments on the book.
203. Truman delivered the final manuscript to the publisher in July of 1955.
See Thorndike, supra note 135.
204. See 26 U.S.C.A. 162(a) (West) (“There shall be allowed as a deduction
all the ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred during the taxable year in
carrying on any trade or business . . . .”) (emphasis added).
205. Truman Taxes, supra note 132.
206. See id.
38 Michigan State Law Review
convert this figure to 2021 dollars, it becomes evident that this is a
staggering and literally incredible sum: $2,589,000!
207
Mysteriously, as soon as the memoirs project was complete,
Truman’s professional expenses, which were already extraordinarily
high—recall that they collectively totaled more than $400,000 in
2021 dollars during his first three post-presidential years—suddenly
shot up to bizarrely stratospheric levels: in 2021 dollars, $402,846
and $399,274 in 1956 and 1957, respectively.
208
In addition, these
numbers either involved double counting the expenses associated
with writing the memoirs or Truman’s claimed professional expenses
in these years were even higher: in 2021 dollars, over $500,000
annually.
It is probably impossible, at a remove of more than six decades,
to untangle what was actually going on when Truman claimed such
unbelievably high professional expenses, but it is impossible to not at
least suspect that what may have been going on was some egregious
tax fraud.
Furthermore, the sort of arrangement Truman entered into with
the IRS in 1953, in which the expenses for the memoirs project were
estimated in advance, requires the taxpayer to, at the conclusion of
the project, reconcile the actual expenses incurred with the pre-
production estimate of those expenses.
209
There is no evidence
anywhere in Truman’s tax returns that any such reconciliation ever
took place.
210
Still, in regard to the central question of whether Truman
committed a fraud on Congress and the public when he claimed he
would have been in serious financial distress if he and his siblings
had not inherited the family farm, all these are side issues. Even
taking the calculations in his tax returns at face value, Truman
earned, after taxes and expenses, millions of dollars from the
207. CPI Calculator, supra note 97. Truman’s tax records claim, assuming
that the expenses from the memoirs were not being double counted, that he paid $1.4
million, in 2021 dollars, in office salaries alone between 1953 and 1958. This is,
given rates of pay for research assistants and secretarial help at the time, a literally
incredible figure.
208. See Campos, supra note 133.
209. See Alice Phelan Sullivan Corp. v. United States, 381 F.2d 399, 403
(Cl. Ct. 1967) (laying out the inclusionary tax benefit rule and holding that if an
expense is deducted in Year 1, and later events reverse that deduction, the offsetting
events generate income to the extent the original deduction has now been rendered
inappropriate).
210. See Campos, supra note 133.
Campos The Truman Show 39
memoirs, in inflation-adjusted terms, and even more in terms of
relative income.
211
B. Other Writing, Lecturing, and Guest Appearance Fees
Another aspect of Truman’s post-presidential finances that has
been overlooked or ignored by his biographers and other commenters
has been that, quite apart from his fabulously lucrative memoirs,
Truman also made an enormous amount of money from other
sources in the years immediately after he left the White House. He
did so by writing occasional magazine articles, giving lectures at
various venues, and making paid media appearances.
212
The most startling example of the latter source of income was
Truman’s appearance on Edward R. Murrow’s CBS television
program See It Now.
213
This program was broadcast in February of
1958, but Murrow’s interview of Truman was filmed a year earlier,
from February 8-15, 1957, in Islamorada, Florida.
214
Here is what
Truman had to say about the fact that he was not receiving any
financial support from the federal government in his post-
presidential years: “You know, the United States Government turns
its Chief Executives out to grass. They’re just allowed to starve. . . .
If I hadn’t inherited some property that finally paid things through,
I’d be on relief right now.”
215
What the immense prime time national television audience for
this interview—the first of its kind ever given by a former
president—did not know was that apparently Truman had been paid
$25,000 to give it.
216
This sum is found on the Schedule C attachment
211. See Thorndike, supra note 135.
212. See Harry S. Truman Papers: Post-Presidential Papers, HARRY S.
TRUMAN LIBR. & MUSEUM, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/truman-
papers/harry-s-truman-papers-post-presidential-papers [https://perma.cc/W5E7-
DG2V] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022); Harry S. Truman Lecture at Columbia
University on the Presidency, HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBR. & MUSEUM,
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/soundrecording-records/sr75-1-harry-s-truman-
lecture-columbia-university-presidency [https://perma.cc/6D4M-K6WK] (last
visited Mar. 14, 2022); Motion Picture MP-66-3 Through 66-14, HARRY S. TRUMAN
LIBR. & MUSEUM, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/movingimage-records/mp66-3-
through-66-14 [https://perma.cc/3HJ5-HU3N] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022).
213. See Motion Picture MP66-3 Through 66-14, supra note 212.
214. See Jack Gould, Human Document: Murrow Interview of Truman
Offers Study of Man and Office Holder, N.Y. TIMES, Feb. 3, 1958, at 46; Motion
Picture MP66-3 Through 66-14, supra note 212.
215. See HAMBY, supra note 16, at 628.
216. See Campos, supra note 133.
40 Michigan State Law Review
to Truman’s 1957 tax return, under the category “Personal
Appearances.”
217
Median family income in America that year was
$4,914.
218
The audience might have been even more startled to learn that
Truman was in the process of earning, between 1953 and 1960,
$197,500 from his occasional writings, lectures, and public
appearances.
219
Again, all this income—equivalent to $1,926,000 in
2021 dollars—was quite apart from the fortune he received for his
memoirs.
220
All told, in the eight years immediately after he left the
presidency, Truman collected $797,500 from the direct exploitation
of his post-presidential fame.
221
This is, in inflation-adjusted terms,
equivalent to $7.78 million.
222
And in terms of relative income, a
person today would need to have earned $20.2 million over the past
eight years to have made as much money, relative to the earnings of
his fellow Americans, as Truman made between 1953 and 1960 just
from these activities.
223
C. Sale of the Truman Family Farm
Interestingly, while lobbying for the passage of the Former
Presidents Act, Truman kept insisting that what was saving him from
penury was the sale of the Truman family farm, which his maternal
grandfather, Solomon Young, had originally purchased in the mid-
nineteenth century.
224
In his January 10, 1957, letter to John McCormack, Truman
claimed that “[h]ad it not been for the fact that I was able to sell
some property that my brother, sister and I inherited from our mother
I would practically be on relief.”
225
The latter phrase must have been
much in his mind, as less than four weeks later he told Ed Murrow
217. See Truman Taxes, supra note 132.
218. See Income Tables, supra note 127.
219. See Truman Taxes, supra note 132.
220. See CPI Calculator, supra note 97; FERRELL, supra note 16, at 387.
221. See Truman Taxes, supra note 132.
222. See CPI Calculator, supra note 97.
223. The relative income figure is derived by comparing Truman’s income
from these activities over these years with family income at the ninety-fifth
percentile at the time.
224. See OFF THE RECORD, supra note 36, at 346.
225. See id.
Campos The Truman Show 41
that if he “hadn’t inherited some property that finally paid things
through, I’d be on relief right now.”
226
Characteristically, David McCullough presents Truman’s
claims about how the sale of the family farm saved him from poverty
without evincing even a hint of skepticism regarding them:
‘I sure hate to see the old place go,’ he was quoted in the Kansas City Star.
But the sale, as he also said, meant financial security at last, for Truman,
as for [his brother and sister] Vivian and Mary Jane. And while, with the
transaction went a good deal of sadness, it affirmed the old faith that come
what may, land was wealth to count on. It wasn’t Truman’s rise to
political power or his world renown, his books or lectures or the legacy of
his wife’s family that saw him through in the end, but the old farm at
Grandview.
227
As is so often the case when it comes to Harry Truman’s
finances, what actually happened with “the old place” turns out to be
a complicated story regarding which Truman’s own account was at
times less than accurate in several important particulars.
First of all, contrary to Truman’s representations, he and his
siblings did not inherit the Grandview farm from their mother.
228
In
fact, their mother had lost what by then remained of the original farm
to creditors in 1940 after an odd and disconcerting set of events
related to Truman’s senatorial re-election campaign that year.
229
The Grandview farm was approximately 1,500 acres when
Solomon Young died in 1892.
230
By the time Harry Truman was
working it as a young man fifteen years later, it had been reduced to
600 acres.
231
Various financial stresses led Truman’s mother, Martha
Ellen Truman, to sell off more of it after World War I and to heavily
mortgage the remainder.
232
By 1940 she owned 287 acres
226. See HAMBY, supra note 16, at 628.
227. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 962–63. Hamby makes a similar
claim:
All the Trumans—Harry, Vivian, and Mary Jane—joined the ranks of the financially
independent by selling most of the old family farm to a real estate developer.
Nevertheless, both Harry and Bess felt insecure. The ‘job’ of being a former
president carried a lot expenses; federal law provided no remuneration.
HAMBY, supra note 16, at 628.
228. See The Young-Truman Farm, HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBR. & MUSEUM,
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/student-
resources/places/grandview/young-truman-farm [https://perma.cc/5L2S-85DB] (last
visited Mar. 14, 2022) [hereinafter Young-Truman Farm].
229. See id.
230. See id.
231. See id.
232. See id.
42 Michigan State Law Review
encumbered by a now-overdue short-term $35,000 mortgage that her
son Harry had helped arrange with the Jackson County School Board
in 1938.
233
In fact, this mortgage was probably illegal under Missouri
law at the time, which did not allow a property to be mortgaged for
more than its fair market value, which was estimated to be
$22,680.
234
The overdue mortgage was not foreclosed on for more than a
year because the Jackson County Court at the time was controlled by
elements of Kansas City’s Pendergast political machine, which
Truman eventually became by far the most prominent protégé.
235
But
when the court came into different hands after Republicans defeated
the Pendergast candidates, foreclosure proceedings moved forward,
and Martha Truman was ejected from her lifelong home.
236
Truman,
no doubt correctly, saw this development as a politically
motivated—although perfectly legal—attack on him as he was
preparing to run for a second senatorial term. Yet somewhat
surprisingly, he seems to have been either unable or unwilling to
arrange alternative financing for the property.
237
After Truman became president in 1945, three of his friends
acquired the property by paying off Jackson County for the by-then
$43,000 debt.
238
They then sold eighty-seven acres and the farmhouse
to Harry’s brother Vivian and, in 1946, the remaining 200 acres to
233. See HAMBY, supra note 16, at 209.
234. See id.
235. See id. When he first joined the Senate in 1935, Truman was referred to
derisively by some critics as “the Senator from Pendergast.” See MCCULLOUGH,
supra note 13, at 221.
236. See HAMBY, supra note 16, at 209.
237. Truman’s apparent passivity during this entire incident is somewhat
puzzling. See id. While $35,000 was a considerable sum in 1940, it would seem that
a sitting U.S. senator could have done more to prevent his 87-year-old mother from
being evicted from her lifelong home. See id. It appears Truman, who was in the
middle of a difficult re-election campaign, was embarrassed by the sketchy nature of
his previous efforts to refinance the property with the help of the forbearance of the
Pendergast-controlled county court. See id. In any event, Truman remained quite
bitter about the matter:
When Judge Fred Klaber, Truman’s only friend on the county court, asked
him for comments on a purchase offer in 1941, the senator retorted, “That
old squint-eyed son-of-a-gun, who is the Presiding Judge [George
Montgomery], . . . caused a lot of suffering to a grand old woman, and I
hope he’s happy over it. You own the place, do as you please with it.” His
rage vented, Truman then sent a note to Jim Pendergast urging him to try
to get the county’s land business turned over to a pliable agent.
Hamby, supra note 16, at 262.
238. See Young-Truman Farm, supra note 232.
Campos The Truman Show 43
Harry.
239
Over the next few years, the three Truman siblings acquired
other portions of the original parcel until by the early 1950s they
owned 529 acres.
240
The farm was just fifteen miles from downtown Kansas City,
and in the postwar period its value for commercial development was
increasing rapidly—so much so that, when Truman sold most of his
holdings in it in a series of transactions between 1954 and 1959, he
received a total of $566,633 from these sales—certainly a handsome
return on an investment that in the course of a little more than a
decade increased several-fold in value.
241
(Truman’s profit on these
transactions was equivalent to about $4.5 million in 2021 dollars).
242
D. Truman’s Post-Presidential Income Adjusted for Inflation and
Relative Income
Adding these various sources of wealth together, we can
analyze Harry Truman’s annual income during the years when he
was lobbying for passage of what became the Former Presidents Act
as well as the two years immediately following when he received the
last two installment payments on his memoirs. Each year below
features three figures: Truman’s income in nominal (current) dollars,
in constant, inflation-adjusted 2021 dollars, and in terms of relative
income, that is, in terms of how much money someone would have
239. See id.
240. See id.
241. Truman Taxes, supra note 132. Truman sold 98 acres in 1954 for
$75,000, after purchasing that land in 1945 for $14,736. See id. He sold 59.8 acres in
1955 for $130,295.77, after purchasing that land in 1945 for $8,239.12. See id. He
sold 31.9 acres in 1955 for $65,000, after purchasing that land in 1952 for $31,910.
See id. He sold 15.9 acres in 1956 for $13,864, that he purchased in 1946 for
$1,863.90. See id. He sold seven lots in 1957 for $11,000, that he purchased in 1945
for $2,991. See id. He sold 220 acres in 1958 for $220,000, that he bought in 1946
and 1955 for $53,832.10. See id. He sold a lot in 1959, for $37,850.75, that he
purchased in 1945 for $44.12. See id. He sold another lot that year for $13,621.50,
that he also purchased for $44.12 in 1945. See id. All in all, Truman spent $113,660
to acquire these properties, and then sold them for $566,633. See id. According to
the Harry S. Truman Library, $23,000 of the $53,832.10 purchase of 220 acres that
Truman acquired in 1946 and 1955 were for the 200 acres he bought in the former
year. See id. This would mean that Truman spent $82,828 during his presidency
buying back pieces of the old family farm. See id. He also spent an additional
$18,750 shortly after leaving the White House, to buy out the three-quarters share in
his late mother in law’s house that was not inherited by his wife. See id. (This was
the first and only residence Truman would ever own). See id.
242. See CPI Calculator, supra note 97.
44 Michigan State Law Review
to make today to have the same income relative to other Americans
that Truman enjoyed relative to the Americans of his time.
243
1953
Nominal Dollars: $34,177
2021 Dollars: $343,294
Relative Income: $1,018,913
1954
Nominal Dollars: $13,565
2021 Dollars: $135,748
Relative Income: $395,399
1955
Nominal Dollars: $141,413
2021 Dollars: $1,425,756
Relative Income: $4,057,401
1956
Nominal Dollars: $121,543
2021 Dollars: $1,202,896
Relative Income: $3,239,229
1957
Nominal Dollars: $139,140
2021 Dollars: $1,332,946
Relative Income: $3,680,251
1958
Nominal Dollars: $137,085
2021 Dollars: $1,276,906
Relative Income: $3,473,427
243. Truman’s income is stated in terms of his gross income, as listed on his
tax returns, rather than his adjusted gross income. This is because family income,
which provides the baseline for the comparison in regard to relative income, is
calculated by the U.S. Census’s Current Population Survey using gross income, not
AGI. See Income Tables, supra note 127. Relative income is again derived by
comparing Truman’s income in each of these years to family income at the 95th
percentile in those years.
Campos The Truman Show 45
1959
Nominal Dollars: $169,502
2021 Dollars: $1,568,010
Relative Income: $4,026,986
1960
Nominal Dollars: $152,615
2021 Dollars: $1,387,946
Relative Income: $3,433,887
Note that during these years, Truman paid an average effective
tax rate of 41%, meaning that his after-tax income can be estimated
readily by multiplying these figures by .59.
244
Per contemporary IRS
data, Truman’s compensation during these years was on average
higher than that of approximately 99.92% of American taxpayers.
245
E. Harry Truman’s Post-Presidential Net Worth
The foregoing figures make clear that the standard narrative
about Harry Truman’s post-presidential finances bears no
relationship whatsoever to the historical reality. Furthermore, now
that Bess Truman’s personal financial files have become available to
researchers, we have Truman’s own estimates of his actual net
worth, both at the time he left the White House and at the time
Congress enacted the Former Presidents Act.
246
In a holographic draft will dated December 26, 1953, that is,
eleven months after he left office, Truman laid out his then-current
financial situation to his wife.
247
He listed their current assets as the
following:
Land: $250,000
Bonds: $250,000
Cash: $150,000
Book: $100,000
248
244. See Truman Taxes, supra note 132.
245. See INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, STATISTICS OF INCOME: INDIVIDUAL
TAX RETURNS FOR 1955, at 18 tbl.1 (1958), https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-
soi/55inar.pdf [https://perma.cc/ZYM3-HZDU].
246. See Campos, supra note 133.
247. Draft will, supra note 168.
248. See id.
46 Michigan State Law Review
Where these then-enormous sums came from is not mysterious.
Indeed, Truman himself informed Bess in the text of the document
that the “bonds, land and cash all come from savings of presidential
salary and free expense account. It should keep you and Margaret
comfortably.”
249
Truman’s liquid assets at this time were equivalent to 119% of
the entire post-tax official White House salary Truman received
during his eight years in office.
250
Specifically, during his years as
president, Truman netted $335,596 after taxes on his White House
salary.
251
Over this time, he apparently acquired $400,000 in liquid
assets and spent approximately $83,000 on land purchases.
252
He also
bought a three-quarters share in the ownership of his late mother in
law’s house for $18,750 shortly after leaving Washington.
253
(Bess
Truman had already inherited a one-quarter share of the property).
254
And while Truman’s household expenses during his eight years in
office were low, they were not non-existent.
255
In addition, Truman
noted in the December 26, 1953, draft will in Bess Truman’s
personal files that all of the money and land whose value he was
listing in the document came from a combination of savings from his
presidential salary and from the tax-free expense account.
256
Thus,
both simple mathematics and Truman’s own representations indicate
that Truman must have converted all or nearly all of the $200,000
deposited into the White House expense account between 1949 and
1953 into personal wealth.
257
This does not appear to have been, strictly speaking, legal.
258
What is even more dubious, from a tax law perspective, is that after
249. See id.
250. See Truman Taxes, supra note 132.
251. See Campos, supra note 133.
252. See id.
253. See id.
254. See Campos, supra note 133.
255. See generally Liptak & Spodak, supra note 174.
256. See Draft will, supra note 168.
257. See Campos, supra note 133.
258. One could make a very strained argument that, by not including any
reporting requirement regarding the use of the money prior to October 1951,
Congress did not necessarily object to allowing Truman to convert the expense
account funds into personal wealth. Indeed, some members of Congress complained
that, structured as it was, the expense allowance could end up functioning as a covert
salary enhancement. See 103 CONG. REC. S. 103, 198–221 (daily ed. Jan. 13, 1949).
The plain language of the statute clearly prohibits such a use of the funds, however.
See 3 U.S.C.S. § 102 (amended 1951). Unless we treat much of its language as
purely precatory, no possible reading of the statute would allow Truman to do what
Campos The Truman Show 47
any conversion of the expense account funds into personal income
became an explicitly taxable event in 1951, Truman did not report
any such conversion on his taxes in either that year or in the
following two tax years.
259
Note that on a dollar for dollar basis, expense account funds
converted to salary would have been much more valuable to Truman
than money from his official salary since the former funds were not
taxed prior to 1951, and Truman simply did not report this income
when it did become taxable.
260
Given that the money from the
expense account should have been taxed at a 90% rate in 1951 and
1952, Truman’s appropriation of that money made his salary,
practically speaking, several times larger than his official pay.
261
And Truman’s December 1953 estimate of his net worth was, if
anything, a substantial understatement. For one thing, as we have
seen, the memoirs netted Truman at least $300,000 after taxes and
expenses.
262
For another, the Grandview farmland Truman had
reacquired over the previous few years ended up being sold in
transactions that generated reportable capital gains of $290,725, off a
basis from purchases that added up to a little more than one-third that
amount.
263
Nevertheless, even Truman’s quite conservative estimate of his
net worth just months after leaving the White House indicates that,
by all ordinary standards, he departed the presidency a very wealthy
man.
Consider that fully ten years after Truman made this estimate,
the net worth of an American family at the 99th percentile of family
net worth was $186,981.
264
If we take into account both inflation and
economic growth between 1953 and 1963 to estimate the likely
he evidently did, which was to convert the entire expense account into cash savings
and bonds, and to repurchase the Grandview farm property.
259. See Truman Taxes, supra note 132.
260. See id.
261. See Federal Income Tax Brackets (Tax Year 1951), TAX-
BRACKETS.ORG, https://www.tax-brackets.org/federaltaxtable/1952
[https://perma.cc/FJ98-GF3J] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022).
262. See supra note 193 and accompanying text.
263. See Truman Taxes, supra note 132. Note that at this time the tax code’s
automatic deductions for capital gains ensured that reportable capital gains would be
far smaller than a taxpayer’s actual net profit. Truman, for example, sold land that
he acquired for a total of $113,600 for $566,633, yet this resulted in reportable
capital gains of only $290,725.
264. See Nine Charts About Wealth Inequality in America, URBAN INST.
(Oct. 5, 2017), https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/index.html
[https://perma.cc/4HMX-K3NK] [hereinafter Wealth Inequality].
48 Michigan State Law Review
growth in family net worth at the 99th percentile over the course of
these years, we can estimate that the 99th percentile of family
income in 1953 was around $126,000.
265
If we then remove Truman’s
estimate of the value of the memoirs—the contract for which he
signed three weeks after leaving the White House—when calculating
his net worth on the day he left the presidency, we can estimate that
the Truman family’s net worth on that day was about 5.2 times the
net worth of an American family at the 99th percentile of net worth
in 1953.
266
To interpret what these numbers mean in regard to relative
wealth, note that the 99th percentile of family net worth in America
in 2020 was $11.1 million.
267
This suggests that Harry Truman’s net
worth when he left the presidency was equivalent to a net worth of
about $58 million in America today in regard to how wealthy he was
in comparison to other Americans at that time.
268
And of course Truman’s estimate of his net worth in December
of 1953 includes none of the wealth that was generated by the vast
sums—equivalent to many millions of dollars in simple inflation-
adjusted terms and far more in terms of relative income—that
Truman earned in his first few years after leaving the presidency, via
books, articles, lectures, and media appearances.
269
It is certain that,
as rich as Truman was when he left Washington, he was a good deal
richer when he lobbied Congress successfully to grant him the
benefits he received under the Former Presidents Act.
Indeed, in a document in Bess Truman’s files from January
1959—five months after the passage of the FPA—Truman estimates
his net worth at the time as being $1,046,788.86.
270
This suggests that
at the time that Congress was passing the FPA to ameliorate Harry
Truman’s supposed financial struggles, he had a net worth of
approximately $72 million, in terms of what someone’s net worth
265. See Income Tables, supra note 127.
266. See id.
267. See Average, Median, Top 1%, and All US Net Worth Percentiles,
DQYDJ, https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/
[https://perma.cc/GJ77-B97C] (last visited Mar. 14, 2022).
268. See id.
269. See supra notes 184–243 and accompanying text.
270. See Holographic note, “Bank Balances as of January 30, 1959,” Bess
Truman Financial Records, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, Independence
Missouri (copy on file with the author.)
Campos The Truman Show 49
would have to be today, to be as relatively wealthy now as Truman
was then.
271
CONCLUSION: HARRY TRUMAN AND THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA
On its face, it is difficult to explain why American taxpayers
should, for example, be paying $130,000 every single month just to
rent personal office space for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and
Barack Obama—men who are each worth many tens of millions of
dollars, and, who in the case of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama,
became rich because they were former presidents of the United
States.
272
It is even more difficult to explain why taxpayers should spend
millions of dollars supplementing the post-presidential income of
Donald Trump—a purported billionaire who seems to have run for
president in the first place as a kind of fundraising scheme, and
whose post-presidency promises to be, if past is prologue, a nonstop
attempt to extract money from his millions of loyal followers.
273
All this illustrates is that the Former Presidents Act’s intended
effects on the post-presidential behavior of its beneficiaries is
impossible to find.
274
Indeed, all modern former presidents have
reaped huge financial windfalls from their exploitation of their status
as former chief executives of the United States. And, rather than
providing a contrast to this pattern, Harry Truman’s post-presidency
both pioneered and epitomized it.
271. See id. (explaining this calculation is based on the assumption that the
growth in family net worth between 1959 and 1963 paralleled the growth in family
income over those four years. Thus, Truman’s net worth in 1959 was approximately
six and a half times that of an American family at the 99th percentile of net worth. A
family at that same percentile of net worth in 2020 had a net worth of $11.1 million).
272. See Brady, supra note 4.
273. See Shane Goldmacher & Rachel Shorey, As Trump Raked in Cash
Denying His Loss, Little Went to Actual Legal Fight, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIB. (Feb.
1, 2021), https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/story/2021-02-01/as-trump-raked-
in-cash-denying-his-loss-little-went-to-actual-legal-fight [https://perma.cc/XS4F-
T7DF] (“[W]hile Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the election did not keep him in
power, they did spur millions in contributions from loyal supporters and provided
both him and the party with an enormous infusion of cash.”).
274. The absence of such evidence is particularly significant, given that the
original legislative purpose of the Former Presidents Act was, in the words of one of
its congressional supporters, to ensure that former presidents would not have “to
write and lecture to gain a livelihood in their final days.” See 85 CONG. REC. 18942
(1958).
50 Michigan State Law Review
It is true that Truman struggled financially for much of his life,
and that even in his fifties his large Senate salary was stretched by
the needs and demands of various impecunious relatives.
275
But
Truman made genuinely enormous sums of money in his nearly eight
years in the White House and even larger sums in the years
immediately afterward, all as a result of his presidential fame. In a
precise inversion of the meaning ascribed to it by the standard
historical narrative, Truman’s financial biography illustrates exactly
why the Former Presidents Act has always been a bad law that has
never had any reasonable justification in public policy.
President of the United States is neither a pensionable career
path nor a title of quasi-nobility. There is no reason why American
taxpayers should be forced to spend millions of dollars per year
supplementing the incomes of men who were either already rich
when they became president or became rich as a result of their public
service.
That Harry Truman’s purported post-presidential financial
struggles have turned out to be totally imaginary merely emphasizes
why the FPA never had any justification to begin with. Rather than
address the FPA with reformist tweaking, Congress should rescind
the law altogether. Especially as Donald Trump’s post-presidency
threatens to make an especially spectacular mockery of the statute’s
original purpose.
276
275. Truman’s mother and siblings struggled financially for many years,
including after Truman became a senator. Truman at times used his government
position to try to help them, especially his sister Mary Jane, who became the
caretaker of Truman’s mother in her old age: “Mary Jane and Mamma also had to be
taken care of. In January 1944, Truman appointed Mary Jane an ‘additional clerk,
based in the Kansas City area at $1,800.” See HAMBY, supra note 16, at 262.
276. Note that the FPA contains no statutory limits on how much money a
former president can charge the government annually for office space (former
presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama are each charging the government more than
$500,000 per year for this emolument), nor on the identity of the landlord that will
be paid for providing this service. Any such limits enforced over the six decades
since the enactment of the law have been purely customary. See Former Presidents
Act, 3 U.S.C. § 102. In other words, the only thing that might keep Donald Trump
from renting office space from, for example, the Trump Organization for some
exorbitant sum is the possibility that Congress might rebel against such a flagrant—
but legal—abuse of the statute’s original purpose. The question of whether Congress
could enact legislation to specifically revoke Trump’s benefits under the FPA,
without also revoking those benefits for other former presidents, raises difficult
constitutional issues, specifically in regard to whether such legislation would
constitute an unconstitutional bill of attainder. See also Mears, supra note 11, at 188
(footnotes omitted) (“Any special legislation enacted to revoke or reduce a former
President’s retirement benefits could be struck down as a bill of attainder, as an ex
Campos The Truman Show 51
Harry Truman’s post-presidential career became the basis for a
wholly fictitious historical narrative about how, despite leaving the
White House nearly penniless, his principled refusal to cash in on his
presidential fame still serves as an object moral lesson to today’s less
scrupulous post-presidential entrepreneurs. It is a story, in other
words, that illustrates what might be called the politics of
nostalgia.
277
For no doubt complex reasons, Truman became, shortly after
his death in 1972, one of the subjects of a more general wave of
cultural nostalgia that swept over America during the Watergate
era.
278
The Truman nostalgia boom featured, among other things, the
publication of Merle Miller’s 1974 oral biography Plain Speaking,
the 1975 hit song “Harry Truman,” by the rock group Chicago, and
later that year the biographical play and subsequent film, Give ‘em
Hell, Harry! starring James Whitmore.
279
Even as the Watergate scandal and its aftermath dominated the
headlines, Americans seemed to long for an idealized version of this
plain-spoken son of the Midwestern soil, who might have used some
curse words from time to time, but at least could be counted on to
keep his hand out of the public till. These desires are no doubt part of
the ultimate explanation for the remarkable fact that Truman’s
gigantic presidential salary and his stupendous book—both matters
of public concern—did not interfere with the creation of a narrative,
post facto law, or as a deprivation of due process and equal protection rights.”).
Compare United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303, 315 (1946) (holding “Section 304
falls precisely within the category of Congressional actions which the Constitution
barred by providing that ‘No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be
passed’”), with Nixon v. Adm’r of Gen. Servs., 433 U.S 425, 475 (1977) (holding
that “the Act [at issue] imposes no punishment traditionally judged to be prohibited
by the Bill of Attainder Clause”).
277. It should be unnecessary to note that this Article makes no pretense to
evaluating Harry Truman’s political career as a whole, or even for that matter his
overall personal character. Why Truman, who by all indications lived in, financially
speaking, a fairly modest manner after leaving the White House felt himself
impelled to engage in the discreditable behavior revealed here is a question beyond
the scope of this study. For a more general analysis of the politics of nostalgia, see
PAUL CAMPOS, A FAN’S LIFE (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2022).
278. On the nostalgia boom of the mid-1970s, see RICK PERLSTEIN, THE
INVISIBLE BRIDGE 166–67 (2014).
279. See MERLE MILLER, PLAIN SPEAKING: AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY OF HARRY
S. TRUMAN 15 (Berkley Publ’g Co. 1974); The Hot 100, BILLBOARD,
https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100/1975-04-05/ [https://perma.cc/AZS3-
58J7] (last visited Feb. 1, 2022) (noting that “Harry Truman” reached a peak chart
position of number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, on April 5, 1975); GIVE
‘EM HELL, HARRY! (Permut Presentations Sept. 18, 1975).
52 Michigan State Law Review
always incredible on its face, that Truman left the White House with
little or no money, and then, despite his difficult financial
circumstances, chose not to cash in on his presidential fame.
280
Another part of the explanation for that fact is surely
confirmation bias. Truman’s biographers, and in particular David
McCullough, have all evidently operated from the axiom that Harry
Truman was not the sort of man who would tell outrageous lies about
his financial status for a purpose as petty as extracting wholly
unneeded pension benefits from Congress.
281
Yet if Truman was a
rich man when he left the White House, and if he made a further
fortune immediately after leaving office by exploiting his fame, then
his statements to Congress and to the American public about his
financial situation would have been dishonorable mendacities. And
everyone knew Truman was an honorable man.
Therefore, Truman’s various statements along these lines,
absurd as they might seem on their face to anyone not working from
an irrebuttable presumption that he was telling the truth, were taken
to constitute sufficient proof that Truman’s claims that he would be
on welfare if he had not inherited the family farm were actually
true.
282
Yet another factor at play in this story is the striking inability of
even many highly educated and otherwise perceptive critics to adjust
their interpretations to take into account properly the economic
significance of nominal dollar figures. Such critics know in the
abstract, of course, that $100,000 was a good deal more money
seventy years ago than it is today.
283
Nevertheless, just how much
more money it really was is something that they—and we—find very
difficult to actually appreciate unless we force ourselves to grapple
with the relevant figures in a more concrete way.
284
For example, when we learn that Harry Truman was paid
$25,000 in 1957 to be interviewed on national television—an
280. See Harry Truman’s Obsolete Integrity, N.Y. TIMES (Mar. 2, 2007),
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/opinion/02iht-edjacoby.4775315.html
[https://perma.cc/ADA9-6PN9].
281. See Campos, supra note 133.
282. See id.
283. See MCCULLOUGH, supra note 13, at 928.
284. For example, consider David McCullough’s evaluation of Truman’s
financial situation when he left the White House, with the relevant dollar figure
expressed in 2021 dollars rather than, as in McCullough’s text, nominal dollars:
“[W]hile he and Bess had managed to put aside part of his [$1.1 million per year]
salary as President during his second term, primarily in government bonds, it was in
all probability a modest amount.” See id.
Campos The Truman Show 53
occasion that he employed to complain about his financial
struggles—we may think that this sounds like a good deal of
money.
285
Still, the matter is put in quite a different light if we
consider that this sum was five times greater than the typical
American family’s entire yearly income at the time.
286
In this regard, a failure to adjust for inflation is not even our
most significant intellectual failure; rather, our bigger mistake is in
failing to appreciate the vast increase in the overall wealth of
America since the days of Harry Truman’s presidency and the years
immediately following.
287
After all, above the level of brute survival,
the social meaning of wealth is always profoundly relative:
Assuming neither of us is starving, whether you or I are rich is really
a question of how much wealth we have relative to each other and to
the rest of our community.
288
Harry Truman was rich not just because he had an inflation-
adjusted net worth of around $6.5 million when he left the White
House and of about $9.5 million five and one half years later when
Congress granted him a generous package of benefits, but even more
so because these sums, as enormous as they are, were actually many
times bigger in relative social terms in the 1950s.
289
285. See Michael Hiltzik, Trump Will Get Millions in Post-Presidential
Benefits, Thanks to Harry Truman’s Lies, L.A. TIMES (Aug. 5, 2021, 1:38 PM),
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-08-05/trump-post-presidential-
benefits [https://perma.cc/6U8H-WDYE].
286. See U.S. DEP’T OF COM., CURRENT POPULATION REPORTS: CONSUMER
INCOME REP. P60-29 (1958).
287. See Robert J. Shiller, The Economy Grew Even Faster in Truman’s
Presidency. So What?, N.Y. TIMES (Aug. 10, 2018),
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/business/the-economy-grew-even-faster-in-
trumans-presidency-so-what.html [https://perma.cc/U936-35TE].
288. See John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our
Grandchildren (1930), in ESSAYS IN PERSUASION 365 (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co. 1963) (“Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable.
But they fall into two classes – those needs which are absolute in the sense that we
feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those
which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us
above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which
satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general
level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs – a point
may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us are aware of, when
these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to
non-economic purposes.”).
289. Recall that, in terms of relative wealth, a person would have needed a
net worth of approximately $58 million in 1953 and $72 million in 1959 to be as
54 Michigan State Law Review
In the end, it may be that the remarkably durable fiction that
Harry Truman left the White House with very little money, and yet
despite his financial struggles still refused to monetize his post-
presidency, is a product of, more than any other single factor, a
widespread cultural longing for a simpler and more innocent past.
But the past is never simple or innocent.
rich as Truman was relative to other Americans at the time. See Campos, supra note
133.
