Citizen-in-Chief

Leonard Benardo, Jennifer Weiss

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061974724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"[A] remarkably revealing history.…This well-researched, opinionated account does a fine job of filling a surprisingly empty historical niche."
— Publishers Weekly

Citizen-in-Chief, The Second Lives of the American Presidents, is a smartly researched, surprising, often witty, and always revealing look at former presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush. Authors Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss offer readers entertaining true stories of the radical turns, provocative rehabilitations, and tragic trajectories of presidential lives after the White House. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calls Citizen-in-Chief, "an engrossing book, Benardo and Weiss tell a fascinating tale, " and he properly states that where our nation's leaders went after leading is often "more interesting than the presidency itself."

1

GETTING SOLVENT

The Financial Journey of Past Presidents

It is a national disgrace that our Presidents…should be cast adrift, and perhaps be compelled to keep a corner grocery for subsistence…. We elect a man to the Presidency, expect him to be honest, to give up a lucrative profession, perhaps, and after we [are] done with him we let him go into seclusion and perhaps poverty.

Millard Fillmore

I never had a nickel to my name until I got out of the White House, and now I’m a millionaire, the most favored person for the Washington Republicans. I get a tax cut every year, no matter what our needs are.

Bill Clinton

[Gerald Ford] has become the presidential equivalent of Joe Louis, who ended his days as a greeter for a Las Vegas hotel.

Richard Cohen, The Washington Post

RETURNING BY TRAIN ON HIS OWN DIME AND MOVING INTO HIS mother-in-law’s house, Harry Truman found his January 1953 exit from the White House a sobering experience. With no Air Force One to guarantee a soft landing, no million-dollar transition fund to help him segue into private life, no plush office awaiting administrative staff, the former president confronted a subdued and humbling homecoming.

Nearly half a century later, Bill Clinton’s departure could not have been more different. Forsaking Little Rock and removing to New York, Clinton left office blessed with a rich array of perks and a wide-open opportunity to capitalize on his fame. Waiting in the wings were a host of record-setting book deals for him and his wife, unprecedented speaking fees (over $9 million his first year alone), and an eight-thousand-square-foot office space in Harlem that would become headquarters for his worldwide fund-raising operations. The ex-presidency, once a burden to bear, now had the marks of la dolce vita.

Compensation for presidents and ex-presidents alike has long been a contested question. The opening salvo in the debate occurred during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when Benjamin Franklin proposed that a president receive no recompense whatsoever. Franklin wanted to diminish what he believed was human nature’s overriding passion: avarice. Two stays in England before the Revolution convinced him that corruption was inherent to English political life, and helped seed his “Utopian Idea” of a nonsalaried chief magistrate in America. “That we can never find men to serve us in the Executive department, without paying them well for their services,” he declared, was a false premise and one that risked creating institutional birth defects.

Franklin’s advice went unheeded. The convention decided to grant the commander-in-chief a twenty-five-thousand-dollar salary and a rent-free mansion. Yet what appeared to be a generous offer was not generous enough. Although Congress occasionally allocated separate funds, presidents were generally expected to use their personal income to finance the standard accoutrements of White House life—public receptions, banquets, furnishings, and staff. Many ended up saving nothing during their tenure, and most left the office deep in debt. Thomas Jefferson found himself eight thousand dollars in the hole simply from the invoices accrued during his final year in power.

Compounding the pain of debt, once out of power most presidents were loath to engage in the kinds of commercial pursuits that might have restored them financially. Republican ideas of virtue, nurtured and fostered by the Founding Fathers, held that commerce was a stain on the reputation of the presidency and something to be shunned. For decades, most departing presidents felt compelled to uphold an informal obligation to refrain from exploiting the symbolic power of their former position.

Not until after the Civil War were the financial restraints on former presidents finally adjusted. The new capitalist ethic altered the playing field: generating income from commercial transactions was no longer perceived as antithetical to the country’s value system. The ruthless accessories of capitalism’s forward march—graft, acquisitiveness, and inequality—benefited the ex-presidential class. According to historian Henry Graff, “Puritan America was trying to find moral justification for the relatively easier accumulation of money,” and singled out robber barons, corrupt bosses, and rapacious industrialists as villainous exceptions to the rule. For the rest of America, there was no shame in turning a legitimate business profit—and former presidents were hardly blamed for pursuing a decent living after leaving office, whether in law, business, writing, or speaking for pay.

SURPLUSES AND DEFICITS OF THE VIRGINIA FOUNDERS

In the beginning, George Washington acknowledged his kismet. The only one of the early Virginia presidents not to be enveloped by the tyranny of arrears, Washington wrote in 1799 that “Were it not for occasional supplies of money in payment for lands sold within the last four or five years to the amount of upwards of $50,000,” he too would have been mired “in debt and difficulties.”

Washington’s good fortune was a product of diligence and foresight. Having acquired his first piece of land in western Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley before turning twenty, and educated himself on Pennsylvania investments during the French and Indian War, Washington was seasoned in the burgeoning business of land speculation. (He also bore witness to the regrettable circumstances of others who gambled poorly and landed in debtors’ prison—friends like Henry Lee and Robert Morris, the latter who, before meeting such a fate, had been celebrated as the “Financier of the Revolution.”)

Out of office, Washington ventured conservatively and forswore borrowing on assets purchased with loans, pledging “never [to] undertake anything without perceiving a door to the accomplishment in a reasonable amount of time with my own resources.” His prudence paid off. Moreover, Washington was rarely beset by the challenge of managing distant lands; there was never a shortage of people eager to assist the retired general-president in administering his real estate. Reluctant to use his position for financial gain when in power, once out of office he became “shameless, asking government officials and private individuals to assess the value of tracts, see to surveying and improvements, advise him as to the reliability of respective buyers, [and] collect sums due to him.”

Despite his acumen and land-holding successes, especially compared with his Virginia successors, Washington was nevertheless cash poor; he often resorted to selling property to make money, but frequently failed to receive full payment. The refurbishing of Mount Vernon, and the mouths he had to feed there, only aggravated his burden. Washington left half his slaves in Philadelphia when he returned home in 1797, planning to rent out parts of his plantation to freedmen. But the scheme was unsuccessful: by 1798 Washington was forced to secure a bank loan, his lack of ready cash forcing him into what he considered “a ruinous mode of obtaining money.”

Despite its rundown state when Washington left Philadelphia, Mount Vernon did provide the former president with an income. In his first year out of office, Washington established a 2,250-square-foot distillery that produced twelve thousand gallons of corn and rye whiskey and fruit brandy, and became one of the new republic’s largest whiskey distillers. (Early Americans were mighty imbibers, consuming three times as much alcohol as their counterparts today.)

At his death, Washington’s estate was valued at more than half a million dollars, predominantly in land and stock, making him one of the wealthiest persons in the country. His twenty-seven-page will, written on watermarked paper in the summer of 1799, liberated his slaves, with additional provisions for the elderly and young, upon his wife’s passing. As the foremost historian of Washington’s finances concluded: “His greatness, in the last analysis, rests upon the fact that he was by nature and by thorough training the greatest businessman of his time.”

The same could not be said, alas, for Washington’s successors. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson were besieged by debt for almost their entire postpresidential life. Confronted by the prospect of relative poverty, they borrowed money, sold off land, and marketed their personal collections. As relatively large slaveholders, the early presidents were also held back by the intensifying contradictions and economic inviolability of plantation life. The vast landholdings and slave workforce of the plantation model required a level of oversight and investment causing many to become “prisoners of their own plantations.” In this era before agricultural innovation had made more efficient plowing and harvesting possible, gentlemen farmers like James Madison soon concluded that slavery and farming were incompatible. Yet these slaveholding ex-presidents rarely divested themselves of their human property.

Virginia underwent profound economic changes in the period after Washington’s death. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the profitable Virginia lifestyle, driven for two centuries by slaveholding and major cash crops like tobacco, was nearing obsolescence. The emergence of a world economy, the rise of the Kentucky region as a source of competition, and the advent of cotton as a marketable commodity all contributed to the attenuation of the Virginia way of life. The Old Dominion dropped from first to fifth among the states in population, had almost no resident growth (while the country exploded), and developed only the meagerest of industry. With the peculiar institution exacerbating its decay, Virginia was a state in radical decline—and the early Virginia presidents were caught in the transition.

Suspicious of the commercial and market forces that were overturning his agricultural conventions, Thomas Jefferson clung to his belief in the ideal of the yeoman farmer; the rash of competitive commerce streaking through the North left him cold. While he grudgingly accepted new forms of exchange, such as the sale of cash crops abroad, Jefferson viewed the new institutions of capitalism—banks and stock markets—as inherently foreign and dangerous.

Although they accelerated the deterioration of his condition, the changes in Virginia’s economic profile were hardly Jefferson’s only problem. Far more immediate and significant were the debts he had accumulated—from outstanding liabilities on his father-in-law’s estate and pre–Revolutionary War loans from British firms, to his unsustainable affinity for the good life. Though he owned two hundred slaves and more than ten thousand acres of land, Jefferson’s life out of office was economically unforgiving.

Jefferson felt the oppression keenly. “Instead of the unalloyed happiness of retiring unembarrassed and independent, to the enjoyment of my estate,” he said regretfully upon his retirement, “I have to pass such a length of time in a thraldom of mind never before known to me.” Yet he did little to address the problem. Jefferson was constitutionally incapable of curbing his spending, his polymathic interests motivating purchases far and wide. His personal debt was ironic, given his political conviction that any form of governmental debt was an injustice to be avoided at all cost. “I place economy among the first and most important virtues,” he wrote, “and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared.” Still, his righteous disdain for public debt never figured into his private habits.

The constant flow of visitors to Monticello—he sometimes hosted more than a hundred at a time—presented a further burden. And there were more permanent guests: Jefferson’s only surviving child from his marriage to Martha Skelton, Martha (Patsy) Randolph, lived there with her underemployed husband (whose debt exceeded even Jefferson’s) and children. Selling land was Jefferson’s only practical source of income and sole means to pay off his debts—especially since he refused any form of paid labor.

Jefferson was also faced with crippling litigation in his later years. Landholder Edward Livingston filed suit against him in Richmond, Virginia, in the circuit court of Jefferson’s foe and second cousin, John Marshall. The issue concerned a Livingston-owned New Orleans river property that Jefferson had ordered federal marshals to seize during his presidency, arguing that it obstructed access to the Mississippi River. Livingston sued for one hundred thousand dollars, but he really just wanted his land back. While the suit was thrown out, the case was costly to Jefferson in time and resources alike.

By 1814, Jefferson’s economic situation had become so parlous that he was forced to sell to Congress his treasured personal library of over six thousand volumes. The timing was right: the British had torched the Library of Congress not long before, and Congress’s need for books dovetailed with Jefferson’s need for cash. The final price Jefferson received, just under twenty-four thousand dollars, was half its market value. The bulk of the funds went to repay Jefferson’s creditors, including Polish Revolutionary War general Tadeusz Kosciuszko and former private secretary William Short. Though Jefferson took no credit for the Library’s rebirth, “the institution that emerged from the ashes after the war” was essentially his creation, as biographer Dumas Malone noted.

Yet Jefferson’s solvency was eventually overcome by his acquisitiveness. Tormented by the loss of his collection—“I cannot live without books,” he wrote—he soon began building another library, though the costs would surely diminish the remaining proceeds from his sale to Congress. Whatever his financial circumstances, Jefferson retained an abiding faith that all things must pass. “Somehow or other these things find their way out as they come in and so I suppose they will now.” Jefferson saw his economic problems as “an approaching wave in a storm,” but remained determined to “live as long, eat as much, and drink as much, as if the wave had already glided under the ship.”

But even Jefferson could only cling to such optimism for so long. When the young nation entered its first financial crisis, the panic of 1819, Jefferson’s longtime escape hatch—his ability to generate income by selling land—was finally closed off. His status in Virginia allowed him to run up bills that he never paid, but that was small consolation. Although he was bailed out by friends, Jefferson’s situation continued its descent—especially after he invested in a local flour mill that would generate virtually no net value. Worse, he was forced to pay compound interest on an ill-advised loan to his grandson’s father-in-law. Even his monumental labors to establish the University of Virginia were financed with borrowed funds.

The last months of Jefferson’s life may have been his most emotionally taxing. Faced with a hovering debt of a hundred thousand dollars, he was forced to appeal to the Virginia General Assembly for the legal right to sell off Monticello itself (though not the slaves who lived there). A letter to a friend, sitting Virginia legislator Joseph Cabell, presents the evidence in painful detail: “My application to the legislature is for permission to dispose of property…in a way which, bringing a fair price for it, may pay my debts, and leave a living for myself in my old age, and leave something for my family…. To me it is almost a question of life and death.” A public lottery was planned to support the third president, but Jefferson was reluctant to accept the proceeds. Though his friends finally raised enough money to save Jefferson from the humiliation of selling his estate, he nevertheless ended his life bankrupt and debt-ridden.

Till the end, Jefferson clung to the belief that “the earth belongs to the living,” and that every generation must start afresh—with new laws, constitutions, and, yes, a financial slate cleared of all debt. His own debts were not settled until 1831, five years after his death, when Monticello and its slaves were sold to James Turner Barclay for seven thousand dollars after Jefferson’s daughter could not pay her creditors. It was one of history’s astringent ironies: the “apostle of liberty,” as Dumas Malone called him, had his posthumous arrears wiped out by the sale of human life.

After he left office in 1817, James Madison visited frequently with Jefferson at Monticello (just thirty miles away from his own home, Montpelier). The two men endured similarly harsh circumstances in their postpresidential years. Beset by the general hard times in Virginia, Madison was also overwhelmed by the panic of 1819, with its string of foreclosures and bank failures. The years that followed brought further anguish. Though Madison took a forward-looking interest in the science of farming, a combination of lackluster markets, an uncooperative Mother Nature, and a dramatic downturn in agricultural fortunes cast doom on his economic well-being. In ten years, Madison experienced nine crop failures. After a streak of bad luck, including insects, early frost, and torrential rains, in 1825 he was forced to make supplications to Nicholas Biddle and the Bank of the United States for a six-thousand-dollar loan to tide him over—a loan that was never even granted.

By the late 1820s, Madison had disposed of enough land and assets to reclaim, barely, his former lifestyle. Maintaining his hope that slavery would be eliminated by gradual means, he held off selling any slaves until 1834, two years before his death—and came to regret the transaction. Convinced that the races were irreconcilable, Madison helped to found the American Colonization Society, which advocated the deportation of liberated slaves to West Africa. A rigid constitutionalist, he always held that slaves were legal property and that slaveholders should be guaranteed adequate compensation upon their sale.

Madison’s economic condition was weighed down by an additional drain: the painful liability of his wife Dolley’s wastrel son from her previous marriage. Saddled with gambling debts and other trappings of a spendthrift existence, Payne Todd made several visits to debtors’ prison and left his stepfather with forty thousand dollars in unpaid bills. Madison even began to contemplate the loss of his Washington home. “He still talks of the last resort, ‘the house in Washington,’” Dolley bemoaned. Madison did retain one increasingly valuable set of documents: his private notes on the 1787 constitutional debates, which he pledged not to publish while any Founders were still alive. Despite his straitened circumstances, he stuck to the promise, and the notes went unpublished until his death.

Things were hardly better for James Monroe. The last of the original Virginians, Monroe left office seventy-five thousand dollars in the hole. According to one account, he “tottered from the White House…wrinkled, bent, old, and poverty-stricken,” an ignoble end to the life of the fifth president. And unlike Jefferson and Madison—who managed, with great struggle, to hold on to some of their property—Monroe was forced to dispose of his.

Jefferson may have spent his retirement years chasing away creditors, but he remained committed to earthly pleasures, imbibing the wines (a “necessary of life”) and food (“we seldom repent of having eaten too little”) that deepened his economic plight. By contrast, Monroe’s half decade after the presidency was dominated by his pursuit of what he felt was just compensation for the diplomatic missions he had conducted on behalf of the government. Where Jefferson soothed his despair with the pleasures of the sweet life, Monroe was gripped by a single idée fixe: getting repaid.

Monroe had known easier times, especially during his postings to France in 1794–96 and 1803–7. In those days he was c...