Truman played quite the long con then
The life of a former president wasn’t always cushy. Until 1959, retiring chief executives got precisely nothing in the way of retirement benefits: no Secret Service protection, no administrative support, and certainly no money.
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Consider, for instance, the straitened circumstances of Harry Truman after he left office. In his last full year as president, Truman had earned $100,539.06, according to his 1952 tax return. (This return, along with others from 1935 to 1972, was recently released by the Truman Presidential Library.) The following year, former President Truman reported just $34,176.70 in income. In 1954 he earned just $13,564.74.
These were lean years for Harry and his wife, Bess. Indeed, the former president was living principally on his military pension; while President Truman got nothing from the taxpayers, Col. Truman was entitled to a monthly pension of $112.56, thanks to his service during World War I and subsequent years in the Army Reserve.
It was something, but certainly not much. Of course, Truman could have cashed in on his Oval Office experience. “If President Truman is unemployed after he leaves the White House, it won’t be for lack of job offers,” observed the
Los Angeles Times in November 1952. Rumors swirled that numerous companies had offered to pay him more than $100,000 to sit on corporate boards, serve in no-show, symbolic positions, or otherwise lend his name to various enterprises.
But Truman considered such options unseemly. “I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable,” he later wrote, “that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency.”
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