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By Root 310 0

November 1912, Andrew Carnegie offered to pay future ex-presidents twenty-five thousand dollars a year so they could “spend their latter days free from pecuniary cares in devoting the intimate knowledge they have gained of public affairs to the good of the country.” By limiting the pensions to “future” ex-presidents, Carnegie pointedly snubbed his old trust-busting nemesis Teddy Roosevelt, the only living ex at the time. Roosevelt was too rich to care. “In any event,” he said upon learning of Carnegie’s offer, “[my] interest isn’t in pensions for ex-Presidents, but in pensions for the small man who doesn’t have a chance to save, and who, when he becomes superannuated, faces the direst poverty.” The sole immediate beneficiary of Carnegie’s offer would have been his good friend William Howard Taft, who had recently lost his bid for a second term (largely because Roosevelt had run as a third-party candidate). Taft had hinted at his upcoming need in a speech shortly after the election. “I consider that the President of the United States is well paid,” he said, “… unless it is the policy of Congress to enable him in his four years to save enough money to live in adequate dignity and comfort thereafter….”

Carnegie’s proposal was widely condemned as “undemocratic.” “The idea of ex-Presidents being dependent on private bounty is distasteful to many of Mr. Taft’s associates and friends,” the New York Times reported. Taft was forced to disavow the offer, and Carnegie withdrew it. (Taft, as it happened, found a good post-presidential job in 1921, when Warren Harding appointed him chief justice.)

Members of Congress, meanwhile, exhibited an aversion to presidential pensions that bordered on hostility. (They were more generous with presidential widows. At least twelve had been allocated pensions, usually around five thousand dollars a year. They were also more generous with themselves. A congressional pension plan was begun in 1946—too late for Harry, though.)

In 1912, shortly after Carnegie made his pension offer, Albert S. Burleson, a Democratic congressman from Texas, proposed that ex-presidents be made permanent, nonvoting members of the House of Representatives at an annual salary of $17,500. The proposal went nowhere.

In 1948 none other than Senator Robert Taft, son of William, proposed a “substantial” pension—perhaps twenty-five thousand dollars a year—which would allow former presidents “to live in a dignified manner.” He also said exes should be made nonvoting members of the Senate. But, again, Congress did nothing.

In an editorial published shortly before Truman left office, the New York Times spoke out in favor of pensions for ex-presidents. “A president nowadays is likely to be a worn-out man when he lays down his office,” the paper wrote. “He shouldn’t have to embark on making a living even in a comfortable and dignified way.”

To Harry Truman, a pension was a matter of principle. Members of Congress got pensions. So did federal judges, and generals and admirals. Yet he got nothing—and he had been commander in chief for nearly eight years! “If you were a rich man before becoming President you went home to your estates,” he wrote in September 1953, “[and] if your means were modest you did the best you could to earn a living…. You were just a private citizen. Ideally, this fits in with our notions of the equality of man. Practically, though, it presents a few problems.”

Even if he didn’t get a pension, Truman argued, the government should at least help him pay his expenses. Truman estimated the cost of maintaining his office in Kansas City at more than thirty-six hundred dollars a month. The government, he believed, should pick up 70 percent of that cost, the remainder being “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.”

Still, Congress wouldn’t budge.

In contrast to the bitter denunciations he had sometimes suffered in the editorial pages during his presidency, the newspaper coverage of Truman’s return to Washington was mostly fawning.