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The total amount of money the federal government spends on its ex-presidents has risen from $160,000 in 1959 to an estimated $2.5 million in 2008. And that’s not counting Secret Service protection, which, in 2000, when four formers were living, cost nearly twenty-six million dollars altogether.

Harry thought presidents deserved pensions, but probably not that much. Given the earning power of the modern ex-president, it’s doubtful such lucrative pensions are even necessary anymore. Yet, just as it was loath to grant the pensions in the first place, Congress is now loath to take them away. In 1994 President Clinton signed a bill that would have ended an ex-president’s office allowance in 2003 or five years after leaving office, whichever was later. But the legislation was quietly repealed three years later, reportedly at the urging of the ex-presidents. The only perk the exes have ever lost is one they didn’t want. For several years in the 1980s, the government rented a townhouse in Washington exclusively for their use when they visited the capital. In 1988 the funding was cut because the property was almost never used.

When he was in office, America’s newest ex-president was often fond of comparing himself to Harry Truman. In some ways the comparison is apt. Both George W. Bush and Harry Truman were mocked by critics as inarticulate and bumbling. Both presided over unpopular wars. (Of course, Truman was repelling an invasion, while Bush launched one.) As a result of those wars (and other factors), Bush and Truman both saw their approval ratings plummet. (In 2008, Bush’s sank to 22 percent, matching Harry’s low in 1952.)

In a commencement address at West Point in 2006, Bush invoked Harry’s name seventeen times. He claimed his administration was “building on the legacy of Harry Truman.” And he equated the cold war with what he called “today’s war.” “Like the cold war,” Bush said, “we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions, and pursues totalitarian aims.”

The younger Bush believes history will vindicate him just as it has, in the eyes of many historians, vindicated Harry.

Some historians are skeptical. “The only connection between Harry Truman and George Bush is that they left office with low opinion numbers,” Douglas Brinkley of Rice University told the Washington Post. “That’s a very thin reed.”

However, as ex-presidents, Bush and Truman will definitely have at least one thing in common. Under legislation passed in 1995, all ex-presidents after Bill Clinton will receive Secret Service protection for only ten years after leaving office. (They can keep the rest of their generous pension packages.)

So, on January 20, 2019, George W. Bush will become the first ex-president since Harry Truman with no legal right to taxpayer-funded protection.

But I doubt we’ll see him and Laura driving back to Washington by themselves anytime soon.

Afterword

After this book came out in the spring of 2009, I was contacted by several people who claimed to know the whereabouts of Harry’s 1953 Chrysler New Yorker, the car in which he and Bess undertook their excellent adventure. Most of the tips were spurious, but one was tantalizing. At a book signing in Kansas City, I was approached by the Creasons, four siblings who’d read about the book in the Kansas City Star. The Creasons insisted that their father had bought Harry’s Chrysler back in the 1970s and that the car was stored in a barn on their family’s farm in northeastern Kansas. They showed me an old Polaroid of the car, which, I had to admit, looked a lot like Harry’s.

I was intrigued, but more than a year would pass before I could fully investigate their claim. In early November 2010, I flew to Kansas City, rented a car, and drove out to the Creasons’ farm. It was an unseasonably warm day, and Carey Creason, one of the siblings who’d approached me at the book signing, was waiting for me outside her house. With her was her mother, Gladys Creason, as well as a lazy brown dog named Tanner, who, Gladys