Toward the end of his presidency, George W. Bush told Robert Draper, reporting for a book called Dead Certain, that he intended after vacating the Oval Office to “replenish the ol’ coffers.” He said he could make “ridiculous” money on the lecture circuit.
“I don’t know what my dad gets, but it’s more than 50, 75” thousand dollars a speech, he said.
As critics over the years have chided Bill Clinton and also his wife for the industriousness with which they have pursued opportunities to get paid a lot of money in this manner, Bush, too, has been doing exactly what he said he would be doing.
Since 2009, POLITICO has found, Bush has given at least 200 paid speeches and probably many more, typically pocketing $100,000 to $175,000 per appearance. The part-time work, which rarely requires more than an hour on stage, has earned him tens of millions of dollars.
Relative to the Clintons, though, he’s attracted considerably less attention, almost always doing his paid public speaking in private, in convention centers and hotel ballrooms, resorts and casinos, from Canada to Asia, from New York to Miami, from all over Texas to Las Vegas a bunch, playing his part in what has become a lucrative staple of the modern post-presidency.
He has talked to the National Grocers Association and the National Association for Home Care and Hospice and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores. He’s talked to global wealth management firms and multinational energy companies. He has talked to motivational seminars and boat builders and something called the Work Truck Show. He has talked to the chambers of commerce in San Diego and Wichita.
“Evil is real,” he said at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas.
“Bowling is fun,” he said at a get-together for the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America in Orlando.
“History will ultimately judge whether I made the right decisions or not,” he said at a gathering put on by the Advertising Specialty Institute in Dallas.
He listed for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in a talk at Tulsa’s Hyatt hotel the three best things his father ever gave him — “being raised in West Texas, no money and unconditional love” — and then got back into a motorcade of a couple SUVs and cop cars and flew home on a private plane.
“We paid his regular fee,” Lynne Sipiora told POLITICO. She’s the executive director of the Samaritan Inn, a homeless shelter in McKinney, Texas. “Which is $100,000.”
The Washington Speakers Bureau, which represents Bush (and his wife, and his sister, and his daughter), says only that his fees “vary.” From what to what? Bureau co-founder Harry Rhoads Jr. didn’t return three messages left at his office. For a talk to the Western Riverside Council of Governments’ General Assembly, Bush got $175,000, a sum that was cobbled together by private donors but was nonetheless public because the WRCOG is a consortium of public organizations. For a series of talks done under the tag “Revitalizing America,” Bush and Clinton appeared together, and Clinton got $225,000. For a talk this spring in Las Vegas to the Republican Jewish Coalition, one report put Bush’s fee at $250,000, although the RJC refused to confirm that. Bush’s staff at his office in Dallas and at his foundation and his library at Southern Methodist University say he gets paid nothing when he’s representing the library or the foundation and that none of what he makes when he does get paid goes anywhere other than his own bank account. They say they don’t comment on what that number might be.
Most of the folks on the hook are similarly mum.
“I signed a confidentiality agreement,” said Frances Atchison, the co-chair of the Distinguished Lecturer Series in Vero Beach, Florida.We’re precluded by contract from sharing any of the particulars,” said Carol Walden, a spokesperson for FARE, a conference about the business of food at which Bush spoke.
Pat Fitzpatrick, the head of Plumstead Christian School in Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania, said he couldn’t discuss money — but he did say that Bush’s going rate went up “substantially” during the time the school was talking to him about coming and that he still “honored the older price tag with us.” That was three years ago.
There were other rules as well in the contract, said Dawn Shurmaitis, from the Advertising Specialty Institute: “We were not allowed to record it, so there is no recording, video or audio.”
Bush learned this from his father, who learned it from Ronald Reagan, whose Hollywood success was a natural antecedent. And if turning money into power into money is the game, Bill Clinton is the greatest of all time. But the first president who made no longer being president into a fat gig was Gerald Ford. He went out on the “mashed potato circuit,” according to Mark K. Updegrove, who wrote Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, at first getting $10,000 per talk, then $20,000, then $40,000. He got guff. He didn’t care. “I’m a private citizen now; it’s nobody’s business,” he told the New York Times. An aide of his explained that Ford always had been “a strong devotee of the free enterprise system.”
Harry Truman balked at the prospect of a post-presidential buck-rake.
“I have a very strong feeling about any man, who has the honor of being an occupant of the White House in the greatest job in the history of the world, who would exploit that situation in any way, shape or form,” he once wrote.He even used fountain pens he paid for himself lest anybody think he was endorsing a particular brand.
Truman died the day after Christmas in 1972, not quite 17 years before Reagan, out of office for a mere nine or so months, took $2 million to give a few talks in Japan.
“The commodification of the post-presidency,” said Gleaves Whitney, the director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Michigan’s Grand Valley State university.
“The post-presidential industrial complex at work,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
George H.W. Bush was asked about the paid speaking circuit in 1989. “Everybody’s got to make a living,” he said.
Bill Clinton was asked about it last month. “I gotta pay the bills,” he said.
Potential conflicts of interest with the speeches and who’s paying for them exist for past presidents Bush(es) and Clinton in a way they didn’t and don’t for their fellow “formers.” They have relatives running or about to finally officially run for the same office. The families’ situations aren’t quite commensurate, though, because of Bill Clinton doing it at the same time his wife was Secretary of State and because of Hillary Clinton making paid speeches as well when she wasn’t a “former” but was a possible “future.” It’s one reason the Clintons more than the Bushes have disclosed their speaking schedules and compensation. Bush seems not to make as many foreign trips, either, preferring Texas and Mandalay Bay and the Golden Nugget in Vegas to the rest of the world.
Monday, June 8, 2015
