"There is nothing
more pathetic in life than a former president." These words, and
variations of them, authored by former
President John Quincy Adams show up in just about every
major article on the subject. But if you pay any
attention to the news, you'll see that's
probably not the case. Today, we're exploring
what life is really like for an ex-president. Before we get started, we have
an executive order for you to subscribe to the
channel and let us know who your favorite president is. Ladies and gentlemen,
the ex-Presidents of the United States. Even if you were
young and vigorous before your
presidency, by now, you feel like you're in danger of
collapsing into a pile of dust. The stress that transforms a
president is a force of nature. Lucky for you,
there's really no need to recover from it to survive. Thanks to the 1958
Former Presidents Act, the US pays ex-presidents
a lifetime pension. In 1958, it was
$25,000 a year, which works out to about $218,000
a year in 2019 money. Today, they actually
get a little less. The pension of an ex-president
with a clean discharge from office is based on the
salary of an active cabinet member-- $210,700. A healthy sum, especially
compared with what the widow of an ex-president gets-- a paltry $20,000. Now, check this out. Those who make, let's
say, a less glorious exit from office-- tricky Dick Nixon, for example-- still have a shot at that fat
pension, but only if they quit before they could be
impeached for the crimes. Provided they do
resign in time, they'll still get $210,700 every
year until they die, which won't be for some time if
they put their free health care and paid travel to good use. It doesn't matter what they did
or didn't do to lose their job, because their new
job is to save face, and Uncle Sam is happy to
let taxpayers foot the bill. Bless his tiny little beard. It's not all endless money and
rainbow golf at Camp David. Being president
means you never ever, ever get to be alone
ever, ever again, not even when you're
done being president. 2012 saw the passage
of a law reversing 1994's 10-year limit on
Secret Service protection for former presidents. As of 2013, the
Secret Service is tasked with watching
over every ex-president until death do them part. As with the pension,
this protection does not extend to the family. Children are inexplicably
left on their own after they hit 16 and begin
driving places on their own for the first time in
their lives, out in public, unescorted, bearing the
surname of someone who still merits an armed guard at 90. First ladies are punished
with the removal of all rights to protection should they
divorce and remarriage, regardless of how much the
general public hates them or how their presidential
partner treated them. This is the very
definition of a catch-22. Shall we count the number
of presidential divorcees? No? Bad luck, Melania. You're stuck with him. Although there is that
$20,000 to look forward to. What with the pension,
the elite security detail, and more things that seem
just a little unfair in this economy, or any other,
a library of your own is a luxury this country
can ill-afford, right? Actually, this one makes
more sense than the rest, but it requires a
bit of background. FDR, known for applying
a veritable alphabet soup to reforms to
American law books, arranged for a
library-slash-museum to archive has many, many, many records. We at Weird History have
benefited quite a lot from that tradition. Thanks, Frank. Public officials used to dump
their old correspondences and junk into boxes and
shove them into attics, like good, sane people. This deviation in the normalcy
on the part of politicians is a real heartbreaker
for historians. George Washington's
nephew reported that his uncle's papers
were very extensively mutilated by rats and
otherwise injured by damp. The world may never know
what weird history was lost. President Truman
spent a great deal of time maintaining his library
after departing the Oval Office, which was
a very decent thing to do considering how much time
and effort those places demand. There was a very good incentive
on the part of the president to keep his notes in good
order, as we'll see next. Let's face it. It takes a very
special kind of person to not only envision
him or herself as commander-in-chief of a nation
over 300 million strong, decide to go through with
it, campaign for office, win that office, and
stay in that office for four to eight years without
getting into serious trouble. Most of us are not that person. A lot of us would
like to know what it's like to be that person. Decision Points,
George W. Bush's book, sold 1.5 million copies
and earned him $7 million. Bill Clinton got a $15
million dollar advance for his book, My Life,
which sold over 2 and 1/4 million copies and won a
Grammy in its audio book form, narrated by Clinton himself. By 2017, the Obamas had
already received $65 million in advances for their books. Jimmy Carter, in true
Jimmy Carter fashion, wrote not one or
two but 14 books. He was flat broke when he
got out of office, according to historian James Thurber. If you've been all judgey
about ex-presidents and their ranches, hold
your horses for a minute. You'd probably run off
to live like a cowboy, too, if the government
took your car keys. When your term is
up, your driving days are done, unless you have, say,
a big ranch out in the country where you can make
some rooster tails and donuts in the backyard
until your heart gives out. If you're wondering how
ex-presys get around off private property,
look no further than the guys in the
happy, snappy black suits. That's right. The Secret Service
doesn't just hang around waiting for bad guys. They also become your
private, armed chauffeurs for the rest of your life. Too bad no one told
poor old Joe Biden. "That there are a lot of
reasons to run for president," he said, in typical
Biden fashion, "but there's one
overwhelming reason not to run for president. I like to get that
Corvette Z06 from zero to 60 in 3.4 seconds." Oh, Joe. Someone has to tell him. Anyway, we're really
very OK with this rule. Keep those presidents, vice
or otherwise, off our streets. At 77, the current model
is already too doddy to drive as it is. This one's a no-brainer. Obviously, a guy
who's spent the better part of the last decade
getting death threats is not going to check his own
mail, especially when he's no longer sitting on four
floors of the White House, which brings us back to
the men in black. They drive. They sort mail. They do everything that
for an average Joe, as opposed to Biden,
Joe, is routine. But never confuse routine
for boring in this field. The Secret Service's
intercepted pipe bombs meant for the Clintons, the
Obamas, and other big figures in recent years at the
off-site facilities used to sort the
ex-presidential mail. A statement from
the Secret Service made October 24, 2018
concerning the mail-- "The packages were immediately
identified during routine mail screening procedures as
potential explosive devices and were appropriately
handled as such. Both packages were
intercepted prior to being delivered to
their intended location." In the olden days
before 1958, when a man could do a day's
work for a day's pay, presidents left the
White House with whatever they had when they moved in. No fat pension, no guaranteed
book advance deals, just a suit and the best resume
America can give. And some of them used it. We mentioned before that Harry
Truman put in a lot of hours at his own library in
Independence, Missouri. What we didn't tell you was
that he had an office there where he worked for 19 years. He'd had enough excitement
for one lifetime. It's not a shocker
that he'd spend the rest of his life
working in a library. Grover Cleveland, not having
bombed even one country during his non-consecutive
presidential terms, decided to play chicken
with the stock market. George Washington turned
down an opportunity to be dictator for life and
set himself up in style, opening a whiskey
distillery at Mount Vernon. Maybe that's how his
papers got all soggy. Life is strange for
an ex-president. After the most incredible
power trip available is over, you have to go and
live in a bubble for the rest of your
days, surrounded by people who won't let you
drive, open your own mail, go anywhere on your own, or say
whatever you want on Twitter. Not a lot of people
can relate to that. Only other
ex-presidents, really. So it comes as no surprise that
many former commander-in-chiefs and their former first families
are friendly with one another, even if they come from
different parties. George W. Bush, for
example, referred to Bill Clinton as his brother
from another mother in 2017. On top of the pension, the
health care, bodyguards, and paid official travel, the
government reserves an annual $150,000 budget for an
ex-president to spend on their staff for
the first 30 months-- that's 2 and 1/2 years-- of
their retirement, after which they kick in $96,000 a year
because apparently they need that, too. If that wasn't excessive
enough, every office space is comped courtesy
of us, the taxpayers. Judging by the current
president's preferences and predilections,
we can reasonably expect the furnishings and
staff of his future office to be a solid gold fountain
filled with blondes. Former presidents
can, and often do, choose to have a state funeral. All well and good. It's as nice a funeral
as anyone could ask for-- five whole days of
aircraft flyovers, gun fire salutes, and parades,
and of course, flags remain lowered
across the country, even if we didn't like you. It's a lot to plan
for, and the presys spend an extraordinary amount
of time doing the planning. For Richard Nixon, it was a
chance to die with dignity. He chose to opt out and be
buried quietly in his library, as befits a disgraced
ex-president who continued to draw a tax-funded
paycheck until his death. Not bad, Dick, not bad. Considering how much of
their job is talking, it seems a little
incredible that a present can do the bulk of
the speechmaking after the job is done. But it's true. Many speeches given by those who
have held that high office are given outside that office. Take Bill Clinton. He earned a whopping
$104.9 million from 542 speeches between
January 2001 and January 2013. "I've never had any money until
I got out of the White House," he told Wolf Blitzer in 2010,
"but I've done reasonably well since then." The Former Presidents
Act is at it again. We've touched on
the travel budget, and now we'll tell you
just how things stand. Buckle up. Each and every ex-president is
entitled to up to $1 million in security and travel
expenses each daggone year, with an additional half
mil for his spouse. The only catch is
barely even a catch. They must be traveling as
officials of the United States government, and this stipulation
came 10 years after the FPA was put into effect. You've ruled a first-world
country for the last four to eight years of your life. And you come to the
question, what next? Where do you go from the top? And if you're unpopular,
is there a chance to make people like you again? Philanthropy, the Nobel Prize. That's the golden
ticket to immortality, the eternal love of the
people, and a better tomorrow. Or it backfires horribly and
turns into just more politics and a lot of comedy
sketches, as Al Gore might be able to tell you. Jimmy Carter founded
The Carter Center to protect election integrity
in democratic nations, mediate diplomatic
disputes, fight disease, and other awesome things. Or this-- he justifiably
won the 2002 Nobel Prize. Michael Duffy, co-author
of The Presidents Club, said of Carter's
philanthropic work, "He's made it difficult for
absolutely everyone who's come after him because
who can keep up?" Who, indeed. Who's even trying,
except Michelle Obama? If there's one thing
we've learned today, it's that an ex-president's
life follows him. After the choices he made, it's
perhaps not surprising that when Harry Truman
left the White House, he went straight to
his mother-in-law's. And dear, sweet,
gentle Jimmy Carter got a sensible two-bedroom
house in Georgia. Ronald Reagan, on
the other hand, returned to his
7,000-square-foot Bel Air mansion. The Obamas and Clintons settled
down in some lavish lodgings, as well. Health care is a
bit more confusing. Jimmy Carter gets
his health benefits from Emery College, where
he was once a teacher, because he wasn't a
government employee for the minimum of
five years requisite to gain health care benefits. But the bloated budget of the
FPA allows for health care. What gives? It's health care, so of
course it's got to be archaic. All former presidents
and their spouses, widows, and children under
18 are entitled to treatment in military hospitals
free of charge. They can also enroll in
private health insurance plans at their own expense,
if they want more than the occasional Motrin
and they can afford it. Ex-presidents are
getting wealthier, between the pension,
the speeches, the books, and the little odds and ends we
didn't have time to deal with. And the only way to live and
struggle like regular folk is to choose to do so. Jimmy certainly
did, and we hope he gets a little more love
for it because it was one heck of a choice to make. So what do you think
of an ex-president's post-presidential life? Let us know in our comments
below, and while you're at it, check out some of these other
videos from our Weird History.
