Say It Ain’t So Harry!

I have always been a great admirer of Harry Truman. That admiration just took a major hit. He was a hypocrite just like the rest. 

From The American Catholic

By Donald R. McClarey

 

This is depressing:

But Campos brings the receipts. With the cooperation of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, he spent months examining the 33rd president’s financial records, many of which became available only with the 2011 release of Bess Truman’s personal papers.

“Harry Truman was a very rich man on the day he left the White House,” writes Campos, “and he became a good deal richer in the five and a half years between that day and the passage of the FPA.”

The evidence for those jolting assertions comes from none other than Truman himself. In a will drafted in his own hand and kept with Bess Truman’s papers, Truman estimated that his net worth at the end of his presidency was $650,000 — a sum comprising $250,000 in savings bonds, $150,000 in cash, and land worth an estimated $250,000. Adjusted for inflation, $650,000 in 1953 is the equivalent of $6.6 million in 2021.

Far from being one step from the poorhouse on his return to private life, Campos writes, Truman’s own private calculations show that his income was among the top 1 percent of American households. Which, in hindsight, makes sense: As president, he received one of the most generous salaries in America — in 1949, presidential pay was raised to $100,000 annually, an amount worth more than $1.1 million today.

Congress also authorized a $50,000 annual presidential expense account, on which Truman could draw at will, no questions asked. Truman stashed the money in “the little safe in the White House,” he acknowledged in the financial statement he wrote in 1953, then transferred it to a safety deposit box at the Columbia National Bank in Kansas City.

“The cash in the box . . . came out of the [yearly] $50,000 expense account that was not accountable for taxes,” Truman noted in his draft will.

Over the next five years, Truman lobbied hard for a federal pension for former presidents, even going on TV to complain that “the United States government turns its chief executives out to grass. They’re just allowed to starve.” Yet during those five years, Truman’s net worth soared. According to an accounting he made of his assets in January 1959, his wealth had climbed to $1.04 million ($9.7 million in 2021 dollars).

Go here to read the rest.  Harry Truman conned us all.  Time to end pensions for members of Congress and the President and Veep.