Paying for National Pyramids

By Maureen Dowd

Congress may curb the perks of former U.S. Presidents

As President, Jimmy Carter was a devoted cheapskate. He sold the presidential yacht, curtailed White House magazine subscriptions, and took away the limousines and office television sets of aides. But now that he is back in private life, Carter seems to have acquired a taste for the finer things. He asked the Government to buy a $15,000 wool carpet and two chandeliers costing $3,500 for his federally funded office in Atlanta. Even the General Services Administration, not known for its thrift in dealing with ex-Chief Executives, balked. So Carter managed to buy the rug below list price for $12,600, and is making do with chandeliers worth only $1,850.

In a time of budget whittling, this kind of outlay irks Democratic Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida and 15 colleagues who are co-sponsoring legislation to curb benefits for ex-Presidents and their families. Over the past three decades, the cost to taxpayers for what Chiles dubs "the imperial former presidency" has quietly spiraled from $64,000 to $27 million this fiscal year. The Federal Government picks up the tab for pensions, offices, staffs, round-the-clock Secret Service protection, maintenance for lavish presidential libraries and a gamut of other expenses ranging from car washes to cable-TV rentals to joke writers' fees. All this, Chiles points out, even though Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon are already millionaires from lucrative memoirs, speaking engagements and television deals. Says Chiles: "We seem to have allowed these people to go from working Presidents to retirement as royalty."

The legislation is likely to gain momentum from the announcement just over a week ago that Congress will have to start worrying about providing for the upkeep of a spacious Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, which has finally found a home in San Clemente, Calif. An 80,000-sq.-ft. building, including a museum, is planned on a 13-acre, $6.5 million site in the city where Nixon had his Western White House. It will join the libraries and museums of seven other Presidents, built with private funds but staffed and maintained by the Government at a cost of $14.9 million this year. These modern pyramids have been getting ever more grandiose. Franklin D. Roosevelt started the trend when he built his own library at Hyde Park, N.Y., while still in office. Although he was President for only onesixth as long as Roosevelt, and in a time of less historical importance, Ford has a library in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a museum in Grand Rapids that boast 50% more space than F.D.R.'s.

Congress began funding the libraries in 1955 and three years later, moved by the plight of Harry Truman, added pensions and perks. While departing Presidents now get a transition fund of $1 million, Truman left the White House emptyhanded. Back in Independence, Mo., he refused to take any job that would trade on his past and spent his time answering quantities of mail, an economic burden for the proud former haberdasher. Several of his predecessors had died in financial straits, including the penniless Ulysses S. Grant, who had tried to provide for his family by toiling over his memoirs while dying of throat cancer.

The Former Presidents Act of 1958, seeking to rectify such instances of national neglect, provided a $25,000 annual pension and $50,000 a year for office and taff, sums that have steadily escalated. Now each ex-President is entitled to a lifetime annual salary equal to that of a Cabinet Secretary (currently $80,100). Widows get $20,000 a year. The retiree also gets $150,000 for a staff during the first 30 months and $96,000 a year thereafter, unlimited nonpolitical postage and a furnished office. The expenses are flexible. "The law says the office must be 'suitably' furnished," says General Services Administration Official Raymond Fontaine. "Does that mean a $500 coffee table or a $5,000 coffee table?"

The new bill would set limits on the size of presidential libraries, offices and staff, cut the current lifetime Secret Service protection to a period of eight years after a President has left office (except in special circumstances), and drop protection for spouses, widows and minor children. Bess Truman, who rarely left the house after her husband died in 1972, was guarded continuously by agents until her death last year. Congress had to pass a $1 million supplemental appropriation after Lady Bird Johnson cruised the Greek islands with friends and twelve Secret Service agents. The measure would also stipulate that the profits retired Presidents earn from books written at Government expense would revert to the Treasury. Nixon, Ford and Carter all had help from Government-paid staffers in writing their bestselling memoirs.

The Reagan Administration opposes the cutbacks, as do the Secret Service and National Archives, whose budgets have expanded markedly thanks to the original acts. The cost of bodyguards for ex-Presidents and their families has swelled from a first-year expense of $49,507 in 1964 to more than $12 million this year. Although the three former Presidents pay for their personal travel, taxpayers finance accompanying staffers and Secret Service agents. When Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter visited the Middle East in March, a reported 36 agents went along on the 19-day trip. Robert Powis, an official at the Treasury Department, which oversees the Secret Service, insists that the expensive protection for former White House residents is small compared with the national trauma that might result from a kidnaping or assassination.

Spokesmen for the trio of past Presidents say they are judicious about spending Government money. Of $800,000 Carter received for his transition, he returned $128,000. Ford regularly gives back $12,000 to $14,000 a year in expenses. When Nixon moved from Manhattan to a house in Saddle River, N.J., he spent $50,000 of his own money to convert a carport into a Secret Service command post. Ford Aide Robert Barrett defends the federal allowances. Says he: "It's the only reasonable way to deal with what former Presidents have to deal with." --By Maureen Dowd. Reported by Hays Gorey/Washington

With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.