Millionaire ex-presidents can pay their own way

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

U.S. Presidents G.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, G.H.W. Bush

The avarice of Bill and Hillary Clinton is a wonder to behold. They crave wealth, it seems, even more than they crave power, and display no qualms about exploiting their political stature to amass it.

According to a required financial disclosure filing last week, the former president and his wife have collected more than $30 million since January 2014, most of it from speaking engagements for which they charged an average of $240,000 each. To put that figure in perspective, what the Clintons earn per speech is nearly five times what the median US household earns per year.

Since leaving the White House in 2001, the Clintons have made more than $125 million just from what The New York Times has called "the family speechmaking business." Huge book advances have been worth many millions more. For all their poor-mouthing about being "dead broke" and needing to "pay our bills," the Clintons' income puts them well within the top one-tenth of 1 percent of all Americans.

So why, pray, should taxpayers be giving Bill Clinton an allowance that amounts to another million dollars a year?

Indeed, considering that every living past president is a multimillionaire, why should taxpayers have to fund an allowance for any of them?

That question has been on the minds of US Representatives Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the chairman and ranking Democrat, respectively, of the House Oversight Committee.

Under a bill they have introduced, presidential pensions would be capped at $200,000 yearly, as would the amount available for office space, travel, and staff.

For any former president making more than $400,000 a year, the expense account (though not the pension) would be reduced dollar-for-dollar, zeroing out once an ex-president's earnings surpassed $600,000. That's about two-and-a-half speeches, at Bill Clinton's usual rate.

On Tuesday, the committee voted in favor of the measure, sending it to the House floor. Now House members ought to do the right thing and advance it, with bipartisan approval, to the Senate.

For most of American history, presidents weren't showered with taxpayers' money after leaving office. Nor were most former presidents willing to cash in on their White House service by chasing paid speaking gigs or lucrative board memberships. Calvin Coolidge spurned offers to endorse commercial products.

The money was being dangled "to hire not Calvin Coolidge, but a former president of the United States," he said, and it would be shabby to "make that kind of use of the office."

It wasn't until 1958 that Congress, learning of Harry Truman's financial struggles, enacted the Former Presidents Act to provide a pension and expense account for retired presidents.

Its purpose, the Congressional Research Service explained in a 2014 report, was "to maintain the dignity" of the presidency, and ensure that no ex-president would be forced to engage in activities "which would demean the office he has held or capitalize upon it in any way deemed improper."

In that more innocent era, members of Congress took it for granted that former presidents would be loath to devote their post-White House years to hustling six- and seven-figure honoraria, or peddling their availability to influence-seeking special interests.

Most former presidents refused on principle to
chase paid speaking engagements or accept
lucrative corporate offers. - I could never lend
myself to any transaction, however respectable,
Harry Truman wrote - that would commercialize
 on the prestige and dignity of the office of
the Presidency.

Well, those days are gone, and they vanished long before the Clintons were on the scene.

Gerald Ford devoted his after-presidency to aggressive moneymaking, accepting the kind of corporate directorships and consultant contracts that earlier presidents avoided on principle.

"I have to earn a living," he offered as a justification. Ronald Reagan cashed a $2 million check from a Japanese media conglomerate in exchange for giving a couple speeches and attending a dinner.

George H. W. Bush took the money-grubbing to new heights: Within four years of leaving the White House, reported The Wall Street Journal in 1997, he had "earned millions of dollars speaking publicly for about 40 companies."

His son has followed suit, amassing a fortune of his own in speaking fees and royalties.

Bill and Hillary Clinton didn't start the fire of post-presidential buckraking. What makes their greed distinctive is the way they have pushed it to previously unimagined levels, leveraging Hillary's political career to advance their financial interests, and vice versa.

It's crass and unseemly; it would have appalled Coolidge and Truman. But if former presidents are hell-bent on turning the prestige of the presidency into a license to print money, there's little the rest of us can do to stop them. Electing leaders with better character would help.

In the meantime, taxpayers shouldn't have to treat fabulously wealthy ex-presidents to even more wealth. The Clintons and Bushes won't go hungry if they have to cover their own office rent and retirement expenses.

After all, they're not royalty. Even if they are richer than 99.9 percent of their fellow citizens.

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Iraq and the White House time machine

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

In an interview, Jeb Bush was asked whether, "knowing what we know now,"
he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Everyone had a field day with Jeb Bush's mishandling of the Iraq question Megyn Kelly posed during a TV interview last week: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?" Over the course of several days, Bush's answer switched from a firm yes ("I would have") to a firm no ("I would not have gone into Iraq").

Other GOP presidential hopefuls, quick to exploit Bush's fumble, quickly declared that in hindsight they wouldn't have gone to war.

Obviously there will be no do-over of the Iraq war authorization; the next president can't hop a time machine back to 2003. But even as a theoretical exercise, it's impossible to answer Kelly's question without clarifying the meaning of "knowing what we know now."

Was Bush being asked whether he would have invaded Iraq, knowing how the invasion was destined to play out over the next 12 years? Or was he being asked whether he would have invaded Iraq, had he known what mistakes to avoid in order to achieve the most successful outcome? If the former, then the question was whether the war on balance was worth its costs.

If the latter, it was whether, in retrospect, the war and its aftermath could have been managed more successfully. Those are very different queries, to which a thoughtful candidate might well give very different answers.

But why revisit only 2003? As long as we're asking presidential contenders what lessons they draw from George W. Bush's decision — widely supported at the time, remember — to topple Saddam Hussein, why not ask whether, "knowing what we know now," they would repeat other historical presidential decisions.

For example:

Would the men and women campaigning for president today have signed the Iraq Liberation Act, as President Clinton did in 1998, thereby making Saddam's removal from power a matter of explicit US policy?

With 20/20 hindsight, would they have ended the Gulf War after just 100 hours, as President George H. W. Bush did in 1991? Would they, like the first President Bush, have explicitly encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam — but then, when Kurds and Shi'ites heeded his call, done nothing to stop the dictator from savagely crushing the uprising?

Or take the more recent decision, by President Obama in 2011, to pull all American troops from Iraq, rather than negotiate a new Status of Forces agreement to maintain a substantial US military presence. That wholesale withdrawal — which was also widely supported at the time — created a vacuum that ISIS and Iran have filled with blood and terror. Knowing what we know now, would the candidates have brought those troops home?

President George H. W. Bush rides an armored jeep with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf
during the 1991 Gulf War. Bush urged Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein,
then allowed Saddam to savagely suppress the uprising and cement
his hold on power for another 12 years.

History is always messy, especially the history of wars and their aftermath. Intelligence failures, battlefield misjudgments, diplomatic fiascoes, wavering public opinion — these have played a role in nearly every conflict, including those we recall with approbation. Rarely does the decision to fight proceed as expected. The same is true of the decision not to fight.

World War II, the "good war," the war to liberate Europe from Adolf Hitler, ended with America acquiescing in the enslavement of Eastern Europe by Joseph Stalin. The Civil War was envisioned as a quick and decisive Northern campaign to put down a Southern rebellion; it turned into grinding, appalling four-year bloodbath.

President Reagan chose to withdraw rather than retaliate after US Marines on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon were killed by Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsor. That was a signal of weakness that helped convince Osama bin Laden to regard America as a vulnerable "paper tiger," with awful results.

By all means, let's grill presidential candidates on what lessons they've learned from history, and how it informs their approach to national security today.

Let's also remember that politicians always find it easy to tell us how blunders could have been avoided in the past. They're not nearly so adept at avoiding them in the present.

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Putin in Russia: A gangster regime

By Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Putin is a coldly corrupt, KGB-trained totalitarian, not someone
with whom the West — as Margaret Thatcher said of
Mikhail Gorbachev — "can do business."

"I'm afraid Putin will kill me," Boris Nemtsov told a Russian website on February 10. He was dead before the month was out.

The charismatic opposition leader, a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, was assassinated in the heart of Moscow on Friday night as he walked over a bridge near Red Square, only yards from the Kremlin walls. The killing, it seems clear, was a professional hit.

Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by gunmen who escaped in a precisely timed getaway car, the murder unrecorded by nearby security cameras, which were mysteriously turned off — all in a section of the Russian capital that normally teems with security personnel and surveillance.

It was a calculatedly shocking crime, the highest-profile assassination since the Stalin era, and Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine immediately moved to exploit it. The Russian ruler said he would personally oversee the inquiry into Nemtsov's killing, which his press aide described as a "provocation" intended to make the government look bad.

With almost unfathomable cynicism, government investigators speculated that one of Russia's best-known liberal democrats might have been martyred by his own allies in a bid for sympathy.

"Nemtsov could have been a kind of sacrifice for those who stop at nothing to attain their political ends," spokesman Vladimir Markin suggested. Meanwhile, Pravda — a Putin mouthpiece — published a column labeling the murder "a CIA-staged false flag" and "Washington's latest attempt to destabilize Russia."

Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, noted on Twitter that he was being flooded with thousands of messages parroting the "USA killed Nemtsov" line.

In the Russia that Putin has built, such brazen Big Lies are pervasive, relentlessly promoted by a regime that manipulates the media and the law to destroy its critics and strangle democratic opposition.

Putin's time in power have seen the elimination of a jaw-dropping array of inconvenient individuals: Courageous journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, Anastasia Baburova, Ivan Safronov, and Paul Klebnikov. Human-rights defenders, such as historian Natalia Estemirova and lawyer Stanislav Markelov.

High-placed whistleblowers, including one-time Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko and accountant Sergei Magnitsky. They are only a few of so many Putin foes who met untimely deaths. Other opponents have been neutralized in other ways, from long prison terms on trumped-up convictions to forced exile.

Did Putin order the latest assassination? As Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and longtime Nemtsov friend, noted over the weekend, whether or not Putin issued a directive is beside the point.

The Russian strongman "is directly responsible for creating the conditions in which these outrages occur with such terrible frequency."

What Putin's propagandists and proxies have done in Ukraine, Chechnya, and Georgia — inciting hatred and violence against far weaker opponents, demonizing all critics as traitors, fifth columnists, and enemies of Russia — they do at home to liberal dissidents and democratic reformers.

In such a culture of fear, there is little point asking who gave the order to kill. Ask rather whose killing will be ordered next.

And ask an even more pressing question: When will American policymakers
stop treating Putin's regime as anything but the gangster state that it is?

For those with eyes to see, there has never been any mystery about Putin's ways and means. He is coldly corrupt and vicious, a KGB-trained totalitarian who still resents the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century."

Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, Putin is not a Russian leader with whom the West "can do business." He is a brute, one who scruples at nothing in his pursuit of power, wealth, and the breaking of his opponents.

Yet US leaders have consistently denied the obvious. George W. Bush famously looked Putin in the eye, got "a sense of his soul" and concluded that the former KGB colonel was "very straightforward and trustworthy." Barack Obama sought to "reset" relations with Moscow in his first term, and promised even more "flexibility" in his second.

Putin took their measure, and acted accordingly: crushing Chechnya, occupying Georgia, annexing Crimea, running interference for Syria and Iran — all while eviscerating Russia's democratic opposition, plundering its wealth, and periodically reminding anyone who might forget that those who get in his way are apt to die young.

Washington can best give meaning to Nemtsov's death by emulating the resolve and courage he embodied in life. Condolences won't slow Putin's aggression. Backbone is a different story.

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