, the author proves two points:
1. Truman was rich when he died and at least the majority of that money came from book contracts (one worth $600,000).
2. Truman had at least $50,000 when he left the presidency, and he got it from an untaxed expense account.
The author also asserts that Truman was rich when he left office but he doesn’t show that Truman had anything other than the $50,000. Does $50,000 alone make your rich back then?
The author also suspiciously doesn’t describe the terms of what he calls the expense account despite saying that the terms were voted by congress and therefore would be public. Was the expense account (that’s the authors name for it) like a per dime where you keep what you don’t spend? Or like a corporate expense account where you need to show receipts to get reimbursed? That would be directly relevant to the implication that Truman stole the money but the author leaves it out. Suspicios
Actually, I answer my own questions by following links in the article. It looks like the sloppiness in the article came from the editos not the writer. His longer article here carefully addresses the points I made aand overall it’s much more convincing:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html
“The author also asserts that Truman was rich when he left office but he doesn’t show that Truman had anything other than the $50,000. Does $50,000 alone make your rich back then?”
Go back to the source article:
“Every aspect of this narrative is false. My research into Truman’s private financial files, which became available with the release of his widow Bess Truman’s personal papers, reveals the following:
• When Truman left the White House, he had, according to his own (far too conservative) estimate, a net worth that would be equivalent to $6.6 million in simple inflation-adjusted terms.
• By his own accounting, Truman’s wealth increased by the 2021 equivalent of another $3.7 million when Congress passed the Former Presidents Act five and a half years after he left office.
• Contrary to his claims, Truman made a fortune from his memoirs, and from other writing and speaking engagements, in the years immediately after he left the presidency.
• Truman’s repeated insistence that only his inheritance and subsequent sale of the family farm were keeping him from financial distress was false in several ways. For one thing, Truman had already become a very wealthy man several years before he sold that land. For another, Truman did not actually inherit any of the land: He bought it, in no small part, with money that he had misappropriated from the federal government. He then sold it a few years later at an enormous profit....
...Exactly how much richer he became is revealed by another document in Bess Truman’s files: an accounting that Truman made of his assets in January 1959, five months after the passage of the Former Presidents Act. This accounting includes a detailed breakdown of the former president’s holdings, which by this time included a diversified portfolio of stocks and even an ownership share in the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams franchise, whose part-owner was his longtime friend Edwin Pauley.
All told, Truman calculated his net worth to be $1,046,788.86. Six years after leaving the presidency, he was a millionaire — and at a time when this term still retained its pre-inflationary grandeur. A person in 2021 would have to have a net worth of approximately $74 million to be as rich as Truman was in 1959, relative to the other Americans of his time.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Read the whole article. Truman pocketed government funds not intended for personal use, tax free.
“Does $50,000 alone make your rich back then?”
Not in my book. $50K then is about $750K which is a nice chunk but hardly rich.
$50K in 1952 did not make one rich, certainly not when compared with the windfalls that the Clintons and the Obamas - even a VP Al Gore - reaped when leaving office. Truman had a $600K book deal? I believe Obamas was in the forty-fifty million range. Truman went back to Independence , Missouri, and lived a quiet life. Compare and contrast that with Obama's 60th birthday bash last night at his $12 million Martha's Vineyard estate.