October 15, 2025 • 47 mins
How did America’s presidents really make—and manage—their money? Bob Crawford sits down with financial expert and author Megan Gorman to explore the personal finances of presidents from George Washington to Donald Trump. Drawing from her new book, All the Presidents’ Money: How the Men Who Governed America Governed Their Money, Gorman reveals who thrived, who failed, and what their choices say about leadership, power, and legacy.
Discover why Thomas Jefferson died in debt, how Abraham Lincoln overcame his impoverished childhood, why FDR’s polio treatment transformed presidential fundraising, and how modern presidents like Obama, Clinton, and Trump built post-White House fortunes.
Also, do you have to be wealthy to become president? Or has the oligarchy already began?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
And Jefferson. I think you can't mention on money without
talking about his two buddies, Madison and Monroe, because the
three of them, as brilliant as the three of them were,
they were all horrible with money.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we
get the answers. Leave a message. Hey, they are American
History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here. You know the drill by.
Now send us your questions will get you some answers,
and the best way to get us a question about
(00:33):
American history is to record a video or a voice
memo on your phone and email it to a Americanhistory
Hotline at gmail dot com. That's Americanhistory Hotline at gmail
dot com. Okay, today's question is about the men on
our money and how they made their money. I'll explain
(00:55):
more in a second, but first let me introduce my
guest for the day. She is Meghan Gorman, author of
the book All the President's Money, How the Men who
governed America Governed their Money. Megan, thanks for joining me today, Bob.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
It's my pleasure. Okay, Megan, here's the question we were
hoping you could help us to answer. It comes from
Mike in Des Moines, Iowa. He says, I just visited Monicello,
Thomas Jefferson's home, and I learned that Thomas Jefferson died broke.
It's hard to square how someone who could be so
(01:33):
accomplished in one part of their life but have no
grasp on money. Megan, this is one of my favorite questions.
I'm always asking myself the same question before we get
to Thomas Jefferson specifically, can you tell me which presidents
were the best and the worst at handling their finances?
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Oh my goodness. Yeah, so you know, it really is
a random mys who were really really good with money.
But let's start with President number one, George Washington phenomenal
with money, which and I know we taught you asked,
just asked about Jefferson. But he's living in the same
time period as Thomas Jefferson, same asset based mix, and
yet Washington's phenomenal. Jefferson's quite a failure when we think
(02:18):
about other presidents who are really good with their money.
Don't laugh, Warren G. Harding, Right, he always ranks at
the bottom, Right, Like who wants to be Warren g.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Harney is at the bottom of every list but personal finances.
So talk about this.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah, so let's talk about Harding because to your point,
he's always the worst. But Harding grows up in Ohio
in a time period where there's a lot of change
like there is today, and things like newspapers were really
becoming a megaphone, just like our social media. And as
he's growing up, he's trying to figure out what he
wants to do. He tries to be a teacher, tries
(02:57):
to sell insurance, and then he and two other friends
to decide to buy a local newspaper called The Marian Star,
and they buy it for three hundred dollars, and he
eventually buys the other two out, and the Marrying Star
is something that just clicks with him. He is really
good at sort of developing a newspaper, and some of
the ideas he does are really obvious, like he convinced
(03:18):
locals like let's advertise for snowshovels in the fall and
winter and not the summer, right like seasonal advertising. And
so he builds up this newspaper and then he obviously
marries his wife, Florence and she's really good with money,
so she runs the finances and they create this newspaper
where the environment has a great esprit de corps. And
(03:39):
when you look into his newspaper, what you find out
is his employees love him. He has like an esop
an employee stock ownership program where the employees own the
newspaper and they call him WG. And they think he's
great and he's very las fair. So remember sometimes the
traits that make you good at something make you bad
at something else. Right, So in this case, he was
(04:00):
a very good leader, very good with the newspaper, really
grew the newspaper. And you know what you found was
he cared about the community. And so when I was
talking to the woman who runs the presidential site, she said,
you know WG used to go around town and if
you were a new business, he would frequent you, or
if you had a new company, he'd buy stock because
he felt it was about the community. And I say
(04:23):
this because when you go back to nineteen twenty three
and he's dying, well he doesn't know he's dying, but
he's on that tour of great understanding, right, goes up
to Alaska and then he comes down to San Francisco.
Besides the fact that he's visiting Americans, he's also rewriting
his estate plan, and he's trying to sell the newspaper,
and he is trying to figure out what he's going
to do post presidency. And he decides what he's going
(04:44):
to do is he's going to write a column in
the newspaper that he sells, and of course he dies
at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, doesn't get the
transaction finished, his wife completes it. And but over his
course of his life, he was just very organized financially,
and so he's not someone that we all aspire to
be like when we're president. But when it comes to money,
(05:05):
this idea of being involved in the community and thinking
of others and really supporting others is incredibly important and
incredibly key to understanding who he was as a person.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Okay, so let's get back to Thomas Jefferson for a minute.
At least he liked the finer things in life, right
to put it wildly, How did he make his money
and what did he spend it on?
Speaker 1 (05:28):
So, first of all, when you think of the first
six presidents of the country, I want you to think
about the fact that all of them had money from land. Okay,
you know, from Washington to Quincy Adams all were landhold owners.
Obviously Adams and Quincy Adams didn't have slaves, and so
Jefferson had his wealth from the plantations, from the slaves
he owned, and he was the land to class here
(05:50):
in the United States. And where he makes mistakes is
some of them are his mistakes and some of them
are more macro estate issues. So when you think about
the time period he's living in, right, you're living in
a situation where crops fail. Then we go through a
period of great turmoil. So there's inflation on currency by
the way, currencies dependent on what they were. You have
(06:13):
panics that go on during his lifetime. And then he
sort of doesn't put himself into the right position because
he makes loans to people that he shouldn't make loans to.
And he also assumes the debts of his father in law.
So part of Jefferson's mindset is he is a gentleman, right,
he has a belief on how people are supposed to behave.
(06:34):
He also goes to France and learns how to live
the good life. And I think a lot about him,
and I think when I think about him, I think
about the losses he had in life, right that you know,
losing his wife. You live in a time period where
people don't live long lives like they do today, and
I think it ends up sort of getting to be Look,
I'm going to live in the moment, right, And that
(06:55):
was part of his challenge. And so when you go
through the Jefferson cough and all the sort of budgeting
that his team does and sort of running his household,
particularly when he's in the White House, he does like
the great things in life, the beautiful wines, the cheeses, right, champagne,
It's just an amazing lifestyle. But where Jefferson sort of struggles, right,
(07:18):
is he's never if you're not good with money, your
role then is to find someone to be your steward.
And Jefferson is never able to find that steward to
manage the money. And part of it was these were very,
very complex assets. You compare him to Washington and Washington
even during the Revolutionary War, even as president, he's actively
(07:40):
managing his assets, and he's also very strict on things.
Washington will only take real cash. He will not take
cash certificates, which were popular at the time, and so
I think with Jefferson, he just never gets his arms
around it, and he just I think, believes in a
nobler cause. Now to the question asked, you know, when
he gets the end of his life, if Monticello is
(08:01):
falling apart, it's not what we see today, right. He
didn't have the money to keep it up. He ends
up doing a lottery and I talk about this in
the book. In the Saturday Evening Post, there's an advertisement
there's a lottery that you could win Monticello, and of
course they start selling the tickets, and a group of
Americans come together and say, look, let's not do this bad. Look,
(08:21):
let's go fund me. Right, they don't actually raise any
money for him. He continues to struggle and he dies
in debt, and we see in his estate plan him
doing things to try to protect his daughter so she
could keep Monticello. But that fails and Monticello goes up
for auction, as do the slaves. And one of the
slaves writes a book many years later, and the real
(08:42):
tragedy of the story is slave families who had been
on the plantation for decades, for generations, were split up,
and that's really heartbreaking. So Jefferson and Jefferson, I think
you can't mention on money without talking about his two buddies,
Madison and Monroe, because the three of them, as brilliant
as the three of them were, they were all horrible
(09:02):
with money really really just weren't able to wrap their
arms around it. And Madison, to me, of all of them,
is interesting because Madison and Joe Biden, I feel like
are like twins in a weird way.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Oh explain, Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Madison, you know, marries Dolly Madison, right, but Dolly paying
her original name. She was previously married and in Philadelphia,
she had a husband and two sons, and in the
yellow fever outbreak, her husband or son dies, her other
son survives, and then she meets James Madison. They marry
and there's been a lot of trauma, and they dote
on this little boy almost too much, too much over indulgence, right,
(09:41):
And so what goes on to happen is Madison always
goes out of his way to smooth the path right,
to give his steps on everything he could want. And
his step son struggles with alcohol, addiction, gambling. You know,
he's not a hard worker. He squanders every opportunity and
it gets to the end of Madison's if he's trying
to sell his papers to Congress because there's value to them,
(10:04):
he knows that he wants to get like one hundred
thousand for it. He doesn't even get them sold before
he dies. Dolly sells them after his death for about
thirty thousand dollars, and then she has to sell the home,
move in with a friend, and the son is still
sucking money out of his mother, and she eventually dies.
He doesn't die that long after her, but he's just
(10:24):
been this mess of a life, right, And if you
look at Joe Biden, right, what I find the parallels
with them about is we have a great trauma that
happens with Joe Biden. Joe Biden, there's two big traumas
that impact him. The first happens when he's born in
nineteen forty two. His family's wealthy, they're out on the cape,
you know, they're living a nice life, right. And then
(10:45):
after the war, his father's manufacturing business closes down, and
that's when Scranton starts. Right, we all think of Joe
from Scranton. Now, was Joe's family's living the good life.
So that's trauma one is to fall from an economic standpoint.
Trauma two is, as we all know, he loses his
first wife and baby daughter in that car accident. And
so when you go through Biden's finances, what you see
(11:07):
is someone who when it comes to family members at times,
can be a little over indulgent, very James Madison. And
so I have a lot of empathy for both Madison
and Biden because they have a lot of love for
their family. They want to do the right things, but
just by how they handle them with the money, it
just never works out. And so I found really interesting
(11:29):
is when I was writing the book and doing the research,
was no matter what time period we were in, the
issues were all the same. And so the fact that
our most recent president, who just left the White House
is the same issues as the fourth president of the
United States, it's like wow, Like money has a common
theme to it when it comes to personal finance.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Is it easier as a historian to learn James Madison's
financial picture or is it easier or harder to learn
Joe Biden's financial picture?
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, I would tell you James Madison, right. So the
more recent right. You know, from like Reagan on, a
lot of their stuff is still classified. It's I mean
some of these people are still living, right, you know,
and so you either have to really look for what
was out there, what was put in the public arena, right,
or look in the newspapers and those types of resources.
(12:25):
When it comes to people like James Madison, there is
a lot of primary source documentation that you know, just
has a lot of meat on it. I mean, God
blessed John Quincy Adams. The man kept a diary every
day of his life. I mean, it's like he knew
we were going to be looking for it. So when
you think about these these these presidents, right, one of
the things that we have as Americans that I would
(12:46):
tell you they're crown jewels, is the fact that we
understand that their papers have value. That these archives that
are out there, and anyone who's listening, regardless of your
political affiliation, our presidential libraries are awesome and the amount
of archives like what they have. I mean, I remember
I reached out to the Truman Library because everybody thinks
Truman was poor, right, not true, he dies wealthy, but
(13:09):
it was it was amazing because the archive is we're
going back and forth over email, and he said, I
got a letter for you. I'm gonna send it to you,
and they scan it, you know, and they send it
to me. And it's a letter that Harry Truman writes
his wife Bess in the early nineteen seventies, and he's
sort of saying, look, if I pass away, I want
you to know what we have and where it is.
(13:30):
And he lists out all these bank accounts and this there,
and it's about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which
is in our dollar, our money byably between five and
six million dollars. Right, you don't think you're like, wait,
what happened to poor Harry Truman? So let me tell
you what happened with Truman. He was not financially successful
for a large portion of his life. But he gets
to the White House. His salary is seventy five thousand
(13:51):
dollars and Congress raises it to one hundred, and Congress
gives him a stipend of fifty thousand dollars a year
that he's gonna get and it's gonna be tax free
and doesn't require an accounting. Right, So, if you go
back in that time, period. What's going on with Harry
Truman and the White House in nineteen forty eight, forty nine,
they're doing a massive renovation, so the family moves to Blairhouse.
(14:13):
They're not entertaining. So he saves this, and of course
Congress especially comes back and like, oh, we really need
to be like managing this stipend. But he's able to
save the money, and because he had failed so much,
you know, I think with Truman you run into a
little what we call bag lady syndrome, which is you
have people who make money and they're frightened that the
next day they're going to wake up and be a
(14:34):
bag lady. And it's very real. I have clients with
this issue. So what I'm going back to the primary
source data. You know why we didn't know this about
Harry Truman is until Margaret Truman passed away, his daughter
in the early two thousands, it was still a classified
file in the National Archives, and finally it gets released
as she passes. So when you think of the presidents today,
(14:55):
it's going to be you know, the next generation that
will know really what went on, you know, with HW's
money or Obama or Biden, because at that point the
people who are alive today will have passed, and a
lot of the releases will allow that money, that information
to be out in the public.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Let's talk about a president who we can we're pretty
sure grew up in poverty. Abraham Lincoln. Yes, everyone knows
he was born poor, very much salt of the earth
kind of a guy. Ey was what was his financial journey? Like?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Oh my god, he was a hot mess for a
long period of time. But you gotta love Lincoln. Lincoln
and Washington are really interesting because you have to think
about it. We have a group of presidents who are
not educated.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
In fact, if you think about it, our three when
they always rank him, it's Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. FDR
is clearly very educated, but the other two were self educated.
And Lincoln grows up and he doesn't know a lot
about money, and he doesn't really like his father. So
what's really important in Lincoln's story is once he turns
twenty one, he is not required by law to give
any he makes to his father. So Lincoln goes out
(16:05):
in the world. He gets up to you know, and
he gets partnered with a gentleman who they decide to
buy and create a store and they take out all
this debt to buy this store. The general's name is
William Berry, and then they decide very quickly on to
buy another store, and they rack up all this inventory
and all this debt, and the business is not doing well.
(16:28):
They're struggling because remember he doesn't have the experience to
run a business. And then William Barry conveniently passes away.
He's an alcoholic, and he passes away, and so Lincoln
has to absorb all of this debt. And he's a
funny guy, and he always called it his national debt,
and it was probably equivalent of about forty thousand dollars
in our money today, so you think about it's sort
(16:49):
of like his student loan debt. And so he has
this debt, and you see him again and again trying
to pay down the debt in the early part of
his life, and he eventually does, but he hits it
taught him a really important lesson, and so when you
look in Lincoln's finances in the early years, you see
a lot of mistakes. He gets brought to court for
some of these mistakes, for not paying bills. But he
(17:10):
gets to a point when he's in Springfield. He marries up.
He marries Mary Todd, and he's in Springfield. And what
does he do with his money. He does a lot
of loans to people. When Lincoln becomes president, he actually
rents out the house in Springfield. If you go to
Springfield and you see this house, it's an upper middle
class house. Like he had gotten money, and he rents
(17:31):
the house out. He goes to Washington, d c. And
what we see in the documentation is he takes every
bit of his twenty five thousand dollars salary and he's
saving it in treasury notes and treasury bonds right backed
by the full faith and credit of the US government,
paying him six seven percent interest. And I love that
(17:51):
about him because what that's doing is it's lining his
financial interests with that of the country, with that of
the Union. And you got to give him credit for that.
To me, he made that connection. Unfortunately for Lincoln, his
wife is in New York spending money. She's like racking
up all this debt. She tries to pass bills off
to different departments within the White within you know, the
(18:11):
executive branch. She's chaotic with money, and she even says
to her dressmaker at one point, Look, if he doesn't
win the reelection.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
What I'm sorry, Megan, was it Elizabeth Keckley?
Speaker 1 (18:23):
It was Elizabeth Keckley, Yes.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Who is who worked at a school, a girls' school,
a couple miles from my house here in North Carolina. Oh,
I love this post presidency. Yeah, anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah. So she tells Elizabeth Keckley, if he finds out
how much debt we have, we're in trouble. And Lincoln
had started to think about his post presidency. He had
said to Mary, I'm probably going to go back and
practice law, which is what a lot of them did
pre Jerry Ford. And so when Lincoln actually passes away
an April fifteenth, eighteen sixty five, he's worth about eighty
(18:56):
five thousand dollars, which is really about two million dollar money.
But what's really shocking about it, Bob, is he passes
away without an estate plan. There's a man who had
premonitions of death. We're in the middle of a war, right,
He's a lawyer. He doesn't have an estate plan. And
so Robert Todd Lincoln calls in the Chief Justice of
(19:16):
the United States and says, help us, help us probate
this and they do, and they gather the assets and
the bonds and the rents and they split it up
a third to Mary Todd, a third to Tad, and
a third to Robert. And that's how the estate gets
sort of distributed. But again sort of an odd ending,
not having an estate plan to someone who really did
make the American dream when it came to finance incredible.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Did Mary Todd come from money?
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Oh yes, yes, she was very pampered. She grew up
in Kentucky with a from a slave owning family. But
she has, you know, history. I don't know if you've
seen the play in New York Oh Mary heard. It's
a fun show. You know, this is a woman who
she had a lot of challenges and some of it
probably came from the fact that, you know, her mother
dies when she's very little. She gets this step mother.
(20:06):
She gets attention by causing drama. And you know, her
and Lincoln are a good example of someone you know,
he married up by marrying her. But the challenge the
two of them had financially is they didn't have shared values.
Now to compare that, Eisenhower did not grow up with money.
Maybe married Geneva Dowd grew up with a lot of money.
(20:27):
Her father was so successful he retired at age thirty
six from this meat factory he had. And so what
I find interesting about Ike and Maymi is that despite
growing up very very differently, they ended up having a
lot of the same values about money, and they lived
paycheck to paycheck until he basically did his memoir and
(20:49):
became President of Columbia. But you know, she used to say,
Ike is so tight with a buck that when he
when he squeezes the dollar, the eagle screams, and which
is very may Mamie's a character. Like one of the
things that's sort of funny is google eyes Ike and
Mamie when they're young. First of all, they're gorgeous, like
you're like, oh, okay, I get it now. But what
(21:11):
I find really funny about Mamie is she has these
little bon mots which give you a sense of who
she was. And one of my favorites is, I have
a career and its name is Ike, and I could
totally like, I just I get it, like all of
a sudden, what you really understood how she saw life.
And you know, we know her as that little lady
in the fifties with the little bangs and the pink
but yeah, she had a sassy side to her.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
We're about to take a quick break, but before I do,
I want to let you know all about my new
book that's coming out soon. It's called America's Founding Son
John Quincy Adams, from President to political Maverick. Pre order
your book today. It's available wherever you buy your books.
(21:59):
This is American Histy Hotline. I'm your host, Bob Crawford.
Today my guest is Megan Gorman. She's author of the
book All the President's Money, How the men who governed
America governed their money. We're talking about the people on
our money who sometimes found themselves not having any money. Remember,
(22:19):
send us your burning questions about American history. Record yourself
using the voice memo app on your phone and email
it to American History Hotline at gmail dot com. That's
Americanhistory Hotline at gmail dot com. You can also write
your question in the comments section of the Spotify app
and we'll see it. Now back to the show, Megan,
(22:42):
we got to talk about FDR. Yes, I think that
you say he's quote terrible with money but gets a
gold Star for charity. Yes, tell me about him.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
So FDR. Look, he's a trust fund kid, right, so
you know we think of the Rosaveout money, right, the
New York money. But he was also a Delano and
that had real money because they had made the Delanas
had made a fortune in the opium trade, lost a fortune,
and then remade a fortune. So he grows up very
you know, with money, it's something that's there. And so
(23:14):
when you see him across you know his life. You know,
he had a check every month from his trust so
did Eleanor. He becomes assistant secretary of the Navy and
they ask him how he wants his paycheck. He's like, ah, no,
give me cash. And it took a few months and
finally Eleanor's like, where's the money. I gotta buy groceries?
Like he just he doesn't think about money the way
(23:35):
you and I do. But what's fascinating about fdr story
is the story of how he manages his money in
relation to polio. So we all know FDR gets polio
in nineteen twenty one, and what's hard for the first
three years of having polio is he becomes obsessed with
trying to find a way to walk again. Right, and
(23:56):
he struggles with depression. You know, he's out on a
boat with Missy Hand in Florida. I mean, these are
dark times. And in the FDR library when you go
through his correspondence on at that time, God bless this
guy because people were writing him with crazy ideas, and
he was always such a gentleman and so proper. He
always wrote people back, even when the ideas were wacky.
(24:18):
But one thing comes to him in nineteen twenty four
George Peabody, who today we know from the Peabody Award, right,
and it says, look, I have this inn in Warm Springs,
Georgia and niece. It's called the Merriweather Inn and the Springs.
You should go check it out now. Interestingly, like three
weeks after he gets this letter, he gets a letter
from somebody in Tennessee talking about like a springs like that,
(24:40):
a warm spring in Tennessee. So he goes to Warm Springs.
He gets there, it's him Eleanor Missy lahand Eleanor can't
take it. She leaves immediately. FDR gets in the water
and it's like this aha moment. It's just like, oh
my God, for the first time in three years, I
can move my legs. And what ends up happening, I'm
gonna shortened certain. The story is he becomes obsessed with
(25:03):
this place and he decides he's going to buy it.
And George Peabody was failing with this hotel, but he
still sells it to FDR for probably the equivalent of
about two thirds of FDR's trust fund, and which is wild.
And FDR has this idea that he's going to have
wealthy people there at Warm Springs and people with polio,
and of course everyone else is like, no, we don't
(25:24):
want to be around people with polio, like we forget today.
Polio was so frightening to people. And of course Basil O'Connor,
his business partner, says, hold on, I'm coming down. So
they he goes down there and he helps FDR. They
get the place certified as a hydrotherapy medical center. They
set up a charity called Warm Springs and they basically
(25:45):
transfort for the hotel into it. And they do two
things financially that's sort of interesting. The one is a
technique that we do today. When they wanted FDR to
run for president, FDR was like, but but what will
happen to the cure and Warm Springs, so he said,
and he's like, if I die, warm Springs will die.
(26:06):
So they decide they're going to have Warm Springs the
charity by life insurance on FDR. And so there's this
legal issue of is there an ensurable interest? And so
it's determined that yes, there is because Warm Springs would
cease to exist, but for FDR's life, you know, being alive.
And the other thing they had to figure out is
could they ensure FDR. Now I'll tell you this cool story.
(26:27):
I'm at the FDR library and you know, I'm always
calling these libraries asking for crazy things like Richard Nixon's
Orange Juice Company. You know, a FDRs I asked, originally
asked about the lobsters, which is in the book. So
I'm there and the archives comes up to me with
a box and she's like, we still haven't fully processed
this box. It came in about a year ago. You
can't photograph it, you can't. You gotta wear the gloves.
(26:49):
But I think it's what you're looking for. So I
open the box and what is in it? But it's
the life insurance application and all these Western Union correspondents
between the different insurance companies, and none of the insurance
companies want to insure him, and so each company is
writing the other underwriter at the other company like what
are you doing? What are we going to do? Like
(27:10):
this is not a great insurable risk, and they finally
all decide that they're going to basically take us piece
of the insurance to ensure FDR. And of course FDR
goes to the papers and is like, I might be
forty something, but they say I got the body of
a thirty year old, and what you can tell from
everything is this is not true. So of course they
set up the insurance and on a when he dies,
(27:32):
the insurance does pay out. It's the equivalent of ten
million dollars today it was five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The other thing they do financially, which is interesting is
basil'connor decides that they should have a birthday ball when
FDR's president to raise awareness for polio. And he says,
every American send in ten cents. Could you imagine them
asking us this today? But March of dimes, the March
(27:54):
of dimes. Eddie Canter called it the March of dimes,
and literally two point seven million Americans in dice it's
go fundme, And today we would never do this, right,
We just don't think that same way. But this birthday
ball thing was huge, and of course he dies in
nineteen forty five. We still don't have a cure, but
all of that money goes into the pursuit of the cure.
(28:17):
It does happen in the nineteen fifties, And what was
interesting is there were a lot of people who were
very nervous about doing the vaccinations, and in particular teenagers
in the United States. So I talked about this in
the book What do they do on the Ed Sullivan Show?
Right before he goes on, they give Elvis Presley the vaccine?
And every teenager in America runs right out and gets vaccinated.
(28:38):
But you know, it's it's it's really a testament to
FDR's ability to transform the mundane into a vision that
everybody gets into. I mean, it's a it's an amazing skill,
and the people who have it are huge. But you know,
this is one of those things where FDR was just
(28:59):
simply unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
So I have to ask and I well, now I
really want to ask about Richard Nixon's Orange Juice Company.
The first Megan, I have to ask, what made you
want to write a book about president's personal finances?
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah, so, you know, I've always loved the presidents. I'm
from a really small town in southern New Jersey called
Cape May, and when I was growing up, we were
very disconnected from the rest of the world, and I
would be a kid that would go in the library
and read about it. Because a lot of the presidents,
particularly starting with Andrew Jackson, they're boys from small towns,
often poor boys. Sorry, there's no girls going out in
the world. So when I got older, I started working
(29:37):
at Goldman Sachs, and I grew up middle class, and
I would be in front of CEOs and CFOs, and
when you work with people, you want to understand where
they came from. And they would tell their story and
they would always say and I worked really hard and
I got lucky, didn't matter how successful the person was.
They always said that. And so I would read books
about presidents and other historical figures and I would be like, well,
you talk about him here buying a house. It's like
(29:58):
one little sentence. I know how hard that transaction is, right,
And so that's what got I wanted to sort of
carve into that, and it was hard. It's really hard
at first because you're really especially with a lot of
the older presidents. You've got to go into the letters,
you know, you got to, I mean, and then you
get the fact that they save stuff. You know, I
have Herbert Hoover's scant copy of his power of attorney
(30:20):
from when he was in Australia, you know, finding the
gold mines and so on. So you're always sort of
looking for this nuanced stuff. Because all of us talk
about money all the time. It's just it's sometimes not
You got to look dig for the little nuggets like
FDR and his lobsters or Richard Nixon and his Orange
Juice company.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Well, speaking of Herbert Hoover, that's an interesting financial journey,
isn't it.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
He's amazing. He really was amazing, and he was He's again,
like Warren Harding, not a great president. But Herbert Hoover
was a phenomenal person. And one of the things that
sort of impacted his life is he was a Quaker,
and the Quaker certain beliefs about how you live your life.
This spice is what they call it, simplicity, community and
(31:06):
he was very focused on the community. And so he
grows up with parents who are becoming successful and they
both die. His dad dies when he's four, his mom
dies when he's nine, and the Quakers have a financial
guardian for him and a physical guardian. So very early
on he learns to budget. And when we look at
so people haven't asked, like, what should you be doing
(31:27):
to make your kids savvy with money? There's certain ages
you're supposed to learn, certain abilities adding, subtracting, running budgets,
and hoover times in perfectly with this. So he's running
budgets as a small boy. Fast forward, you know, he
gets goes to Stanford, he's in the pioneer class. He graduates,
(31:47):
there's no jobs. Panic of eighteen ninety three. He's got
a geology degree. So what does this guy do. He
goes out to the Sierra Nevadas. He's desperate for a job,
and he takes a job in a mind pushing a cart.
And the mines are run by cornish people, like they're
the ones who are actual miners. And after first they
made fun of him because they're like, what's this college
kid doing here? But then he works really hard, so
(32:08):
they respect him, and so they start to teach him
things in the mine. So you think about this. He
goes to Stanford to become a geologist and now he's
getting hands on experience in the mine. He eventually gets
a chance at a job, but the job requires him
to be at least thirty five years old, and it's
a job. It's company owned and based in London to
send him to Australia. So he has to go to London.
(32:31):
He grows a mustache to look thirty five. He goes
over apparently fools them and they send him to Australia.
And why is Australia. He's paid well. And you see
in his letters to his best friend Lester Hinsdale, who
was managing his money here in the United States, he
would say, look after you pay my bills, like if
anyone need, any of our gang needs money, I want
(32:52):
you to help them, but don't tell them it's for me.
And this is a theme in his life, this idea
of helping people. Now, going back back to the mining part,
he's on a camel, he's on a bike, he's going running.
I mean, it's a miserable existence in the mining world.
In the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds in Australia.
But he goes to a place that there was an
abandoned mine and he looks at it and from all
(33:14):
the stuff the Cornish guys taught him in the mind
and all the stuff he learns as geologists, he says,
there's still gold here, and so he convinces his employer
to buy it and to make him a partner, and
they strike gold. So what made Hoover wealthy was he
had ownership interest in minds all around the world, and
yet he was very focused on giving the money back
(33:34):
and that he was very very and he does it
twice obviously in World War One and World War Two
in feeding Europe because he knew how to create stuff
on scale because he had the number knowledge, he knew
how to run finances. But it was all about giving back.
So a really phenomenal human being.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
This is incredible, Megan, absolutely incredible. When we think of
modern presidents and even presidential candidates, there's a lot of
questions and criticism about where they make their money, where
and how they make their money. What are some of
the main ways modern presidents like HW Bush, George W. Bush, Clinton,
(34:11):
Obama Trump how they made their money.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, so it varies depending on the president, right, A
lot of these guys. When you look at Obama and Clinton,
they did not come from money. Obama. How Obama makes
money is sort of interesting because I wrote a book.
I can tell you there's no money in publishing if
you think about the Obamas. Michelle is a very grounded individual.
And we all know marriages like that where one spouse
(34:36):
is grounded and the other spouse is like up in
the air. And she talks about this. This is a
woman who grew up in Chicago with parents who almost
bought a house but decided not to because as Black Americans,
they didn't feel they had the safety net to do it,
like anyone who would help them if they ran into trouble.
And so Obama in the nineties writes, this book tells
of my father, songs of my father, and he gets
(34:57):
paid forty thousand dollars. It does okay, but when he
runs for Senate, the publisher decides to republish it. Well,
it takes off. And so when you go through the
Obama tax returns that are public, what you find is
from the time he runs from Senate to when he
leaves the presidency, he makes ten million dollars off the book. Phenomenal.
Now they've gone on to do what I would call
(35:19):
the jerry Ford rule. So Jerry Ford is a very
important demarcation of presidential money. Pre Jerry Ford President's left office,
they wrote a book Nixon Johnson Right, they died FDR right,
JFK or they went back to practicing law. I mean,
that's what Lincoln was gonna do, right. Franklin Pierce goes
back and does that. So Jerry Ford president for two years,
(35:43):
loses Jimmy Carter, and he doesn't have a lot of money.
He's worth like a hundle hundred thousand dollars, and he's
just devastated because, as you know, Bob, the president's will
all tell you, it takes two years to master the job,
to be really good at it. And he was at
that two year part and it gets yanked from him.
And he's like, I'm sixty one, I'm young, Like I
what am I gonna do? Play golf all day? And
we know he does play goff a lot. But he
(36:04):
ends up connecting with this gentleman named Norm Brokaw, who
is a very famous agent in Hollywood, and they come
up with a three part plan. He's gonna write a book,
so he and Betty sell the first joint book deal,
so everybody else should thank them for the joint book deal.
He's going to do speeches, and he's gonna do entrepreneurial endeavors.
(36:25):
And I get into a bit in the book. But
the one thing he becomes very successful at is he
joins corporate boards. And you know, Sandy Wheel of Smith
Barney talks about this in the oral histories that are
at the Ford Library and he says, look, when Jerry
Ford would come to the board meetings, you have someone
there who sees the world very differently. It's a different insights,
different ways to look at things. And this is someone
(36:46):
also came from a background. I remember he was in
Congress for a long time and he knew how to negotiate.
So what Ford would do is he would negotiate with
these corporations very distinct packages, and he would get equity
and payments for being on the board. And at one
point I think he was on twelve boards. He was
really good at that. So the Jerry Ford rule is
post presidency, you can go forth and do something to
(37:09):
make money. Bill Clinton does speeches everywhere when he first
leaves to pay off all the debt. The Obamas are
in podcasting and producing, and they now have like a
scholarship fund with Brian Cheskey of Airbnb. Right, so you
see these people sort of evolve stuff. And what's going
on in the news right now is a word article
because Joe Biden is not getting anything. He got a
(37:30):
book deal. But what may worked for you know, Ford
and Bush and Obama and Clinton is not working for
Biden because the Biden brand has sort of struggled. And
so this is one of these questions. Is this just
going to be a one off where we don't have
a president who takes advantage of the Jerry Ford rule
or is Biden going to have to evolve it in
(37:50):
the right direction. But I'll tell you one last thing
that was interesting with the presidents. You know, fifty years
before Jerry Ford, we had Calvin Coolidge. In nineteen twenty eight,
Calvin Coolidge is leaving office and Charles Merrill I Merrill
Lynch comes to him and says, hey, caw, I'd love
to have you on the board of Merrill Lynch. And
Coolidge is like, look, I can't help you. What do
(38:11):
I know about the economy? Right? It's like what And
Charles Merrow was gonna pay HM one hundred thousand dollars,
he doesn't take the job. And Charles Merrill must have
been so Charles Martzofi also to going around telling everyone
there's gonna be a huge crash. Which I find interesting
is that Calvin Coolidge doesn't even invest at Merrill Lynch.
He goes to another firm who puts him in the
(38:32):
market right before the crash, and so you know, it's
it's so. What I find so menching about Coolidge to
Ford is both men had really strong moral course, right,
both men had really challenging childhoods. And yet the world
had changed that much in fifty years that the presidency,
particularly post FDR, had evolved such that the president felt
(38:54):
that they had the expertise to provide knowledge for boards,
whereas Coolidge did not feel that way at all.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
I think I'll get called on it if I don't
ask about the current president, and just because it's money,
because he's someone who who was a businessman and worked
in real estate, followed for bankruptcy a few times prior
to his presidency, kind of made his money in branding
as much as in real estate, if not more so.
(39:23):
And now he is seemingly profiting. He's profiting, profiting while
he's in the White House, and you know that may
continue on afterwards. But he's into crypto and selling sneakers
branded sneakers and guitars and whatever, all this kind of stuff,
Like how is this just kind of like him? And
(39:46):
it's kind of it makes really sense for who he is.
Or is it you think presidents after after him will
make will make money while they're president.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
It's a really good question. So, first of all, when
you think about Trump, take him out personally. What he
is very focused on, which is very common with these
wealthy families, is there's a lot of multi generational planning
going on. So, right, we know about the loan Fred
Trump made to Donald that God has started. When you
work with these families, there's G one, generation one, G two,
(40:20):
G three, G four, So Fred Trump is G one,
Donald is G two, Ivanka, Eric Tiffany, and Donald Junior
are G three, and then their children to G four.
So what you're seeing with the Trump money is this
structure going on where the G one wanted to eventually
get everything to G three G two. Trump wants to
(40:40):
get everything to G four. So a lot of the
entities and structures that you see is that going on
where Donald Trump sort of if I had to give
him a skill that he's very good with. He is
very good with pushing the envelope with risk, right, and
that's something people struggle with when they're managing their money,
(41:00):
and so he is always willing to push the line.
So Donald Trump will do estate planning techniques that I
do with my clients. When we do these techniques, we
are very focused on making sure that they pass muster
with the IRS, that if the IRS was to audit them,
that the audit would not be cancel out the gift
that we made, the transfer that we made. When you
(41:21):
look at the gifts that Donald Trump makes through techniques
called a grant to retain dinnuity trust, he's always being
overly aggressive. And what's interesting is you see the IRS
auditing him but not pulling back the valuations to the
level that you would expect. The other thing about Donald
Trump is he might have a core business, but his
(41:41):
money's being made around it. So I'm sitting here today
in campe Made New Jersey, I'm thirty miles south of
Atlantic City. The money that he made in Atlantic City
was not really from the casinos. It was from bonuses.
He was paid salaries, he was paid lawsuits in Atlantic City.
Because a lot of time in the Atlantic City situation,
which it's very complex to go through on a podcast,
(42:04):
he was often paid to go away. So what he's
done is he's able to figure out sort of the
way around things. And so the question I struggle with
all the time because I think about Trump and I
think about George Washington. When George Washington was president, he
was managing Mount Vernon on a day to day basis, right,
you see it in his correspondence, and yet he wasn't
(42:25):
capitalizing on the presidency in the same way. So Washington
clearly felt that it was important for people to believe
in the presidency and in this new country, and he
had to always do right and he would get like,
there's one story he got a prize from the Commonwealth
of Virginia as a thank you, twenty thousand dollars worth
of stock for all he had done for the country
(42:47):
in seventeen ninety six. When he's president and he needs
the cash he's got very liquid assets, but he donates
it to charity because he just isn't he knows that
people have to trust him. Today if we look at
trust him, politicians regardless of you know, Biden or Trump, right,
when you look rather pular party, people don't trust. And
(43:08):
so the question for Americans is do we have to
change our system on how we have the presidents run
their money when they're in office, because we all know
the Jerry Ford rule, which is once you're out, you
can go make a ton of money. And I think
that that has to be restructured because the rules that
were put in place in the nineteen sixties and then
obviously the financial disclosure rules of nineteen seventy eight, they
(43:31):
were made for a different type of financial system, one
where there wasn't branding, where there isn't influencers, and today
there's just you can take too much advantage of the system.
So I think post Trump, we really need to rework
the system.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Would someone today become president without being if not a
million wealthy? Yeah, without being wealthy?
Speaker 1 (43:54):
I think it's hard. I think that Citizens United and
other court cases have allowed a lot of mone need
to go into the political process. You could make an
argument Ian Bremer, who is a political scientist, so I
find fascinating he talks about the fact, you know, we
may have become an oligarchy already because of the money
that's come in. So you think about what's going on.
Unless you're moneyed or your celebrity, it is very hard
(44:18):
to be the Abraham Lincoln who climbs from nothing and
makes it. And when you think about it, when you
go back to the presidents. I said this earlier. The
first six came from money. But Andrew Jackson is one
who really created the idea of a poor boy who
could go off into the world and become president of
the United States. And I worry that we've lost that
(44:41):
ability to have future Andrew Jackson's And I say, Andrew Jackson,
we have Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, Ronald Right.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Let me ask you this, mean, guys, Jackson, wasn't he
already very wealthy?
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Though?
Speaker 2 (44:56):
I mean he sold himself off as a as a
common man for the common man. But didn't he have
like one hundred and fifty enslaved people when he became president?
Speaker 1 (45:08):
When he became president, yestar.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
In the Waxhaws in North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Correct. So his dad dies when his mom's pregnant with him.
You know, he's taken prisoner by the British. He loses
his mom and brothers. This is a guy who can't
through nothing, but he was clever and you see it,
and he fails. He fails early on. He is a
store in Tennessee that fails, and he goes up to
Philadelphia to try to fix it, and they gets played
by someone up there. But he's someone who's quick and
(45:34):
clever and learns from his mistakes. And you see that
with Jackson, and you see that with Lincoln, and you
give them both a lot of credit. So to answer
your question, I hope we get back to a point
in time where a guy who doesn't or a guy
gal who doesn't have a college education can make it
through and someone who's just a regular American can make
it through. I'm I don't know if that can happen
today and where the system is.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
I've been talking to Megan Gorman. She is the author
of the book All the President Money, How the men
who governed America govern their money. Megan, this has been
incredibly fascinating. Thank you, so much for joining us today
on American History Hotline.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Bob, thanks for having me on, and thank you for
letting me share my love of the human side of
the presidents, because at the end of the day, we
might all disagree politically, but we all sort of love
these stories about the guys who helped create this country.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of
iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show is executive
producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are
Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed by me,
Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is Americanhistory
(46:49):
Hotline at gmail dot com. If you like the show,
please tell your friends and leave us a review in
Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob. Feel free to hit
me up on social media to ask a history question
or to let me know what you think of the show.
You can find me at Bob Crawford Base. Thanks so
(47:10):
much for listening. See you next week.
And Jefferson. I think you can't mention on money without
talking about his two buddies, Madison and Monroe, because the
three of them, as brilliant as the three of them were,
they were all horrible with money.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we
get the answers. Leave a message. Hey, they are American
History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here. You know the drill by.
Now send us your questions will get you some answers,
and the best way to get us a question about
(00:33):
American history is to record a video or a voice
memo on your phone and email it to a Americanhistory
Hotline at gmail dot com. That's Americanhistory Hotline at gmail
dot com. Okay, today's question is about the men on
our money and how they made their money. I'll explain
(00:55):
more in a second, but first let me introduce my
guest for the day. She is Meghan Gorman, author of
the book All the President's Money, How the Men who
governed America Governed their Money. Megan, thanks for joining me today, Bob.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
It's my pleasure. Okay, Megan, here's the question we were
hoping you could help us to answer. It comes from
Mike in Des Moines, Iowa. He says, I just visited Monicello,
Thomas Jefferson's home, and I learned that Thomas Jefferson died broke.
It's hard to square how someone who could be so
(01:33):
accomplished in one part of their life but have no
grasp on money. Megan, this is one of my favorite questions.
I'm always asking myself the same question before we get
to Thomas Jefferson specifically, can you tell me which presidents
were the best and the worst at handling their finances?
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Oh my goodness. Yeah, so you know, it really is
a random mys who were really really good with money.
But let's start with President number one, George Washington phenomenal
with money, which and I know we taught you asked,
just asked about Jefferson. But he's living in the same
time period as Thomas Jefferson, same asset based mix, and
yet Washington's phenomenal. Jefferson's quite a failure when we think
(02:18):
about other presidents who are really good with their money.
Don't laugh, Warren G. Harding, Right, he always ranks at
the bottom, Right, Like who wants to be Warren g.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Harney is at the bottom of every list but personal finances.
So talk about this.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah, so let's talk about Harding because to your point,
he's always the worst. But Harding grows up in Ohio
in a time period where there's a lot of change
like there is today, and things like newspapers were really
becoming a megaphone, just like our social media. And as
he's growing up, he's trying to figure out what he
wants to do. He tries to be a teacher, tries
(02:57):
to sell insurance, and then he and two other friends
to decide to buy a local newspaper called The Marian Star,
and they buy it for three hundred dollars, and he
eventually buys the other two out, and the Marrying Star
is something that just clicks with him. He is really
good at sort of developing a newspaper, and some of
the ideas he does are really obvious, like he convinced
(03:18):
locals like let's advertise for snowshovels in the fall and
winter and not the summer, right like seasonal advertising. And
so he builds up this newspaper and then he obviously
marries his wife, Florence and she's really good with money,
so she runs the finances and they create this newspaper
where the environment has a great esprit de corps. And
(03:39):
when you look into his newspaper, what you find out
is his employees love him. He has like an esop
an employee stock ownership program where the employees own the
newspaper and they call him WG. And they think he's
great and he's very las fair. So remember sometimes the
traits that make you good at something make you bad
at something else. Right, So in this case, he was
(04:00):
a very good leader, very good with the newspaper, really
grew the newspaper. And you know what you found was
he cared about the community. And so when I was
talking to the woman who runs the presidential site, she said,
you know WG used to go around town and if
you were a new business, he would frequent you, or
if you had a new company, he'd buy stock because
he felt it was about the community. And I say
(04:23):
this because when you go back to nineteen twenty three
and he's dying, well he doesn't know he's dying, but
he's on that tour of great understanding, right, goes up
to Alaska and then he comes down to San Francisco.
Besides the fact that he's visiting Americans, he's also rewriting
his estate plan, and he's trying to sell the newspaper,
and he is trying to figure out what he's going
to do post presidency. And he decides what he's going
(04:44):
to do is he's going to write a column in
the newspaper that he sells, and of course he dies
at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, doesn't get the
transaction finished, his wife completes it. And but over his
course of his life, he was just very organized financially,
and so he's not someone that we all aspire to
be like when we're president. But when it comes to money,
(05:05):
this idea of being involved in the community and thinking
of others and really supporting others is incredibly important and
incredibly key to understanding who he was as a person.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Okay, so let's get back to Thomas Jefferson for a minute.
At least he liked the finer things in life, right
to put it wildly, How did he make his money
and what did he spend it on?
Speaker 1 (05:28):
So, first of all, when you think of the first
six presidents of the country, I want you to think
about the fact that all of them had money from land. Okay,
you know, from Washington to Quincy Adams all were landhold owners.
Obviously Adams and Quincy Adams didn't have slaves, and so
Jefferson had his wealth from the plantations, from the slaves
he owned, and he was the land to class here
(05:50):
in the United States. And where he makes mistakes is
some of them are his mistakes and some of them
are more macro estate issues. So when you think about
the time period he's living in, right, you're living in
a situation where crops fail. Then we go through a
period of great turmoil. So there's inflation on currency by
the way, currencies dependent on what they were. You have
(06:13):
panics that go on during his lifetime. And then he
sort of doesn't put himself into the right position because
he makes loans to people that he shouldn't make loans to.
And he also assumes the debts of his father in law.
So part of Jefferson's mindset is he is a gentleman, right,
he has a belief on how people are supposed to behave.
(06:34):
He also goes to France and learns how to live
the good life. And I think a lot about him,
and I think when I think about him, I think
about the losses he had in life, right that you know,
losing his wife. You live in a time period where
people don't live long lives like they do today, and
I think it ends up sort of getting to be Look,
I'm going to live in the moment, right, And that
(06:55):
was part of his challenge. And so when you go
through the Jefferson cough and all the sort of budgeting
that his team does and sort of running his household,
particularly when he's in the White House, he does like
the great things in life, the beautiful wines, the cheeses, right, champagne,
It's just an amazing lifestyle. But where Jefferson sort of struggles, right,
(07:18):
is he's never if you're not good with money, your
role then is to find someone to be your steward.
And Jefferson is never able to find that steward to
manage the money. And part of it was these were very,
very complex assets. You compare him to Washington and Washington
even during the Revolutionary War, even as president, he's actively
(07:40):
managing his assets, and he's also very strict on things.
Washington will only take real cash. He will not take
cash certificates, which were popular at the time, and so
I think with Jefferson, he just never gets his arms
around it, and he just I think, believes in a
nobler cause. Now to the question asked, you know, when
he gets the end of his life, if Monticello is
(08:01):
falling apart, it's not what we see today, right. He
didn't have the money to keep it up. He ends
up doing a lottery and I talk about this in
the book. In the Saturday Evening Post, there's an advertisement
there's a lottery that you could win Monticello, and of
course they start selling the tickets, and a group of
Americans come together and say, look, let's not do this bad. Look,
(08:21):
let's go fund me. Right, they don't actually raise any
money for him. He continues to struggle and he dies
in debt, and we see in his estate plan him
doing things to try to protect his daughter so she
could keep Monticello. But that fails and Monticello goes up
for auction, as do the slaves. And one of the
slaves writes a book many years later, and the real
(08:42):
tragedy of the story is slave families who had been
on the plantation for decades, for generations, were split up,
and that's really heartbreaking. So Jefferson and Jefferson, I think
you can't mention on money without talking about his two buddies,
Madison and Monroe, because the three of them, as brilliant
as the three of them were, they were all horrible
(09:02):
with money really really just weren't able to wrap their
arms around it. And Madison, to me, of all of them,
is interesting because Madison and Joe Biden, I feel like
are like twins in a weird way.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Oh explain, Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Madison, you know, marries Dolly Madison, right, but Dolly paying
her original name. She was previously married and in Philadelphia,
she had a husband and two sons, and in the
yellow fever outbreak, her husband or son dies, her other
son survives, and then she meets James Madison. They marry
and there's been a lot of trauma, and they dote
on this little boy almost too much, too much over indulgence, right,
(09:41):
And so what goes on to happen is Madison always
goes out of his way to smooth the path right,
to give his steps on everything he could want. And
his step son struggles with alcohol, addiction, gambling. You know,
he's not a hard worker. He squanders every opportunity and
it gets to the end of Madison's if he's trying
to sell his papers to Congress because there's value to them,
(10:04):
he knows that he wants to get like one hundred
thousand for it. He doesn't even get them sold before
he dies. Dolly sells them after his death for about
thirty thousand dollars, and then she has to sell the home,
move in with a friend, and the son is still
sucking money out of his mother, and she eventually dies.
He doesn't die that long after her, but he's just
(10:24):
been this mess of a life, right, And if you
look at Joe Biden, right, what I find the parallels
with them about is we have a great trauma that
happens with Joe Biden. Joe Biden, there's two big traumas
that impact him. The first happens when he's born in
nineteen forty two. His family's wealthy, they're out on the cape,
you know, they're living a nice life, right. And then
(10:45):
after the war, his father's manufacturing business closes down, and
that's when Scranton starts. Right, we all think of Joe
from Scranton. Now, was Joe's family's living the good life.
So that's trauma one is to fall from an economic standpoint.
Trauma two is, as we all know, he loses his
first wife and baby daughter in that car accident. And
so when you go through Biden's finances, what you see
(11:07):
is someone who when it comes to family members at times,
can be a little over indulgent, very James Madison. And
so I have a lot of empathy for both Madison
and Biden because they have a lot of love for
their family. They want to do the right things, but
just by how they handle them with the money, it
just never works out. And so I found really interesting
(11:29):
is when I was writing the book and doing the research,
was no matter what time period we were in, the
issues were all the same. And so the fact that
our most recent president, who just left the White House
is the same issues as the fourth president of the
United States, it's like wow, Like money has a common
theme to it when it comes to personal finance.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Is it easier as a historian to learn James Madison's
financial picture or is it easier or harder to learn
Joe Biden's financial picture?
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, I would tell you James Madison, right. So the
more recent right. You know, from like Reagan on, a
lot of their stuff is still classified. It's I mean
some of these people are still living, right, you know,
and so you either have to really look for what
was out there, what was put in the public arena, right,
or look in the newspapers and those types of resources.
(12:25):
When it comes to people like James Madison, there is
a lot of primary source documentation that you know, just
has a lot of meat on it. I mean, God
blessed John Quincy Adams. The man kept a diary every
day of his life. I mean, it's like he knew
we were going to be looking for it. So when
you think about these these these presidents, right, one of
the things that we have as Americans that I would
(12:46):
tell you they're crown jewels, is the fact that we
understand that their papers have value. That these archives that
are out there, and anyone who's listening, regardless of your
political affiliation, our presidential libraries are awesome and the amount
of archives like what they have. I mean, I remember
I reached out to the Truman Library because everybody thinks
Truman was poor, right, not true, he dies wealthy, but
(13:09):
it was it was amazing because the archive is we're
going back and forth over email, and he said, I
got a letter for you. I'm gonna send it to you,
and they scan it, you know, and they send it
to me. And it's a letter that Harry Truman writes
his wife Bess in the early nineteen seventies, and he's
sort of saying, look, if I pass away, I want
you to know what we have and where it is.
(13:30):
And he lists out all these bank accounts and this there,
and it's about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which
is in our dollar, our money byably between five and
six million dollars. Right, you don't think you're like, wait,
what happened to poor Harry Truman? So let me tell
you what happened with Truman. He was not financially successful
for a large portion of his life. But he gets
to the White House. His salary is seventy five thousand
(13:51):
dollars and Congress raises it to one hundred, and Congress
gives him a stipend of fifty thousand dollars a year
that he's gonna get and it's gonna be tax free
and doesn't require an accounting. Right, So, if you go
back in that time, period. What's going on with Harry
Truman and the White House in nineteen forty eight, forty nine,
they're doing a massive renovation, so the family moves to Blairhouse.
(14:13):
They're not entertaining. So he saves this, and of course
Congress especially comes back and like, oh, we really need
to be like managing this stipend. But he's able to
save the money, and because he had failed so much,
you know, I think with Truman you run into a
little what we call bag lady syndrome, which is you
have people who make money and they're frightened that the
next day they're going to wake up and be a
(14:34):
bag lady. And it's very real. I have clients with
this issue. So what I'm going back to the primary
source data. You know why we didn't know this about
Harry Truman is until Margaret Truman passed away, his daughter
in the early two thousands, it was still a classified
file in the National Archives, and finally it gets released
as she passes. So when you think of the presidents today,
(14:55):
it's going to be you know, the next generation that
will know really what went on, you know, with HW's
money or Obama or Biden, because at that point the
people who are alive today will have passed, and a
lot of the releases will allow that money, that information
to be out in the public.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Let's talk about a president who we can we're pretty
sure grew up in poverty. Abraham Lincoln. Yes, everyone knows
he was born poor, very much salt of the earth
kind of a guy. Ey was what was his financial journey? Like?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Oh my god, he was a hot mess for a
long period of time. But you gotta love Lincoln. Lincoln
and Washington are really interesting because you have to think
about it. We have a group of presidents who are
not educated.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
In fact, if you think about it, our three when
they always rank him, it's Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. FDR
is clearly very educated, but the other two were self educated.
And Lincoln grows up and he doesn't know a lot
about money, and he doesn't really like his father. So
what's really important in Lincoln's story is once he turns
twenty one, he is not required by law to give
any he makes to his father. So Lincoln goes out
(16:05):
in the world. He gets up to you know, and
he gets partnered with a gentleman who they decide to
buy and create a store and they take out all
this debt to buy this store. The general's name is
William Berry, and then they decide very quickly on to
buy another store, and they rack up all this inventory
and all this debt, and the business is not doing well.
(16:28):
They're struggling because remember he doesn't have the experience to
run a business. And then William Barry conveniently passes away.
He's an alcoholic, and he passes away, and so Lincoln
has to absorb all of this debt. And he's a
funny guy, and he always called it his national debt,
and it was probably equivalent of about forty thousand dollars
in our money today, so you think about it's sort
(16:49):
of like his student loan debt. And so he has
this debt, and you see him again and again trying
to pay down the debt in the early part of
his life, and he eventually does, but he hits it
taught him a really important lesson, and so when you
look in Lincoln's finances in the early years, you see
a lot of mistakes. He gets brought to court for
some of these mistakes, for not paying bills. But he
(17:10):
gets to a point when he's in Springfield. He marries up.
He marries Mary Todd, and he's in Springfield. And what
does he do with his money. He does a lot
of loans to people. When Lincoln becomes president, he actually
rents out the house in Springfield. If you go to
Springfield and you see this house, it's an upper middle
class house. Like he had gotten money, and he rents
(17:31):
the house out. He goes to Washington, d c. And
what we see in the documentation is he takes every
bit of his twenty five thousand dollars salary and he's
saving it in treasury notes and treasury bonds right backed
by the full faith and credit of the US government,
paying him six seven percent interest. And I love that
(17:51):
about him because what that's doing is it's lining his
financial interests with that of the country, with that of
the Union. And you got to give him credit for that.
To me, he made that connection. Unfortunately for Lincoln, his
wife is in New York spending money. She's like racking
up all this debt. She tries to pass bills off
to different departments within the White within you know, the
(18:11):
executive branch. She's chaotic with money, and she even says
to her dressmaker at one point, Look, if he doesn't
win the reelection.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
What I'm sorry, Megan, was it Elizabeth Keckley?
Speaker 1 (18:23):
It was Elizabeth Keckley, Yes.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Who is who worked at a school, a girls' school,
a couple miles from my house here in North Carolina. Oh,
I love this post presidency. Yeah, anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah. So she tells Elizabeth Keckley, if he finds out
how much debt we have, we're in trouble. And Lincoln
had started to think about his post presidency. He had
said to Mary, I'm probably going to go back and
practice law, which is what a lot of them did
pre Jerry Ford. And so when Lincoln actually passes away
an April fifteenth, eighteen sixty five, he's worth about eighty
(18:56):
five thousand dollars, which is really about two million dollar money.
But what's really shocking about it, Bob, is he passes
away without an estate plan. There's a man who had
premonitions of death. We're in the middle of a war, right,
He's a lawyer. He doesn't have an estate plan. And
so Robert Todd Lincoln calls in the Chief Justice of
(19:16):
the United States and says, help us, help us probate
this and they do, and they gather the assets and
the bonds and the rents and they split it up
a third to Mary Todd, a third to Tad, and
a third to Robert. And that's how the estate gets
sort of distributed. But again sort of an odd ending,
not having an estate plan to someone who really did
make the American dream when it came to finance incredible.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Did Mary Todd come from money?
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Oh yes, yes, she was very pampered. She grew up
in Kentucky with a from a slave owning family. But
she has, you know, history. I don't know if you've
seen the play in New York Oh Mary heard. It's
a fun show. You know, this is a woman who
she had a lot of challenges and some of it
probably came from the fact that, you know, her mother
dies when she's very little. She gets this step mother.
(20:06):
She gets attention by causing drama. And you know, her
and Lincoln are a good example of someone you know,
he married up by marrying her. But the challenge the
two of them had financially is they didn't have shared values.
Now to compare that, Eisenhower did not grow up with money.
Maybe married Geneva Dowd grew up with a lot of money.
(20:27):
Her father was so successful he retired at age thirty
six from this meat factory he had. And so what
I find interesting about Ike and Maymi is that despite
growing up very very differently, they ended up having a
lot of the same values about money, and they lived
paycheck to paycheck until he basically did his memoir and
(20:49):
became President of Columbia. But you know, she used to say,
Ike is so tight with a buck that when he
when he squeezes the dollar, the eagle screams, and which
is very may Mamie's a character. Like one of the
things that's sort of funny is google eyes Ike and
Mamie when they're young. First of all, they're gorgeous, like
you're like, oh, okay, I get it now. But what
(21:11):
I find really funny about Mamie is she has these
little bon mots which give you a sense of who
she was. And one of my favorites is, I have
a career and its name is Ike, and I could
totally like, I just I get it, like all of
a sudden, what you really understood how she saw life.
And you know, we know her as that little lady
in the fifties with the little bangs and the pink
but yeah, she had a sassy side to her.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
We're about to take a quick break, but before I do,
I want to let you know all about my new
book that's coming out soon. It's called America's Founding Son
John Quincy Adams, from President to political Maverick. Pre order
your book today. It's available wherever you buy your books.
(21:59):
This is American Histy Hotline. I'm your host, Bob Crawford.
Today my guest is Megan Gorman. She's author of the
book All the President's Money, How the men who governed
America governed their money. We're talking about the people on
our money who sometimes found themselves not having any money. Remember,
(22:19):
send us your burning questions about American history. Record yourself
using the voice memo app on your phone and email
it to American History Hotline at gmail dot com. That's
Americanhistory Hotline at gmail dot com. You can also write
your question in the comments section of the Spotify app
and we'll see it. Now back to the show, Megan,
(22:42):
we got to talk about FDR. Yes, I think that
you say he's quote terrible with money but gets a
gold Star for charity. Yes, tell me about him.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
So FDR. Look, he's a trust fund kid, right, so
you know we think of the Rosaveout money, right, the
New York money. But he was also a Delano and
that had real money because they had made the Delanas
had made a fortune in the opium trade, lost a fortune,
and then remade a fortune. So he grows up very
you know, with money, it's something that's there. And so
(23:14):
when you see him across you know his life. You know,
he had a check every month from his trust so
did Eleanor. He becomes assistant secretary of the Navy and
they ask him how he wants his paycheck. He's like, ah, no,
give me cash. And it took a few months and
finally Eleanor's like, where's the money. I gotta buy groceries?
Like he just he doesn't think about money the way
(23:35):
you and I do. But what's fascinating about fdr story
is the story of how he manages his money in
relation to polio. So we all know FDR gets polio
in nineteen twenty one, and what's hard for the first
three years of having polio is he becomes obsessed with
trying to find a way to walk again. Right, and
(23:56):
he struggles with depression. You know, he's out on a
boat with Missy Hand in Florida. I mean, these are
dark times. And in the FDR library when you go
through his correspondence on at that time, God bless this
guy because people were writing him with crazy ideas, and
he was always such a gentleman and so proper. He
always wrote people back, even when the ideas were wacky.
(24:18):
But one thing comes to him in nineteen twenty four
George Peabody, who today we know from the Peabody Award, right,
and it says, look, I have this inn in Warm Springs,
Georgia and niece. It's called the Merriweather Inn and the Springs.
You should go check it out now. Interestingly, like three
weeks after he gets this letter, he gets a letter
from somebody in Tennessee talking about like a springs like that,
(24:40):
a warm spring in Tennessee. So he goes to Warm Springs.
He gets there, it's him Eleanor Missy lahand Eleanor can't
take it. She leaves immediately. FDR gets in the water
and it's like this aha moment. It's just like, oh
my God, for the first time in three years, I
can move my legs. And what ends up happening, I'm
gonna shortened certain. The story is he becomes obsessed with
(25:03):
this place and he decides he's going to buy it.
And George Peabody was failing with this hotel, but he
still sells it to FDR for probably the equivalent of
about two thirds of FDR's trust fund, and which is wild.
And FDR has this idea that he's going to have
wealthy people there at Warm Springs and people with polio,
and of course everyone else is like, no, we don't
(25:24):
want to be around people with polio, like we forget today.
Polio was so frightening to people. And of course Basil O'Connor,
his business partner, says, hold on, I'm coming down. So
they he goes down there and he helps FDR. They
get the place certified as a hydrotherapy medical center. They
set up a charity called Warm Springs and they basically
(25:45):
transfort for the hotel into it. And they do two
things financially that's sort of interesting. The one is a
technique that we do today. When they wanted FDR to
run for president, FDR was like, but but what will
happen to the cure and Warm Springs, so he said,
and he's like, if I die, warm Springs will die.
(26:06):
So they decide they're going to have Warm Springs the
charity by life insurance on FDR. And so there's this
legal issue of is there an ensurable interest? And so
it's determined that yes, there is because Warm Springs would
cease to exist, but for FDR's life, you know, being alive.
And the other thing they had to figure out is
could they ensure FDR. Now I'll tell you this cool story.
(26:27):
I'm at the FDR library and you know, I'm always
calling these libraries asking for crazy things like Richard Nixon's
Orange Juice Company. You know, a FDRs I asked, originally
asked about the lobsters, which is in the book. So
I'm there and the archives comes up to me with
a box and she's like, we still haven't fully processed
this box. It came in about a year ago. You
can't photograph it, you can't. You gotta wear the gloves.
(26:49):
But I think it's what you're looking for. So I
open the box and what is in it? But it's
the life insurance application and all these Western Union correspondents
between the different insurance companies, and none of the insurance
companies want to insure him, and so each company is
writing the other underwriter at the other company like what
are you doing? What are we going to do? Like
(27:10):
this is not a great insurable risk, and they finally
all decide that they're going to basically take us piece
of the insurance to ensure FDR. And of course FDR
goes to the papers and is like, I might be
forty something, but they say I got the body of
a thirty year old, and what you can tell from
everything is this is not true. So of course they
set up the insurance and on a when he dies,
(27:32):
the insurance does pay out. It's the equivalent of ten
million dollars today it was five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The other thing they do financially, which is interesting is
basil'connor decides that they should have a birthday ball when
FDR's president to raise awareness for polio. And he says,
every American send in ten cents. Could you imagine them
asking us this today? But March of dimes, the March
(27:54):
of dimes. Eddie Canter called it the March of dimes,
and literally two point seven million Americans in dice it's
go fundme, And today we would never do this, right,
We just don't think that same way. But this birthday
ball thing was huge, and of course he dies in
nineteen forty five. We still don't have a cure, but
all of that money goes into the pursuit of the cure.
(28:17):
It does happen in the nineteen fifties, And what was
interesting is there were a lot of people who were
very nervous about doing the vaccinations, and in particular teenagers
in the United States. So I talked about this in
the book What do they do on the Ed Sullivan Show?
Right before he goes on, they give Elvis Presley the vaccine?
And every teenager in America runs right out and gets vaccinated.
(28:38):
But you know, it's it's it's really a testament to
FDR's ability to transform the mundane into a vision that
everybody gets into. I mean, it's a it's an amazing skill,
and the people who have it are huge. But you know,
this is one of those things where FDR was just
(28:59):
simply unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
So I have to ask and I well, now I
really want to ask about Richard Nixon's Orange Juice Company.
The first Megan, I have to ask, what made you
want to write a book about president's personal finances?
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah, so, you know, I've always loved the presidents. I'm
from a really small town in southern New Jersey called
Cape May, and when I was growing up, we were
very disconnected from the rest of the world, and I
would be a kid that would go in the library
and read about it. Because a lot of the presidents,
particularly starting with Andrew Jackson, they're boys from small towns,
often poor boys. Sorry, there's no girls going out in
the world. So when I got older, I started working
(29:37):
at Goldman Sachs, and I grew up middle class, and
I would be in front of CEOs and CFOs, and
when you work with people, you want to understand where
they came from. And they would tell their story and
they would always say and I worked really hard and
I got lucky, didn't matter how successful the person was.
They always said that. And so I would read books
about presidents and other historical figures and I would be like, well,
you talk about him here buying a house. It's like
(29:58):
one little sentence. I know how hard that transaction is, right,
And so that's what got I wanted to sort of
carve into that, and it was hard. It's really hard
at first because you're really especially with a lot of
the older presidents. You've got to go into the letters,
you know, you got to, I mean, and then you
get the fact that they save stuff. You know, I
have Herbert Hoover's scant copy of his power of attorney
(30:20):
from when he was in Australia, you know, finding the
gold mines and so on. So you're always sort of
looking for this nuanced stuff. Because all of us talk
about money all the time. It's just it's sometimes not
You got to look dig for the little nuggets like
FDR and his lobsters or Richard Nixon and his Orange
Juice company.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Well, speaking of Herbert Hoover, that's an interesting financial journey,
isn't it.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
He's amazing. He really was amazing, and he was He's again,
like Warren Harding, not a great president. But Herbert Hoover
was a phenomenal person. And one of the things that
sort of impacted his life is he was a Quaker,
and the Quaker certain beliefs about how you live your life.
This spice is what they call it, simplicity, community and
(31:06):
he was very focused on the community. And so he
grows up with parents who are becoming successful and they
both die. His dad dies when he's four, his mom
dies when he's nine, and the Quakers have a financial
guardian for him and a physical guardian. So very early
on he learns to budget. And when we look at
so people haven't asked, like, what should you be doing
(31:27):
to make your kids savvy with money? There's certain ages
you're supposed to learn, certain abilities adding, subtracting, running budgets,
and hoover times in perfectly with this. So he's running
budgets as a small boy. Fast forward, you know, he
gets goes to Stanford, he's in the pioneer class. He graduates,
(31:47):
there's no jobs. Panic of eighteen ninety three. He's got
a geology degree. So what does this guy do. He
goes out to the Sierra Nevadas. He's desperate for a job,
and he takes a job in a mind pushing a cart.
And the mines are run by cornish people, like they're
the ones who are actual miners. And after first they
made fun of him because they're like, what's this college
kid doing here? But then he works really hard, so
(32:08):
they respect him, and so they start to teach him
things in the mine. So you think about this. He
goes to Stanford to become a geologist and now he's
getting hands on experience in the mine. He eventually gets
a chance at a job, but the job requires him
to be at least thirty five years old, and it's
a job. It's company owned and based in London to
send him to Australia. So he has to go to London.
(32:31):
He grows a mustache to look thirty five. He goes
over apparently fools them and they send him to Australia.
And why is Australia. He's paid well. And you see
in his letters to his best friend Lester Hinsdale, who
was managing his money here in the United States, he
would say, look after you pay my bills, like if
anyone need, any of our gang needs money, I want
(32:52):
you to help them, but don't tell them it's for me.
And this is a theme in his life, this idea
of helping people. Now, going back back to the mining part,
he's on a camel, he's on a bike, he's going running.
I mean, it's a miserable existence in the mining world.
In the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds in Australia.
But he goes to a place that there was an
abandoned mine and he looks at it and from all
(33:14):
the stuff the Cornish guys taught him in the mind
and all the stuff he learns as geologists, he says,
there's still gold here, and so he convinces his employer
to buy it and to make him a partner, and
they strike gold. So what made Hoover wealthy was he
had ownership interest in minds all around the world, and
yet he was very focused on giving the money back
(33:34):
and that he was very very and he does it
twice obviously in World War One and World War Two
in feeding Europe because he knew how to create stuff
on scale because he had the number knowledge, he knew
how to run finances. But it was all about giving back.
So a really phenomenal human being.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
This is incredible, Megan, absolutely incredible. When we think of
modern presidents and even presidential candidates, there's a lot of
questions and criticism about where they make their money, where
and how they make their money. What are some of
the main ways modern presidents like HW Bush, George W. Bush, Clinton,
(34:11):
Obama Trump how they made their money.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, so it varies depending on the president, right, A
lot of these guys. When you look at Obama and Clinton,
they did not come from money. Obama. How Obama makes
money is sort of interesting because I wrote a book.
I can tell you there's no money in publishing if
you think about the Obamas. Michelle is a very grounded individual.
And we all know marriages like that where one spouse
(34:36):
is grounded and the other spouse is like up in
the air. And she talks about this. This is a
woman who grew up in Chicago with parents who almost
bought a house but decided not to because as Black Americans,
they didn't feel they had the safety net to do it,
like anyone who would help them if they ran into trouble.
And so Obama in the nineties writes, this book tells
of my father, songs of my father, and he gets
(34:57):
paid forty thousand dollars. It does okay, but when he
runs for Senate, the publisher decides to republish it. Well,
it takes off. And so when you go through the
Obama tax returns that are public, what you find is
from the time he runs from Senate to when he
leaves the presidency, he makes ten million dollars off the book. Phenomenal.
Now they've gone on to do what I would call
(35:19):
the jerry Ford rule. So Jerry Ford is a very
important demarcation of presidential money. Pre Jerry Ford President's left office,
they wrote a book Nixon Johnson Right, they died FDR right,
JFK or they went back to practicing law. I mean,
that's what Lincoln was gonna do, right. Franklin Pierce goes
back and does that. So Jerry Ford president for two years,
(35:43):
loses Jimmy Carter, and he doesn't have a lot of money.
He's worth like a hundle hundred thousand dollars, and he's
just devastated because, as you know, Bob, the president's will
all tell you, it takes two years to master the job,
to be really good at it. And he was at
that two year part and it gets yanked from him.
And he's like, I'm sixty one, I'm young, Like I
what am I gonna do? Play golf all day? And
we know he does play goff a lot. But he
(36:04):
ends up connecting with this gentleman named Norm Brokaw, who
is a very famous agent in Hollywood, and they come
up with a three part plan. He's gonna write a book,
so he and Betty sell the first joint book deal,
so everybody else should thank them for the joint book deal.
He's going to do speeches, and he's gonna do entrepreneurial endeavors.
(36:25):
And I get into a bit in the book. But
the one thing he becomes very successful at is he
joins corporate boards. And you know, Sandy Wheel of Smith
Barney talks about this in the oral histories that are
at the Ford Library and he says, look, when Jerry
Ford would come to the board meetings, you have someone
there who sees the world very differently. It's a different insights,
different ways to look at things. And this is someone
(36:46):
also came from a background. I remember he was in
Congress for a long time and he knew how to negotiate.
So what Ford would do is he would negotiate with
these corporations very distinct packages, and he would get equity
and payments for being on the board. And at one
point I think he was on twelve boards. He was
really good at that. So the Jerry Ford rule is
post presidency, you can go forth and do something to
(37:09):
make money. Bill Clinton does speeches everywhere when he first
leaves to pay off all the debt. The Obamas are
in podcasting and producing, and they now have like a
scholarship fund with Brian Cheskey of Airbnb. Right, so you
see these people sort of evolve stuff. And what's going
on in the news right now is a word article
because Joe Biden is not getting anything. He got a
(37:30):
book deal. But what may worked for you know, Ford
and Bush and Obama and Clinton is not working for
Biden because the Biden brand has sort of struggled. And
so this is one of these questions. Is this just
going to be a one off where we don't have
a president who takes advantage of the Jerry Ford rule
or is Biden going to have to evolve it in
(37:50):
the right direction. But I'll tell you one last thing
that was interesting with the presidents. You know, fifty years
before Jerry Ford, we had Calvin Coolidge. In nineteen twenty eight,
Calvin Coolidge is leaving office and Charles Merrill I Merrill
Lynch comes to him and says, hey, caw, I'd love
to have you on the board of Merrill Lynch. And
Coolidge is like, look, I can't help you. What do
(38:11):
I know about the economy? Right? It's like what And
Charles Merrow was gonna pay HM one hundred thousand dollars,
he doesn't take the job. And Charles Merrill must have
been so Charles Martzofi also to going around telling everyone
there's gonna be a huge crash. Which I find interesting
is that Calvin Coolidge doesn't even invest at Merrill Lynch.
He goes to another firm who puts him in the
(38:32):
market right before the crash, and so you know, it's
it's so. What I find so menching about Coolidge to
Ford is both men had really strong moral course, right,
both men had really challenging childhoods. And yet the world
had changed that much in fifty years that the presidency,
particularly post FDR, had evolved such that the president felt
(38:54):
that they had the expertise to provide knowledge for boards,
whereas Coolidge did not feel that way at all.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
I think I'll get called on it if I don't
ask about the current president, and just because it's money,
because he's someone who who was a businessman and worked
in real estate, followed for bankruptcy a few times prior
to his presidency, kind of made his money in branding
as much as in real estate, if not more so.
(39:23):
And now he is seemingly profiting. He's profiting, profiting while
he's in the White House, and you know that may
continue on afterwards. But he's into crypto and selling sneakers
branded sneakers and guitars and whatever, all this kind of stuff,
Like how is this just kind of like him? And
(39:46):
it's kind of it makes really sense for who he is.
Or is it you think presidents after after him will
make will make money while they're president.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
It's a really good question. So, first of all, when
you think about Trump, take him out personally. What he
is very focused on, which is very common with these
wealthy families, is there's a lot of multi generational planning
going on. So, right, we know about the loan Fred
Trump made to Donald that God has started. When you
work with these families, there's G one, generation one, G two,
(40:20):
G three, G four, So Fred Trump is G one,
Donald is G two, Ivanka, Eric Tiffany, and Donald Junior
are G three, and then their children to G four.
So what you're seeing with the Trump money is this
structure going on where the G one wanted to eventually
get everything to G three G two. Trump wants to
(40:40):
get everything to G four. So a lot of the
entities and structures that you see is that going on
where Donald Trump sort of if I had to give
him a skill that he's very good with. He is
very good with pushing the envelope with risk, right, and
that's something people struggle with when they're managing their money,
(41:00):
and so he is always willing to push the line.
So Donald Trump will do estate planning techniques that I
do with my clients. When we do these techniques, we
are very focused on making sure that they pass muster
with the IRS, that if the IRS was to audit them,
that the audit would not be cancel out the gift
that we made, the transfer that we made. When you
(41:21):
look at the gifts that Donald Trump makes through techniques
called a grant to retain dinnuity trust, he's always being
overly aggressive. And what's interesting is you see the IRS
auditing him but not pulling back the valuations to the
level that you would expect. The other thing about Donald
Trump is he might have a core business, but his
(41:41):
money's being made around it. So I'm sitting here today
in campe Made New Jersey, I'm thirty miles south of
Atlantic City. The money that he made in Atlantic City
was not really from the casinos. It was from bonuses.
He was paid salaries, he was paid lawsuits in Atlantic City.
Because a lot of time in the Atlantic City situation,
which it's very complex to go through on a podcast,
(42:04):
he was often paid to go away. So what he's
done is he's able to figure out sort of the
way around things. And so the question I struggle with
all the time because I think about Trump and I
think about George Washington. When George Washington was president, he
was managing Mount Vernon on a day to day basis, right,
you see it in his correspondence, and yet he wasn't
(42:25):
capitalizing on the presidency in the same way. So Washington
clearly felt that it was important for people to believe
in the presidency and in this new country, and he
had to always do right and he would get like,
there's one story he got a prize from the Commonwealth
of Virginia as a thank you, twenty thousand dollars worth
of stock for all he had done for the country
(42:47):
in seventeen ninety six. When he's president and he needs
the cash he's got very liquid assets, but he donates
it to charity because he just isn't he knows that
people have to trust him. Today if we look at
trust him, politicians regardless of you know, Biden or Trump, right,
when you look rather pular party, people don't trust. And
(43:08):
so the question for Americans is do we have to
change our system on how we have the presidents run
their money when they're in office, because we all know
the Jerry Ford rule, which is once you're out, you
can go make a ton of money. And I think
that that has to be restructured because the rules that
were put in place in the nineteen sixties and then
obviously the financial disclosure rules of nineteen seventy eight, they
(43:31):
were made for a different type of financial system, one
where there wasn't branding, where there isn't influencers, and today
there's just you can take too much advantage of the system.
So I think post Trump, we really need to rework
the system.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Would someone today become president without being if not a
million wealthy? Yeah, without being wealthy?
Speaker 1 (43:54):
I think it's hard. I think that Citizens United and
other court cases have allowed a lot of mone need
to go into the political process. You could make an
argument Ian Bremer, who is a political scientist, so I
find fascinating he talks about the fact, you know, we
may have become an oligarchy already because of the money
that's come in. So you think about what's going on.
Unless you're moneyed or your celebrity, it is very hard
(44:18):
to be the Abraham Lincoln who climbs from nothing and
makes it. And when you think about it, when you
go back to the presidents. I said this earlier. The
first six came from money. But Andrew Jackson is one
who really created the idea of a poor boy who
could go off into the world and become president of
the United States. And I worry that we've lost that
(44:41):
ability to have future Andrew Jackson's And I say, Andrew Jackson,
we have Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, Ronald Right.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Let me ask you this, mean, guys, Jackson, wasn't he
already very wealthy?
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Though?
Speaker 2 (44:56):
I mean he sold himself off as a as a
common man for the common man. But didn't he have
like one hundred and fifty enslaved people when he became president?
Speaker 1 (45:08):
When he became president, yestar.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
In the Waxhaws in North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Correct. So his dad dies when his mom's pregnant with him.
You know, he's taken prisoner by the British. He loses
his mom and brothers. This is a guy who can't
through nothing, but he was clever and you see it,
and he fails. He fails early on. He is a
store in Tennessee that fails, and he goes up to
Philadelphia to try to fix it, and they gets played
by someone up there. But he's someone who's quick and
(45:34):
clever and learns from his mistakes. And you see that
with Jackson, and you see that with Lincoln, and you
give them both a lot of credit. So to answer
your question, I hope we get back to a point
in time where a guy who doesn't or a guy
gal who doesn't have a college education can make it
through and someone who's just a regular American can make
it through. I'm I don't know if that can happen
today and where the system is.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
I've been talking to Megan Gorman. She is the author
of the book All the President Money, How the men
who governed America govern their money. Megan, this has been
incredibly fascinating. Thank you, so much for joining us today
on American History Hotline.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Bob, thanks for having me on, and thank you for
letting me share my love of the human side of
the presidents, because at the end of the day, we
might all disagree politically, but we all sort of love
these stories about the guys who helped create this country.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of
iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show is executive
producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are
Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed by me,
Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is Americanhistory
(46:49):
Hotline at gmail dot com. If you like the show,
please tell your friends and leave us a review in
Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob. Feel free to hit
me up on social media to ask a history question
or to let me know what you think of the show.
You can find me at Bob Crawford Base. Thanks so
(47:10):
much for listening. See you next week.
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