In February 1958, the immense prime-time audience that tuned into Edward R. Murrow’s CBS program See It Now was treated to a historical first: a television interview with a former president of the United States. Among various other topics, the great journalist asked Harry Truman about how he was getting along financially.
As was his custom, the plainspoken Missourian minced no words about his situation. “You know,” Truman told Murrow, “the United States government turns its chief executives out to grass. They’re just allowed to starve.” Truman went on to claim that only his recent inheritance of the family farm was keeping him off the welfare rolls: “If I hadn’t inherited some property that finally paid things through, I’d be on relief right now.”
The tale of financial woe Truman was telling the television public was the same one he had been repeating privately to leaders of Congress, as he pushed for a bill to provide him with a pension. “Sam, I’m not lobbying for the bill,” Truman had written to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn a few months earlier. But if the bill did not become law, he added ominously, he would have to “go ahead with some contracts to keep ahead of the hounds.”
The spectacle of a former president of the United States being forced to enter into grubby commercial arrangements to stave off penury was a favorite theme for Truman. So too was his claim that only the recent sale of the family farm was keeping him afloat. Just three weeks before the Murrow interview, he had written to House Majority Leader John McCormack, claiming that the overhead he had incurred in writing his memoirs and answering the blizzard of mail he received as a former president had amounted to more than $153,000 — a staggering sum when adjusted for today’s monetary values (this would be equivalent to approximately $1.5 million in 2021 dollars). “Had it not been for the fact that I was able to sell some property that my brother, sister, and I inherited from our mother, I would practically be on relief,” he told McCormack.
Truman went on to complain that the combination of enormous overhead and sky-high income taxes had left him with a net profit of only 6 percent on the original $600,000 sale price of his memoirs. He noted that, when he was president, he had intervened with the IRS to get the agency to give favorable tax treatment to Dwight Eisenhower’s memoir deal, but that after succeeding to the same office, Eisenhower had failed to return the favor.