the Monetization of Prestige
AMERICA’S STAR SYSTEM
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/07/americas-star-system.html
Last year, Bill Clinton earned seventeen million dollars giving speeches, including one before a company in Lagos that paid him seven hundred thousand dollars. Hillary Clinton will be paid two hundred thousand dollars for each speech that she gives to the likes of the American Society of Travel Agents and the National Association of Realtors. David Petraeus, the retired Army general and ex-C.I.A. director, was offered two hundred thousand dollars by the City University of New York to teach one course each semester and to give a couple of public lectures, until a small outcry from faculty and students embarrassed the university into reducing his salary to one dollar. CUNY’s swift retreat suggested that there’s something wrong with public figures commanding and getting spectacular fees for minimal work. But is there?
The best argument for overcompensating V.I.P.s is that the market wants to. I’ve never understood exactly what the Global Business Travel Association gets out of paying the nation’s former top diplomat six figures to tell its members that the only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask and that honey catches more flies than vinegar, but no doubt the G.B.T.A. has figured out Hillary Clinton’s publicity and marketing worth down to the third decimal place (this is the Global Business Travel Association), so why shouldn’t it spend its money as it sees fit? Similarly, CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, and its dean, Ann Kirschner, must have calculated and recalculated General Petraeus’s tangible and intangible benefits to the city’s public university system many times before arriving at a taxpayer-funded salary roughly eight times that of an adjunct professor teaching a full course load.
Moreover, the Clintons and Petraeus spent their careers in government service, which is to say, they were underpaid for decades. Bill Clinton made just two hundred thousand dollars during his last year in the White House. (In George W. Bush’s first year, Congress doubled the amount to four hundred thousand dollars, where it has remained ever since.) Hillary Clinton’s highest annual salary as a U.S. senator was $169,300; as Secretary of State she made just $186,600 a year. Petraeus actually made more at the end of his military service—two hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars is the basic pay for someone in his position as the head of U.S. Central Command—but for a quarter century he was a badly paid junior officer and field-grade officer who once nearly died from an accidental rifle wound. Why should anyone begrudge these public servants their chance to finally cash in like everyone else? Are they expected to refuse the money? Was Clinton supposed to tell the publishing company in Lagos, “I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the Presidency”?
Those were Harry Truman’s words after he became an ex-President. On principle, Truman refused all corporate positions and commercial endorsements, and for a few years he barely survived on an Army pension of $112.56 per month, until his memoirs sold well. (There were no Presidential pensions until 1958, when word of Truman’s near-poverty spurred Congress to pass the Former Presidents Act.) Truman’s gesture now seems exceedingly old-fashioned. Today, no one refuses the money.
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