“I had the lowest net worth of any American president in the 20th century when I took office.”
Former President Bill Clinton during comments Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press”
Former President Bill Clinton defended his wife and potential presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, for saying they left the White House “not only dead broke, but in debt.”
“I think I had the lowest net worth of any American president in the 20th century when I took office,” he told host David Gregory on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Intrigued by his comment, we wanted to know whether it was accurate.
Nowadays, the Clintons are not known for living on modest means. A Washington Post report says Bill Clinton earned more than $100 million from speeches between January 2001, when he left office, and January 2013, when Hillary Clinton left her role as secretary of state. She reportedly draws $200,000 for each public appearance.
Clinton is considered the wealthiest living president and among the top-10 all-time wealthiest, with the Clintons’ combined net worth at about $55 million, according to the website 24/7 Wall Street, which started evaluating the net worth of presidents in 2010.
But to Clinton’s point, it was not always this way.
Clinton’s pre-presidential wealth
The Clintons did not move into the White House with old money akin to the political dynasties of the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Bushes. And unlike nearly every other president, Clinton’s wife was the breadwinner ahead of his run for the Oval Office.
In his five terms as Arkansas’ governor, Clinton earned $35,000 a year, consistent with the lower pay of other Southern governors, as well as some speaking fees, honorariums and in-kind income, such as living in the governor’s residence. Hillary Clinton, then a senior partner in the Rose Law Firm of Little Rock, earned a $92,000 salary and listed her share of her firm’s profit-sharing and retirement plan between $100,001 and $250,000, according to a New York Times examination of the couple’s finances in 1992.
The Clintons listed their net worth as nearly $700,000 in a statement released a few months later, a substantial increase from the $418,692 net worth reported at the end of 1989, according to The Washington Post. Assets included big gains in their investment portfolio (reaching $387,077) and retirement plans of $180,200, and liabilities included a $65,000 mortgage for a half-interest in a condo co-owned with Hillary Clinton’s parents and a $100,000 bank loan from his last governor’s race.
Comparing against other presidents
While we have a good picture of Clinton’s net worth, it is more difficult to gauge the net worths of many other presidents who served in the 20th century. The 24/7 Wall St. research is helpful but does not detail presidents’ net worth before taking office.
We heard from several experts on presidents who said the data we need is just not available. Problems include a lack of uniform candidate financial disclosure requirements, inflation and changing national circumstances.
“It’s one of those Clintonesque statements that can be true but who knows?” said Lewis Gould, a visiting distinguished professor at Monmouth College and scholar of William McKinley.
Often, people discussing the least-monied presidents — especially in the 20th century — turn to Harry S. Truman.
Truman’s money problems as a result of his failed haberdashery in the 1920s are no secret. With debts over his head, he continued to climb political ladders, first as a county judge and ultimately as a U.S. senator, vice president and president upon Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945.
Truman continued to live modestly as a senator and vice president, residing in a two-bedroom apartment in Washington shared with his wife, Bess; daughter, Margaret; and ailing mother-in-law. Truman’s mother-in-law, not Truman, owned the well-known Truman Home in Independence, Mo., said Alonzo Hamby, a Truman biographer and distinguished professor of history emeritus at Ohio University.
Even as a U.S. senator in 1935 earning $10,000, Truman was not in a solid enough financial position to save the family farm owned by his mother, Hamby said. So even though it’s not clear what his net worth was before he became president, Hamby said, “I find it very hard to believe that Bill Clinton was in a tighter financial situation.”
Russell Riley, a co-chairman of the University of Virginia Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program and director of the Clinton Presidential History Project, said Clinton’s claim did not strike him as much of an exaggeration, “if an exaggeration at all.”
“He may have taken it one step too far by asserting he was No. 1 on the list,” Riley said. “But if he’s not No. 1, he’s somewhere near the top.”
Our ruling
Clinton said, “I had the lowest net worth of any American president in the 20th century when I took office.”
Without a doubt, Clinton’s net worth was one of the lowest of 20th century presidents, experts told us. Whether it was the lowest is hard to say, and we could not find information to support it. There’s a good case to be made that Truman entered the White House with a (albeit unknown) smaller net worth.
There’s not enough evidence to prove Clinton correct, but he is at least right in his larger point: He did not enter the White House with the wealth of many of his contemporaries.
On balance, we rate his claim Half True.
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