Former President Jimmy Carter "seldom accepts speaking fees," The Associated Press wrote in 2002, "and when he does he typically donates the proceeds to his charitable foundation." His fee for speaking about healthcare, government and politics, and retirement and aging was listed at $50,000 at one time, though.
Carter was openly critical of Ronald Reagan at one time, though, for taking $1 million for a single speech. Carter said he'd never take that much, but added quickly: "I've never been offered that much."
"That's not what I want out of life," Carter said in 1989. "We give money. We don't take it."
For nearly ten years, during his post-presidency, Rutherford Hayes traveled around the country speaking on policy reform topics. He,however, was apparently not compensated, according to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center. An archivist concluded that there were no notes or diary entries about Hayes being paid for any of those speeches.
Theodore Roosevelt didn't charge for speeches, but he did arrange a contract with the publisher Charles Scribner's Son's to write a series of articles and a book about his expedition to Africa and Europe for a "hefty sum of 50,000." Adjusted for inflation it would be a 1.2 million dollar book deal today.
Truman in particular once said that he would never lend himself "to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency."
Paid speaking didn’t become normalized until Republican president Eisenhower started the paid circuit. Then there was Ford doing the same thing, then Nixon, then Reagan all the way up to present day. Then you know, we have those people who saved the economy doing it.
Tim Geithner: As I recently pointed out, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner barely let the seat get cold in his office before getting into the buckraking game. In both his offices at the New York Fed and the Treasury, Geithner was ever-eager to put the interests of giant, destructive banks over the public interest, and the banking world is eager to show him their appreciation. In the six months since he left Washington, Deutsche Bank paid him $200,000 to speak at a conference, and private equity groups Blackstone and Warburg Pincus have forked over $100,000 each for recent speaking engagements.
5. Erskine Bowles: Since the financial crisis, former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and his partner-in-crime Alan Simpson, former senator from Wyoming, have been pushing their discredited austerity agenda which accomplishes the joint purpose of screwing the public out of things like Social Security while lining the pockets of financiers and the 1 percent. Bowles nevertheless finds ample time to work the speaker circuit, hauling in $40,000 a pop. (David Dayen notes that this is three times as much as you’ll likely get from Social Security in retirement per year.)
Rudy Giuliani: The former New York mayor is no stranger to the speaker circuit and is eagerly fattening his bank accounts since we last saw him in office. According to the Washington Post, Giuliani submitted a financial disclosure report when he was still on the presidential campaign trail in 2007, which revealed a whopping total $9.2 million earned for speaking fees 13 months. MSN reported that his highest-paid event was at a private equity firm, Sage Capital Group, in 2005, which earned Giuliani $270,000. During the Occupy movement, Giuliani sneered at the idea of regular people protesting Wall Street predation, and boasted that he would have “booted” the protesters on day one. Perhaps such public braying enhances his speaker fees from a certain appreciative sector.
Colin Powell: It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. Colin Powell, who is always reminding us of his qualities of dignity and integrity, rakes in up to $200,000 a hit on the speaker circuit. According to Business Week, Powell, the first African-American Secretary of State and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has spent his time since office serving on various corporate boards, including AOL’s, and collecting stratospheric speaking fees. Powell is famous for speeches, including a certain one he made at the U.N. in support of the Iraq war. That one didn’t turn out too well for his reputation, but it doesn’t appear to have reduced his ability to cash in.
I came to see this in a personal experience here in Chicago last summer. In all the speaking I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time I have ever been booed was one night in our regular weekly mass meetings by some angry young men of our movement. Now I went home that night with an ugly feeling. Selfishly I thought of my suffering and sacrifices over the last twelve years. Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking. I finally came to myself. And I could not for the life of me have less impatience and understanding for those young men. For twelve years, I a mothers like me, have held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about, the not to distant day when they would have freedom, all here, now. I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing me because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted, turn into a frustrating nightmare. This situation is all the more ominous, in view of the rising expectations of men the world over. The deep rumblings that we hear today, the rumblings of discontent, is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppressions to the bright hills of freedom. All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands.
So we are here because we believe, we hope, we pray that something new might emerge in the political life of this nation which will produce a new man, new structures and new institutions and a new life for mankind. I am convinced that this new life will not emerge until our nation undergoes a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Now that is one speech I wish I had seen.
Go ahead and read the whole thing if you like. It was just as true then as it is now.