Bush will see big payday, but not anytime soon

By Duncan Greenberg

updated 12:31 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2008

In January, President George W. Bush will join the growing ranks of the nation's unemployed. And though he's guaranteed a presidential pension that will approach $200,000 next year — and has his family's oil fortune to fall back on — being an ex-president can often be a boon.

Between speeches, book deals, consulting arrangements and sitting on myriad corporate boards, ex-presidents stand to make far more than the $400,000 annual salary they earned while in office.

How much will Bush make in the coming years? It's difficult to say. He'll surely be able to earn a few million dollars giving speeches at an estimated $100,000 a pop to right-leaning think tanks and advocacy groups.

But Bush likely won't come close to the megabucks President Clinton has banked since leaving office. The reason: With his approval ratings below 25 percent, Bush is being advised to hold off on signing a multimillion-dollar book deal — the linchpin of any former president's money machine.

"There's just a little bit too much animosity (toward Bush) right now," says literary agent Harvey Klinger, adding that, with time, more people will be interested in the president's introspection.

Klinger says it's likely that first lady Laura Bush will write her memoirs first. She reportedly has been entertaining publishers at the White House to discuss a possible book deal, which will likely fetch at least $5 million. Hillary Rodham Clinton received an $8 million advance for her 2003 memoir, Living History, which focused largely on her years in the White House.

Kim Witherspoon, founder of literary agency InkWell Management, who has represented Anthony Bourdain, Cindy Crawford and Lionel Shriver, says there is no doubt that Bush will get a book deal if he wants one.

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"It's very likely that he'll publish in the next few years to offer insight into what was on his mind during his presidency," she says, adding that his advance will be several million dollars. "The size of the deal will likely depend upon when he decides to sell the book, and what he promises to address in it."

Bush can afford to wait, a luxury former President Clinton did not have. Clinton left office in January 2001 burdened with millions of dollars in legal bills from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and needed to work hard to pay them down.

First, Clinton leveraged the 65 percent approval rating he had when he left office into a record-setting $15 million advance for his autobiography, "My Life." The book became a best seller; more than 1.5 million copies have been sold since it was published in 2004, according to Nielsen.

As the royalty checks rolled in, Clinton took his charm on the road, delivering speeches to business executives and international groups across the globe. In 2007 he made $10.1 million delivering 54 speeches to corporate audiences, including investment banks Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

He also played the role of rainmaker, becoming an adviser to friend Ron Burkle's private equity firm, Yucaipa. Though it is unclear what the full extent of Clinton's role at Yucaipa was (he severed the relationship with the company last year when Hillary ran for president), billionaire Burkle told Forbes magazine in a 2006 cover story (see "The Rise Of Ron Burkle") that Clinton helped him broker deals and strengthen relationships.

Example: In 2003, Yucaipa arranged for Clinton to make a speech at a Teamsters conference. Later Clinton urged Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. to trust Burkle and present him with possible deals. That encouragement resulted in Yucaipa paying $100 million to buy a controlling stake in Allied Holdings, a trucking outfit in bankruptcy proceedings.

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