America’s Star System: The Monetization of Prestige. By George Packer.

America’s Star System. By George Packer. The New Yorker, July 23, 2013.

Packer:

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.

 

Al Gore didn’t refuse the money when, in January, Al Jazeera, the pro-Muslim Brotherhood satellite network—which is owned by Qatar, a repressive sheikhdom that spends its wealth from oil exports to support Sunni political extremism across the Middle East—offered to buy his failing Current TV network for five hundred million dollars. The ex-Vice-President cleared seventy million dollars for himself. (When Jon Stewart pressed him about this inconvenient truth, Gore repeated his talking points, whatever they meant: “It was an easy choice after doing the diligence on the network itself.”) Also in January, Gore cleared thirty million dollars from the sale of his shares of Apple Computer, which he’d received as compensation for serving on its board of directors after leaving government. A hundred mil in a month—these days the Vice-Presidency is worth a little more than a bucket of warm piss.

 

The revolving door out of the White House hasn’t reached the speed of the one on Capitol Hill, where the traffic between Congress and K Street is so crowded that some elected officials and aides plot their government careers with an eye to maximizing their earning potential once they get out. (Trent Lott left his Senate seat and his position as Minority Leader before the end of his term in order to get into the lobbying business ahead of a new law requiring a two-year hiatus.) But it’s possible to imagine a future where potential candidates study Bill Clinton’s impressive post-Presidency income (more than a hundred million dollars in speaking fees alone) and add that to the calculus as they contemplate whether to run for the highest office in the land. Similarly, Petraeus’s private-sector windfall since leaving government in a sex scandal gives a new, greener glow to the aura of the military hero.

 

There’s no doubt that these and other ex-public servants are “commercializing” their former offices. Petraeus, who spent his career living by an honor code before violating it at the end, might have felt the sting of criticism more than some of his civilian counterparts. In accepting a dollar a year from CUNY, he was harking back to a time when, during the Second World War, businessmen made the opposite move and went to work in government as “dollar-a-year men.” Perhaps his backpedalling under public opprobrium will start a trend toward self-restraint and Trumanesque gestures of refusal on the part of our leaders. Probably not.

 

The top of American life has become a very cozy and lucrative place, where the social capital of who you are and who you know brings unimaginable returns. If you’re an international rock star, you can get a piece of the deal when Facebook has its I.P.O. If you’re a global columnist, you can monetize your influence across the speaker’s circuit and through paid TV gigs. If you’re the chairman of a tech giant, you can get Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to blurb the book you sort of wrote. At the highest altitude, the distinction between entertainers, inventors, business moguls, athletes, academics, and government officials breaks down, making it all the harder to object when an ex-President simply acts like everyone else at his level of fame and influence. After all, the star system, with wildly unequal rewards for relatively small differences in talent, holds in virtually every area of American society. If a bright light from these worlds acted like Truman today, he’d be considered a sucker.

 

If it isn’t fair to ask stars to refuse the money, it is fair to ask exactly what they do to earn it. One problem with the star system (aside from its appearance of corruption and conflict of interest, and its demoralizing effect on adjunct professors, journeymen power forwards, mid-level executives, freelance journalists, and career bureaucrats) is the pervasive mediocrity and corner-cutting that it encourages: the utter banality of corporate speeches written by staff, the abuse of researchers and ghostwriters by big-name authors, the ease with which a star athlete transitions into a business franchise or a commentary gig, the lack of face time with the prof that awaits CUNY students who register for “Are We on the Threshold of the North American Decade?,” a course whose instructor needed three Harvard grad students just to help him put together the syllabus. Nothing spells the end of real achievement like becoming a brand.

 

Yes, these are very busy people. They have a charity gala to co-chair, a speech in Hong Kong to give, a deal in Dubai to finalize, a board meeting in New York to attend by conference call, a memoir to check in on. No one any longer expects them to spend the rest of their lives upholding the prestige and dignity of their offices. It would almost be enough just to see them sweat a little for the big payday that’s headed their way.