Soon after he became President, John Adams wrote forlornly from Philadelphia to his beloved Abigail about the exorbitant tost of maintaining his position. Glumly he declared, “I expect to be obliged to resign in six months because I can’t live. Fortunately, he had just received a gigantic cheese as a gilt from the state of Rhode Island. Perhaps, he mused, when his money was gone he could live oil the cheese.

If not all our Presidents have felt so discouraged about their personal finances, very few have been able to live without self-consciousness of their estate. They have learned that the American people respond ambivalently to the fact of a President who is wealthy: to some it implies that he is accustomed to managing large affairs successfully, but to others it seems to suggest that he cannot possibly be attuned to the needs of the ordinary citizen.

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