Richard Norton Smith doesn’t come
cheap. Besides heading the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum, Smith is director of the nonprofit
fundraising foundation for the museum. Between his state and
foundation salaries, Smith doubled his income when he came to
Springfield from the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the
University of Kansas, where he was paid $156,250. In Illinois,
Smith is drawing a state salary of $150,000 and at least that much
from the library foundation, according to interviews and IRS
records. Smith doesn’t like to talk about his
paycheck. “I don’t discuss my
salary,” he writes in response to an e-mail from Illinois Times requesting
an interview. But, under state and federal law, what Smith earns is
a matter of public record. Estie Karpman, who was hired last year as the
foundation’s development director, says that the $16,199
listed as salaries in the foundation’s 2003 tax return, the
most recent one filed with the IRS, all went to Smith for four to
six weeks of work — he became a foundation employee shortly
before the end of the fiscal year, she explains. On that basis,
Smith, who is supposed to be the foundation’s full-time
director while also working full-time for the state, would have
collected as much as $192,000 from the foundation in one year. In
his e-mail to Illinois Times, Smith says he earned “far less” than
that, but he would not be more specific, even though the IRS
requires the foundation and other nonprofits to make public the
salaries of directors and other key employees. The foundation, however, has long resisted
telling the public what it pays Smith. “The foundation does not have the same
disclosure requirements as the state,” Susan Mogerman,
foundation CEO, told the State
Journal-Register in an interview
last year in which she refused to disclose his pay.
“It’s a private foundation. Richard’s job is not
a public job. It’s not a state job.”
The state’s oldest daily newspaper,
which Lincoln always considered a friend, did not pursue the
matter. Illinois Times did. Maynard Crossland, former director of the
Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, says that the foundation
agreed to match Smith’s $150,000 state salary on a
dollar-for-dollar basis. “I was sitting in the board meeting
when they did it,” Crossland says. “It was ‘This
is what the governor said he wanted, so this is what we’ll
do.’”
Crossland says that he and some others who
knew of the arrangement were alarmed. “If the state’s
paying for somebody to be a full-time employee, how can you turn
around and be paid as a full-time employee by somebody else?”
Crossland asks. “You start looking at the ethics
legislation, it would be very difficult to decide if he’s
working for the foundation or working for the
state.” Crossland was ousted from his post as
director of the state historic-preservation agency in August 2004,
less than a year after Smith came to Springfield. “I
don’t have sour grapes about anything,” he says.
“Life goes on, and I’ve gone on.”
Smith’s income isn’t limited to
what he earns from the state and the foundation. A historian and
author, Smith also is a frequent television guest commentator,
talking about elections and the presidency. His biography on the
life of Nelson A. Rockefeller is scheduled for publication next
year. He insists he has enough time to hold down two fulltime jobs
while also keeping up with his outside work and interests. “I
have been doing this or something like it, for a long time now
— that is to say, writing books and doing occasional
commentary, etc. — at the same time I have been working
fulltime, and then some, overseeing institutions,” he says.
“I like to work, and I’ve long since grown comfortable
with a schedule that sets aside evenings and weekends for writing
and research, at least until this past summer, anyway, when I found
myself working the long lines outside the museum most
weekends.”
Whether Smith is making $300,000 a year in
Springfield or something more, one thing is clear: He’s doing
very well compared with the directors of other presidential
libraries. The salary of every other presidential-library director
is paid by the National Archives. The federal salary scale for a
library director starts at $89,000 and goes to $107,000, although
it’s possible that some directors earn more as they gain
seniority, says a National Archives spokeswoman.
A federal paycheck wasn’t sufficient
for Smith when he ran the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library from
1996 to 2001. As in Springfield, Smith supplemented his pay at the
Ford library by drawing a salary from the private foundation that
raises funds. IRS records show that the Ford foundation
wasn’t as generous as the foundation in the Land of Lincoln.
In 2001, Smith collected $100,000 from the Ford foundation on top
of his federal salary; in 2000, he got $40,000. In Kansas, private
sources accounted for slightly more than $50,000 of Smith’s
$156,250 annual paycheck at the Dole Institute. Since arriving in Springfield, Smith has been
generous with the museum and library he oversees. He says that he
donated $50,000 to the museum last year and that he has asked the
foundation for “a substantial reduction in pay,” with
the money going toward a project with a goal of putting all of
Lincoln’s papers online. “I thought that before I or anyone else
went out and sought private donations, it was incumbent on me
to set an example,” he says.
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2005.
