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As President, he gets $200,000 a year in salary and a $50,000 annual expense allowance for gifts and a host of relatively small items. Of the $200,000 that Nixon received in expense funds over the four-year period, he actually spent only $108,000. He is permitted by law to keep the rest—as he did—and pay taxes on it.
The President also made a bundle in private business dealings, many of them highly complex. In 1967 he bought 199,891 shares in Fisher's Island Inc., a Miami-based real estate development firm—in which his great friend Bebe Rebozo was deeply involved—for $1 per share. Only two years later, he sold 185,891 shares back to the company for $2 per share, and paid capital gains taxes on the $185,891 that he made on the deal.
On May 31, 1969, he sold his Manhattan co-op apartment (which had cost him $100,000 in 1963, and on which he had spent $66,860 in improvements) for $312,500. Profit: $142,912.
In April 1967, Nixon had bought two undeveloped lots in Florida for $38,080. The following month, he "entered into an oral agreement with his daughter Tricia," who was then 22. (At 21, Tricia had received the proceeds of a trust fund that had been given to her nine years earlier by Nixon's wealthy friend Elmer Bobst, then the chairman of the Warner-Lambert pharmaceutical company.) Tricia lent her father $20,000 for purchase of the Florida property, and Nixon promised to repay her that amount plus 40% of whatever profits he might make. On Dec. 28, 1972, Nixon sold the property for $150,000, making a profit of almost 300% on his investment. Tricia received $65,000 as her share, and paid capital gains taxes of $11,617. The White House statement was aimed at refuting published reports that Tricia had avoided paying her share of the tax on the sale by allowing her father to offset the entire gain against the large deductions that he has claimed on recent returns.
Since becoming President, Nixon has concentrated his capital on his properties in Florida and California. On Dec.
19,1968, a few weeks after he was elected, he bought two adjacent properties in Key Biscayne, Fla., for $253,455. To finance the purchase, he borrowed $65,000 from the First National Bank of Miami and got mortgages totaling $ 189,966. By May 31, 1973, he had reduced these mortgages to $161,000.
Nixon's most tortuous—and mysterious—business dealings surround his estate at San Clemente, Calif. In 1969, in two separate transactions, Nixon acquired his Western White House and 28.9 acres around it for $1.5 million, largely with the help of loans from his millionaire friend Robert Abplanalp. In December 1970, he sold all but 5.9 acres of this property for $1,249,000. The buyer's legal name was the B and C Investment Co., but in reality the buyers were the President's staunch friends Abplanalp and Rebozo. Nixon had, in effect, sold his friends 80% of the land that he had bought the previous year for roughly 80% of the original purchase price. But he had retained the heart of the estate: the Western White House, plus the choicest parcel of property fronting on the beach. It appeared that Abplanalp and Rebozo had made the President a substantial gift.