Off Beat: Farewell To 'Ari Bob'

Just hours after White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer announced Monday that he will leave his job in July, the press-office fax machine was humming with queries from book publishers and speaking bureaus.

For now, Fleischer hasn't committed to anything. "If I can't have my first choice, playing short stop for the Yankees, then I'll take my second: catching up on my sleep," he jokes.

Whatever he chooses, he's bound to make more money. His current job pays $145,000 a year; Fleischer will soon be able to pull in some $25,000 per speech. "If he just gives a speech to each of the "Pioneers," he'll do well," says another former press secretary, referring to the group of high-roller Bush fund-raisers. That's an understatement: If Fleischer managed to give a speech to all 538 Pioneers, he'd make $13 million.

Fleischer has more in mind than simply cashing in, despite his plans to eventually move himself and his new wife into a swanky town in Westchester County, just outside New York City. He says he's mulling a "thoughtful" book maybe about press relations during wartime. But don't count on a tell-all memoir a la George Stephanopolous, who landed nearly $3 million for his book while Clinton was still in office. "The press will be shocked to learn I'm not the kiss-and-tell type," jokes Fleischer, who earned the reputation as tight-lipped if occasionally flip.

Past White House press secretaries have gone on to everything from truck stops to Tinsel Town. Richard Nixon's Ron Ziegler was head of the truck-stop trade association; Clinton's Dee Dee Myers and others have consulted on the TV show "The West Wing." Whatever they do, they can usually turn their public service experience into big private-sector bucks. "When I started on the lecture circuit, I was taken aback at what people pay you to come speak," says Carter's press secretary Jody Powell, who parlayed his connections into a successful D.C. public-relations firm.

Writing a book can be either a career booster or a buster for former press secretaries. Stephanopoulos now has his own show on ABC, for example. But Larry Speakes, who wrote a book about Reagan that he intended to be laudatory, ended up infuriating the president and losing his job at Merrill Lynch. In it, Speakes revealed that he had invented some of Reagan's most famous quotes.