RIght Cross

But half of its $5 million goes to paying its 22 staff members--including $320,000 in salary and bonuses to President John Goodman, who also received $30,000 in other employee benefits and $12,000 in expenses, and another $230,000 to his wife, Jeanette, who serves as NCPA's vice president. Also in 2004, John Goodman diverted some $170,000 to a trust fund holding money he will receive when he (or the NCPA) calls it quits; the fund is valued at more than $1 million.

Goodman's salary is "very high compensation for this world," says David Callahan. "When you look at what the director of comparably sized organizations made, you will find that's a lot."

To realize precisely how much Goodman's making, one need only look at think tanks on the right, on the left and in the middle to realize there's a fine line between a think tank and a piggy bank.

The 29-year-old Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, another unabashedly conservative outside-the-Beltway think tank, boasted last year of $12.5 million in revenue, from which President Lawrence Mone took home in 2003 some $250,000 in salary and another $40,000 in contributions to the employee benefit plan. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, based in Washington, D.C., reported in 2003 that it brought in some $5.9 million in donations, with $181,000 going to President Larry Mishel in annual compensation. And of the $4.6 million brought in during 2004 by the centrist, D.C.-based New America Foundation in 2004, which has Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Newsweek International writer Fareed Zakaria on its board of directors, no senior employee made more than $120,000.

"I'd do this for free," Goodman insists. "Just don't tell anybody."

If you ask Bruce Bartlett, he wasn't fired from the NCPA for picking on Bush but for potentially upsetting the NCPA's board of directors, which include some of the wealthiest folks in town: former Southland Corporation President Jere Thompson, oilman James Thompson, Medical Cities Inc. Chairman and CEO Robert Wright and Harlan Crow, the real-estate scion who's good pals with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Those board members have raised millions over the years for the Republican Party and both Bushes. Bartlett says it was in Goodman's interest to fire him.

Goodman says, yeah, absolutely, he was worried his board would get angry when it heard about the book, but he claims no one forced him to fire Bartlett, least of all anyone in the White House.

"No one asked me to do this, no one suggested it would be a good thing, nothing like that," Goodman says.

When asked precisely whom he spoke with, Goodman smiles and chuckles.

"Well, I don't want to get into that," he says. "But some people in the Bush administration said, 'We think you just did something good.'"

In the end, Barlett sacrificed a good salary to write what he did, and he will be portrayed as a martyr for doing so. But maybe he was looking to get fired, he says at the end of several hours' worth of interviews. Maybe he'd just gotten tired of working at the NCPA, with whom he stopped agreeing a long time ago. Or maybe it was time for a change. He's pissed at the NCPA for firing him--and doing so without severance, he says--but figures that, well, maybe he had it coming.

"I don't want to dissuade you from the martyr thing, but I don't want to overstate the case," he says, laughing. "I've lost jobs before. It's the nature of my profession I've chosen. I mean, I lost my job when Bill Clinton got elected and lost jobs in Congress. It's not the kind of job where you put in your 20 and quit. I don't think of myself as a martyr for a cause. I knew at the beginning what I was getting myself into. The point was not to make a buck or just to get the ideas out there. I had plenty of opportunity to do that already. The idea was to do it in a way to make a meaningful impact."