The Billionaire Who Wasn't (54 page)

The healthiest and wealthiest generation the world has ever known is now entering philanthropic prime time,” said Tom Tierney. “Spending down is an emerging trend. As more foundations are formed, we are seeing a greater orientation towards giving while living: founders think they will get better results as they themselves try to do good. Chuck is a pioneer in this area and people are looking for role models.”

Countless people across the globe—in the United States, Europe, the Asia Pacific region, Australia, and Africa—owe Chuck Feeney their sight, their health, or their lives for the advances he has made possible in cancer and other medical research and through his funding of heart clinics and eye hospitals. Dozens of health, children's, aging, and human rights organizations
survive on programs aided by Feeney's wealth. Throughout the world, hundreds of thousands of students spend part of every day in one of the academic buildings, sports halls, or dormitories that his philanthropy has funded. Many of them are there because Feeney provided their scholarships.

Feeney has lived up to Andrew Carnegie's advice that a man of wealth should set an example “of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance.” Why he did so may be explained by his attitude to entitlement. He never seemed to feel entitled to the things that went with being rich. By dispossessing himself of the trappings of wealth, he removed a temptation to think that wealth made him better than anyone else.

Always the sense that he was somehow not deserving comes through. “I shouldn't have had an Ivy League education,” he said once. “I really had no entitlement; kids from my neighborhood went to St. Mary's, not Cornell.” He downplays his money-making genius, saying, “We had more luck than we deserved.”

Just after he was first listed in
Forbes
as a billionaire, a journalist, Buddy de Lazaro, and like Feeney a native of Elizabeth, New Jersey, produced some recollections of Feeney's boyhood days in his regular column in the
Elizabeth Daily Journal.
He concluded that Feeney's achievement in becoming a billionaire was “not bad for an Elizabeth kid who started out hawking beach umbrellas and sandwiches.” Feeney wrote to de Lazaro to tell him the article gave him more personal satisfaction than a cover story in
Business Week
. “We Elmora kids gotta stick togedder,” he wrote.

“There is an Oriental proverb,” Chuck added. “Fortune doesn't change a man, it only unmasks him. I guess under the mask is a kid from Elmora wearing a baseball cap.”

Epilogue

When the first edition of this biography was published in September 2007, Chuck Feeney's friends, Tom Moran, president and chief executive officer of Mutual of America, and Niall O'Dowd, publisher of
Irish America
and
The Irish Voice
, jointly hosted a book party on the top floor of Mutual of America headquarters in New York on Park Avenue, across from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Knowing well his distaste for self-publicity, they did not expect Chuck Feeney to show up. However, not only did Feeney decide to come, he announced that he wanted to bring along almost one hundred of his former classmates from St. Mary's of the Assumption High School in Elizabeth, New Jersey. They arrived along with an extended clan of Feeney-Fitzpatricks in two hired buses. The mostly retired Irish Americans clearly adore their neighborhood kid from Elmora, whom they know as Charlie, and who never turned his back on them when he was making his billions. In crumpled blue blazer, baggy pants, and well-worn Mephisto shoes, Feeney was about the only male not wearing a tie. He spent much of the evening greeting and signing books for old friends while perched on a chair beside his twenty-one-year-old great-nephew, Dennis Fitzpatrick, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. “I used to be Charlie's girlfriend,” one little old lady sighed as she looked on. “Boy did I make a mistake!” Family members told reporters stories of Feeney's frugality. “He'd send my parents
$50,000 for our college educations,” his nephew Daniel Fitzpatrick told Margot Roosevelt of the
Los Angeles Times
, “but if you went out to have a beer with him, he'd check the bar bill.”

The decision to come out of the philanthropic closet and present himself in public was a logical next step for Feeney in establishing his legacy as the promoter of successful and productive “giving while living.” With the publication of his life story, the weight of self-imposed anonymity was finally lifted from his shoulders. In the days after the book launch he subjected himself to a succession of interviews with newspapers and television and radio networks, in the United States and overseas—no easy chore for a man who prefers expressing himself through magazine cuttings. Always his message was the same: The wealthy should give while they are alive, and they will get a lot of fun from doing so. He told Roosevelt that he wanted to set an example for that layer of people who owned a “jillion” dollars. “I mean, honestly, if you ask them, ‘Tell me what you're doing with your money this week?' they couldn't spend a fraction of what they're accruing.” On National Public Radio he told James Hattori that nothing gave him a better feeling of success than seeing the result of something Atlantic Philanthropies had done. He told him how he watched a little girl in a hospital in Vietnam cover her mouth with her hands because she had a facial deformation. “I saw that girl after she went through surgery and she was smiling. And I thought, my God, if we could take kids who were ashamed of something that they didn't cause and put them in a position to resolve it then that's a great source of satisfaction.”

Having crossed the Rubicon, Feeney also agreed, though reluctantly, to deliver a speech at a graduation ceremony at RMIT University in Ho Chi Minh City in November 2007. It was a mistake. Never a gifted orator, he spoke only briefly to an expectant audience. But his message to the students was succinct: They should strive to improve the lives of others and never stop learning.

One unexpected result of having his life story made public gave Feeney a lot of personal satisfaction. In Chesterfield, Missouri, Francis E. O'Donnell, an ophthalmologist and managing partner of a private equity fund specializing in breakthrough medical technology, read the book and was so inspired that he sent a check for $50,000 to Atlantic Philanthropies. “I thought, ‘Boy, this is great,'” he told me over the telephone. “Individual donors like myself can't achieve what Atlantic Philanthropies does, like amplify the effects of giving by leveraging other sources of funding for donees. I hope they get a lot
of checks like this one.” Another $23,000 was raised for the New York-based cleft charity The Smile Train when a copy of the book, signed by Chuck Feeney and his friend Brendan O'Regan, the father of duty free, was auctioned at a travel retail conference in Hong Kong. The final bid came from a representative of Feeney's old firm, Duty Free Shoppers. Brendan O'Regan died on February 2, 2007, in Dublin, aged ninety, and Feeney, who was in San Francisco, had tributes published in Irish newspapers.

Feeney became something of a celebrity on a multiplicity of Web sites, with bloggers praising his unselfish largesse and asking each other for his private mailing address. His name was bandied about on religious Web sites as a Good Samaritan. Six months after publication, the previously unfamiliar name “Chuck Feeney” produced more than 300,000 results when entered on Google. Atlantic Philanthropies got a lot of extra mail, but the policy of not accepting unsolicited applications remained unchanged.

What a
BusinessWeek
reviewer called Feeney's
carpe diem
approach has clearly influenced other super-philanthropists, but Feeney would still like to see a stronger surge toward “giving while living,” especially in the United States, and a faster growth of philanthropy in countries like Ireland, Australia, and South Africa, which have experienced the creation of new wealth but have not developed a philanthropic culture. It has proved difficult, despite favorable articles and newspaper editorials about Feeney's example, to change old ways. In Ireland, tax incentives for philanthropists have met with resistance because of a popular belief that rich people pay far too little tax as it is. But, says Atlantic Philanthropies vice president Colin McCrea, at least it has stimulated an interesting debate in a country “where a few years ago, people couldn't even spell ‘philanthropy.'”

“Giving while living is not for everybody, we recognize,” wrote Gara LaMarche, chief executive of Atlantic Philanthropies, in the foundation's annual report for 2006—only the second yearly report to be published in a quarter of a century. “We respect the pluralism of philanthropy. But an increasing number of donors . . . are pursuing the route of large strategic investments made over shorter periods of time. For those who wish to go that way, we wish to be a model and an ally.”

Feeney and Atlantic still do not seek credit for their giving. The foundation sees generosity as its own reward. But donors spending large sums of money, particularly where they are trying to influence policy, should do so in the open, so others can watch, critique, influence, and hopefully follow their
example, stated LaMarche. While the foundation is no longer secret, its stated goal is to remain humble, and it calls increasingly on outside evaluators to review and guide programs. It commissions independent assessments of major grants and has contracted a “respectable institute” to survey selected major grantees—anonymously. An increasingly important element of winding down, says McCrea, is sustainability, that is, ensuring that any program underpinned with Atlantic money will not simply collapse when the foundation goes out of business, and that other givers come into the field to take its place.

The spend-down train now seems unstoppable. As of December 31, 2007, the foundation had approved $4.4 billion in grants, its net assets had declined toward the $3 billion mark, and it was budgeted to commit about $360 million annually. “At that pace, if the total return on the portfolio is as we project it, we'll stop making grants in or about 2016,” says Harvey Dale. “However, neither the actual annual commitments, nor the actual total return, are knowable in advance. Thus, the actual date when grant commitments will cease will only be finally determined when we get there!”

The idea of a “founding chairman's pot”—currently $45 million a year—intended to balance Feeney's enthusiasm for new projects with the orderly winding down of the foundation, has not really worked, as the aging philanthropist impatiently seeks out new bricks-and-mortar projects. Fearful that the money is not being spent quickly enough, Feeney has resumed a dominant role in taking initiatives. He personally arranged for the commitment of eighteen grants, totaling almost $257 million, in the two years ending on December 31, 2007, most of which reflect his undiminished passion for providing buildings for medical research and higher education. The biggest is a pledge of $50 million (and rising) to the University of California in San Francisco toward the construction of a new cardiovascular research institute.

One thing has changed in Feeney's life. He and Helga now at last travel business class, having been “instructed” to do so by members of his board who constantly fret about his health. Having turned seventy-seven in April 2008, he finds it increasingly difficult to get around because of his wobbly knees but stubbornly continues to traverse the globe on his self-imposed mission of giving. As Feeney sees it, there is too much misery in the world to justify any delay in disposing of the enormous wealth he amassed earlier in life. With a cackle, he vows, “I'm not going to die until I can spend it.”

INDEX

ABC television (Australia)

Adams, Gerry
-
188
-
190

Adler, Harry
-
27

Advertisements

Age
(Melbourne)

Ahern, Bertie

AIDS

Airport Chandlers Ltd. and Airport Chandlers Incorporated

Airport
magazine

Akers-Jones, Sir David

Alarcon, Ricardo

Americans for a New Irish Agenda

American Tourist and Trade Association Anchorage, Alaska

Andrade

Annenberg Foundation

Antil, Fred

Army Exchange Service stores (PXs)

Arnault, Bernard

Arnold, Fortas & Porter law firm

Atlantic Charitable Trust

Atlantic Foundation

Atlantic Foundation Service Company

board members

secrecy/anonymity concerning

See also
Atlantic Philanthropies

Atlantic House

Atlantic Philanthropies legacy of

endowment/spending down of

Atlantic Trust

Attebury, Ed

Australia

Council for the Encouragement of Philanthropy in Australia

Aylward, Sean

 

Bahamas

Bannister, Roger

Beattie, Peter

Beauchamp, Marc

Beck, Robert A. (Bob)

Bellamy, Adrian

“Benefits and Burdens of Secrecy” (Hannon report)

Benn, Dermot

Bennett Jr., John G.

Berghofer, Clive

Bermuda

Bernheim, Antoine

Berry, Padraig

Bessemer Trust Company (New York)

Bianchi, Gail Vincenzi

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Blanche de Castille Catholic school (Nice, France)

Blewitt, Jack

Bortz, Walter

Braddock, Rick

Bradley, Dick

Brady, Sir Denis

Brasher, Chris

Brickern, William

Brown, Michael

Bruso, Bob

Buffet, Warren

Burke, Ray

Bush, George