Judith Miller, who often reported on terrorism (and who later would go to jail for not revealing the source of a leak from the Bush White House), made only passing reference to Feeney’s support for the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. Most Americans knew little of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Among leading Irish Americans in the know, Feeney was highly regarded, even revered, for what he had done for peace on the island of their ancestry. Only one critical letter appeared in the New York Times, from Thomas J. Flynn of Fairfield, Connecticut, wondering how Feeney could “be so taken in by the myth of Irish nationalism that he thinks his donations to Sinn Fein supported only nonviolent activities.”
In Ireland, further public approval followed. The Irish Times, Dublin’s leading daily newspaper, focused on the revelations about Feeney’s massive gifts to Irish universities, comparing his philanthropy to that of one of Ireland’s richest businessmen, Anthony O’Reilly. “The main difference between the two men’s actions is obvious,” wrote Bernice Harrison in The Irish Times. “Mr. Feeney mostly gave anonymously . . . Dr. O’Reilly’s donations are very public and as such perhaps buy the businessman a kind of immortality.”
Coverage of Feeney in the British tabloid press was generally positive. But the Mirror, under the headline “Fury over Sinn Fein $4 billion man,” alleged that the gift to Sinn Fein by the “elderly eccentric” billionaire had attracted flak “from furious peace groups and Protestants.” The “furious peace groups and Protestants” it cited were two people associated with a pressure group called Families Against Intimidation and Terror in Northern Ireland, which campaigned against the paramilitary practice of knee-capping victims, and which received funding from an Irish American with unionist sympathies. One of its founding members, Nancy Gracey, complained to the paper that Feeney was “giving blood money to the very people causing all the hurt and pain.” But the Mirror also noted that Feeney was “no sectarian benefactor,” having contributed to both sides in Northern Ireland. In an editorial headlined “Chuck’s Got a Heart of Gold,” it concluded that in a world dominated by greed, Mr. Feeney’s secret philanthropy “is as refreshing as it is extraordinary.”
Peace groups were in fact far from furious with Chuck Feeney. The leading cross-community peace group, Cooperation North, later renamed Cooperation Ireland, alone had received $10 million from the Atlantic Foundation. Many such nonprofit bodies depended on Feeney and Atlantic for their existence. “Reconciliation and human rights were important areas that needed funding in Ireland and we wanted to see the potential of funding such organizations,” said Feeney. “In the press they say that half the people I fund in Northern Ireland are Republicans: the logic of that is that the other half must be Loyalists.”
John Healy had been apprehensive about the safety of Atlantic staff in Belfast in case a “loyalist bomb-tosser” misunderstood Feeney’s contributions to peace, so he consulted an international security firm, Risk Management International, for advice. “Our worries were unfounded. We didn’t get a single phone call in Belfast from anybody. We lived a charmed life in Belfast. In the Republic, we got a cascade of applications.”
The DFS sale did result in one assessment of Feeney’s role in Ireland that upset him deeply. It came in the book by Airy Routier about Bernard Arnault that was published in France. “Opposed to the idea of inheritance . . . Chuck Feeney gives his money for diverse humanitarian causes but also for the IRA, the secret Irish army, of which he is one of the financiers,” Routier wrote. “Chuck promised Bernard that the sale of DFS would allow him to finance medical research. But only the God of Catholics and Chuck Feeney know how he will use the money of LVMH!”
Many people in France knew Feeney from the time he lived there and would be exposed to this libel. Two of his children, Juliette and Patrick, lived in France and friends asked them, “Is your father supporting the IRA?” They saw how hurt their father was. “It totally sucked,” said his daughter Leslie. “He is such a pacifist, a humanist; the insinuations were totally unfair. The book really pissed him off.”
Years later, a Liberal Party member of the Victoria Parliament in Australia, Phillip Honeywood of Warrandyte constituency, alleged in a parliamentary debate that funding for the Melbourne Institute of Technology had come from “a Bermuda-based entity, Mr. Charles Feeney, who is a long-standing major donor to the Irish Republican Army.” The Melbourne Age reported the comment the next day under a headline that read, “Uni[versity] Benefactor Has IRA Ties, says MP.” Feeney was also “pissed off” by this comment, from a minor politician who “couldn’t get press any other way but for some reason wanted to get up our nose.” The article caused momentary panic among some Australian beneficiaries of his foundation until they checked with contacts in Ireland and got the full picture.
As the dust settled and the media attention faded, Harvey Dale congratulated everyone in the foundation for the success of the unveiling. “The New York Times story and virtually all the ensuing international media coverage was very favorable to us,” he wrote in a report to directors about the “most significant event” in their history. “None of our worst fears of distortion or unfavorable ‘spin’ were realized.” In fact, he boasted, one of his “spook” friends, who served on President Clinton’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, had described the unveiling of Chuck Feeney as “a Great Op.”
Despite everything, Chuck Feeney and Harvey Dale were still not prepared to give up the culture of secrecy. The Atlantic Foundation and the Atlantic Trust, which in the wake of the sale were brought together under a single title, The Atlantic Philanthropies, went underground again. Anonymous giving had allowed them to avoid the “crowding out” effect, where other potential benefactors were deterred by funding from a highly visible person with a great fortune, argued Dale in his post-sale report. “We still adhere to two long-standing attributes of our style of grant-making: we don’t accept unsolicited proposals, and we insist that our donees keep the source of their gifts confidential.”
Atlantic sent a message to all beneficiaries, stating in bold-faced type that they had not been released from their pledges of confidentiality unless specifically authorized. “Our conditions that you not identify the source of the gift remain in force,” it proclaimed. “Please let the appropriate individual in your organization know of this continued requirement.” Other rules stayed in place: No announcements of awards would be allowed, and recipients would still have to sign confidentiality documents and promise not to seek contact with the donor.
While the focus was on the DFS sale, Feeney’s investments were bringing in more huge sums. In 1996, investments in companies such as Price-line. com Inc., E*Trade Group Inc., Sierra Online, and Baan Co. produced a capital return of $403 million. The sale of a stake in Legent Corporation to Computer Associates in 1995 brought in another $173 million.
Of the overall assets of $4 billion, $1 billion was now tied up in “state,” or businesses and property, and the rest was in “church.” When the Atlantic Foundation was first launched, 90 percent of the assets were in “state” and only 10 percent in liquid form. The proportion in cash now shot up to 75 percent. It would continue to rise. After some twenty years of acquisitions and expansion, Chuck Feeney would now wind down his multinational conglomerate, or as Dale put it in his report to directors, bring General Atlantic Group’s various businesses “to ripeness for harvesting.”
There was a “tipping point” in favor of the foundation over GAGL, recalled Chris Oechsli, and from then on “we were on a trajectory to divest ourselves of the operating assets.” They had already started the process with the sale of Cannon’s sports club in London to Vardon, the owner of the London Dungeons, for $40 million and of the Medallion Hotels in Texas and Oklahoma, which in January 1998 brought in a further $150 million.
Harvey Dale noted in his report that in the early 1990s, their liquidity had been so constrained that it had caused “extreme distress both to the donees and to us”—a reference to the drying up of DFS dividends a
t the time of the Gulf War. Now they need no longer worry about dividends drying up. In the post-sale landscape, Atlantic Philanthropies could spend more than 5 percent of the asset base, “even if that shrinks the value of our portfolio over time.” A 5-percent spend rate would be about $200 million a year. In their previous year, they had given grants totaling $140 million. They could now go far beyond that.
Chuck Feeney was much in demand after he was outed by the New York Times. The U.S. networks clamored for interviews. However, following his call from the airport, Feeney did not give another media interview for several years, and his foundation ignored regular requests from CBS 60 Minutes producers to appear on their program. After he gave his interview with Judith Miller on the pay phone in the San Francisco airport, he flew out of the country on one of his frequent around-the-world trips. Having featured in public through circumstances beyond his control, he resolved to disappear again and revert to the anonymity in which he had always taken refuge. Harvey Dale advised him how to react if confronted by paparazzi on his travels. The lawyer had hired a professional photographer to demonstrate how to prevent a cameraman from getting a recognizable picture of a targeted person. He passed on the advice to Feeney: Close your eyes as a photographer raises his camera, or put a hand over your nose and mouth.
Feeney made one or two exceptions that showed his favoritism to the Irish. When he was recognized and approached in a San Francisco restaurant by Irishman Gerry Mullins, who wanted support for a documentary about photographs taken in Ireland by famed photographer Dorothea Lange, he responded enthusiastically, and the result was an award-winning documentary Photos to Send, coproduced by Mullins and Irish American Deirdre Lynch.
Then he stunned his friend Niall O’Dowd by agreeing to accept in person the 1997 award of Irish American of the Year, presented by Irish America magazine. Feeney abhorred self-congratulatory events, but he liked O’Dowd and promised to turn up for the lunchtime presentation at the 21 Club on West Fifty-second Street. O’Dowd tipped off two national media friends, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, and Jim Dwyer of the Daily News. At the event, Feeney told the two columnists that when he was a student at Cornell University, he filled in a questionnaire on money and banking and got a note from the professor saying: “You have a flair for writing, but no knowledge of the subject matter. Try journalism.” Maureen Dowd asked Feeney if he was nervous at making his first public appearance. “Well, they promised me $20 to make the speech,” he quipped. “Chuck Feeney’s desire for anonymity is startling in an age when people stamp their names on every available surface,” she wrote in her New York Times column. “Here was the real-life John Beresford Tipton on the old television show The Millionaire, whose face was never seen as he instructed his personal secretary to give some unsuspecting person a check for $1 million, on the condition that the Samaritan never be revealed.”
Jim Dwyer recalled that his speech was like a toast given by an unprepared uncle at a wedding and that Feeney concluded his talk in style, saying, “That’s it, I’m not doing this again.”
One of Feeney’s concerns about exposure was that his life would never be the same. But after the lunch, Maureen Dowd noticed him tramping off on foot in an old gray raincoat and tweed cap, unnoticed by passers-by, as other corporate figures climbed into their limousines. Feeney was in fact able to retreat back into semi-anonymity after his unveiling, unrecognized while hailing a taxi in New York or dining at a back table at P. J. Clarke’s, where the waiters pretended they didn’t know who he was. His wide range of friends and acquaintances around the world—academics, architects, medical professionals, writers, artists, and lawyers—protected his privacy out of loyalty and gratitude.
“Harvey Dale had scared Chuck into believing his life would change enormously if he went public, so Harvey ran it like the CIA,” said Feeney’s former legal counsel Paul Hannon. “But I think Chuck found out that it didn’t change his life at all. He didn’t get better service at P. J. Clarke’s.”
CHAPTER 27
Golden Heart
On April 27, 1997, four months after the sale of DFS, Chuck Feeney spotted a single-column story on an inside page of the San Francisco Examiner as he waited for a flight at the San Francisco airport. It was headed “U.S. Foundation Last Hope for Many of Vietnam’s Poor.” The writer, Sandra Ann Harris, told the story of a mother of seven children who lived in a one-room hut in Vietnam without doors or windows. She did not have the means to feed her children and was relying on a humanitarian organization called East Meets West Foundation, based in Los Angeles, for subsistence. But the organization’s Vietnam director, Mark Conroy, was quoted as saying that they likely could not continue helping people like that if the foundation didn’t get new funding when their five-year $400,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development ran out in five months.
Feeney tore out the article. When he returned to San Francisco, he asked Gail Vincenzi Bianchi, the administration manager of the InterPacific office, to find out what she could about East Meets West.
Although he had turned sixty-six, Chuck Feeney was not contemplating retirement. Far from it. Not for him the three Gs—golf, grandchildren, and gardening—he told his family. His days of investing in new businesses were behind him, but he was determined to devote all his time to philanthropy. He was becoming more fixated on the merits of giving while living. “The world changed when we sold DFS,” recalled Feeney. “Our coffers were full from the $1.6 billion transaction. I sort of felt we could do more good by taking that money and putting it into things, but the challenge was, where do you put it?” His philanthropy was opportunistic, but he didn’t give randomly. He investigated and scrutinized, and sometimes tested the people involved with small initial grants. And it always came down to his instincts about the quality of the people involved.
The East Meets West Foundation, he learned, was set up by Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese woman whose life as a victim of the war was chronicled in Oliver Stone’s 1993 movie Heaven and Earth. Born Phung Thi Le Ly, in the Buddhist village of Ky La near Da Nang in central Vietnam, Le Ly was recruited as a child by the Vietcong and at age fifteen was tortured by South Vietnamese forces, but then wrongfully condemned as a traitor by the Vietcong and forced to flee her home. She lived on her wits, and was for a time a prostitute at an American base, but in 1969 she married a U.S. citizen who arranged for her to come to the United States. He died four years later, and she married another American, Dennis Hayslip, who passed away in 1982, leaving Le Ly a trust fund that enabled her to invest and become wealthy. She wrote two books narrating her life.6 In 1987, she founded the East Meets West Foundation as a charitable group dedicated to improving the health and welfare of the poorest Vietnamese and to promoting self-sufficiency by building schools and providing safe drinking water.
The story had a strong appeal for Feeney, who believed that helping people was all about helping them to help themselves. He also thought that the Vietnamese had gotten a raw deal from the United States. “I read a lot of books about the American war in Vietnam,” he said. “It was a war America was not going to win. One of the things that got to me about Vietnam was that it seemed to me the whole concept was wrong . . . going into a village and killing peasant families. After starting a war with people whom we were not going to defeat, General Curtis LeMay said, ‘We’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age.’ We then put an embargo on trade. Frankly, if you don’t trade with the U.S. you don’t trade with anybody. It was punitive. Now America is out there trading, and I think that is the right thing to do. We owe it to the Vietnamese after the way we treated them.”
Feeney asked the East Meets West executive director, Mark Stewart, an ex-marine who was severely wounded in Da Nang, to meet him in San Francisco for a chat. “He may not have been pretty excited when he went in but he came out of there pretty excited, because Chuck said to him, ‘Here, I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars, and you go out and see what you can do with that,’” recalled Mark Con
roy. Feeney in effect told Stewart, “Come back and tell me what you did with it. If I like it, well, I have some deep pockets, and maybe we will do some more.” East Meets West took the $100,000 to build and renovate some elementary schools and kindergartens and install some fresh-water systems. Stewart gave Feeney an account of what they did, and Feeney promptly made a second gift of $200,000. It was Feeney’s style to see how an initial grant would be used before making a major commitment. Feeney also liked to get trusted friends from the past to check things out for him. He called up Bob Matousek, then living in Tiburon just outside San Francisco, and suggested that he take a trip to Vietnam to assess the quality of the people with the foundation and the type of work that they were doing and whether the Communist government interfered.
Matousek flew to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in early 1998—the first of a dozen trips he would make to Vietnam—and then on to Da Nang, where he introduced himself to Mark Conroy. The Vietnam director spent a week showing him different projects. Matousek was moved by the distress of rural parents unable to look after their children properly. Conroy, who regularly traveled around the rice paddies on a motorcycle to meet with peasants, showed him “compassion homes” they had built outside Da Nang: small, dry, brick structures with toilets that could be put up for a little over $1,000. Many homes in Vietnam were made from tarps: They leaked and had no toilet or cooking facilities.
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