Matousek reported back to Feeney that he was impressed with the people and the work they were doing, and that there was no sign of interference from the government or of officials looking for kickbacks. There would also be no restrictions on money transfers from Bermuda into Vietnam.
In October 1998, Chuck Feeney flew to Vietnam, taking with him Sandra Harris, the author of the San Francisco Examiner article. He flew from Ho Chi Minh City to Da Nang on the east coast to see East Meets West operations for himself.
“Chuck came in and sat down in my old office, which people used to call the cave,” recalled Conroy. “We had snakes and rats and everything you could think of in there. He came back into the kitchen. He talked for about two hours. Looking back today, I’m a bit embarrassed about it because I was grilling Chuck about what his intentions were, and about his interests in the organization. By then the directors of East Meets West had found out who Chuck was and were asking, ‘What’s going on? Who’s this very rich guy? What’s his interest in our little tiny organization?’ There was concern that Chuck was going to come in and take the organization over and do what he wanted to do with it. I caught wind of that. I asked him, ‘Chuck, why are you coming to Vietnam? What is it that you want to do here?’ He said, ‘I just thought Vietnam got a bad deal, and I’d like to help out.’ He didn’t really have to say much more.”
Feeney’s arrival could not have come at a more propitious time for Conroy, who did not have the funds to do more than manage an orphanage and a primary health care center in Da Nang and do a little irrigation and microcredit. Money was so tight he was reduced to meeting tour boats coming into Da Nang and soliciting money by making presentations to groups of Western tourists.
As they talked in the “cave,” Conroy became aware that Feeney was interested in larger projects that could make a big improvement in people’s lives and would absorb a lot more money. “He didn’t seem as interested in the grass-roots stuff. He could do so much more at the level he is at. He wanted to make a bigger impact. He was convinced that if you educate people, they would develop their own country. We were looking at it from the bottom up as a small organization, trying to keep kids alive, get them educated, while Chuck was thinking top down. It was a pretty good fit.”
He took the American visitor to the hospital in Da Nang, where he knew they badly needed a new burns center. At the hospital Feeney asked the directors what their next-most-urgent need was. They said they would really love to renovate the pediatric center, which was in pretty bad shape. Feeney said, “Why don’t we do both?”
As they left the hospital, Feeney asked, “What do you think that’s going to cost, Mark?” Conroy replied, “Maybe around $300,000.” Back in the cave, Feeney gave him contact details for “a Mr. Harvey Dale,” and asked him to write a proposal for the two projects. “I wrote a bunch of stuff up on three quarters of a sheet of paper,” said Conroy. “Chuck says, ‘That looks good,’ and signs it and faxes it off to Harvey. The money came a month later.”
From then on Chuck Feeney became a regular visitor to Vietnam. In Da Nang, Vietnam’s fourth-largest city, he stayed in a $25-a-night hotel, making expeditions to hospitals and schools through streets filled with cyclos, motorbike taxis, and schoolgirls in flowing white dresses riding bicycles. He made sure that the East Meets West Foundation got the money to continue work on water purification, schools, kindergartens, and compassion homes, but “he did not take over the organization in any way,” said Conroy. Said Feeney, “They would say, ‘OK, this month we’re going to make a push on elementary schools, or kindergartens,’ and we would support it.” In the second half of the 1990s, East Meets West could build only two dozen schools, but with their new patron, they were able to build forty-eight schools in 2001 alone.
Feeney began serious investigation of the education and health needs in Vietnam. He studied surveys and analyses. He got Sandra Harris to work with Conroy for six months to produce a paper on schooling in Vietnam, “Education Under Siege.” He got back copies of Vietnam’s English-language newspapers to see what he could glean about the state of the country.
Just as he had done in practically every university in Ireland, Feeney dropped by the director’s office at Da Nang University to ask him about his plans for the future. The most urgent need was a new library, but the university couldn’t afford to build one. Feeney organized the required funding of $700,000 and channeled it through East Meets West. Conroy got a call one day to meet Feeney at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. “He told me, ‘That library needs a good elevator. I have spent two days looking at elevators. Otis here are not making good ones, just wrapping parts together, the only good one I can find is Schindler.’” He brought Conroy to the Schindler people and said to them, “This is the guy I want you to work with.” A thought struck Conroy. Feeney was planning to buy a lot of elevators. The library was only a first.
“He had a proclivity for construction projects, working with good institutions and good leaders, and building facilities to support their programs: He liked creating tangible assets and institutions to use like major tools,” said Chris Oechsli. “I remember Chuck showing me the article from the Examiner . He wasn’t showing it as a way of saying anything. It’s Chuck’s indirect style. You only realize this afterwards. He gives people papers, out of the blue, without any background, sometimes totally unrelated to anything you are aware of. You can’t tell if this is a precursor to something he wants you to do or this is just something he wants to get off his desk. There’s a lot of ambiguity. These kinds of things happen.” Feeney also for a brief period got John Joyce, an Irish student in Vietnam, and Steve Reynolds, who had retired from General Atlantic Partners, to act as his representatives in Vietnam, and he started bringing members of the Atlantic Philanthropies board to see for themselves the opportunities there.
Feeney also dipped into the reservoir of goodwill that he had created with his earlier philanthropy. He invited Dr. Walter Bortz, past president of the American Geriatrics Society, who wrote the best-selling books Dare to Be 100 and Living Longer for Dummies and who had been generously funded by Atlantic, to come to Hanoi on a fact-finding trip. He got two Irish university presidents, Danny O’Hare and Ed Walsh, to accompany him to Da Nang and Hue to look at higher-education needs. “People come in and none are aware there is an agenda or a plan, at least in Chuck’s thinking, and all of a sudden they tend to meet up in the stew pot of bubbling ideas and possibilities,” said Oechsli, who became director of country and health programs in Vietnam for Atlantic Philanthropies.
“Chuck was attracted to Vietnam like a moth to a flame,” said Matousek. “He realized Vietnam was the greatest bang for the buck, and he took a real keen personal interest. He would walk through run-down hospitals and schools and say, ‘I think we can renovate this and rebuild that.’ He would come back six months later, and they would be finished, and the people would show in their expressions the appreciation of the fact that it was his dollars that achieved this. It was, I think, a tremendous feeling for him to see on the faces of educators and doctors the results of making the call on the spot, and seeing the good that has been done: more patients processed through a hospital, more children through a school.”
In Hanoi, a thirty-three-year-old Vietnamese American doctor, Dr. Le Nhan Phuong, who was working with Dr. Michael Linnan, the medical attaché to U.S. ambassador Pete Peterson, on a public health program, encountered Feeney and other members of Atlantic Philanthropies at a public-health seminar. “Who are these guys, Michael?” he asked. Linnan replied, “You should take these guys very seriously, as they have the potential to do a lot for Vietnam.”
Shortly afterward, when Atlantic decided it needed an in-country director with a medical background, it recruited Phuong—just as he was about to accept a Fulbright scholarship to go back to the United States—and persuaded him to stay and supervise projects funded by Atlantic Philanthropies instead.
Le Nhan Phuong was ten when the North Vietnamese army swep
t down on Saigon in 1975. There was widespread panic at that time among people connected with the South Vietnamese regime, who included Phuong’s parents. His mother, Le Thi Hang, placed him and his sister in an orphanage, in the hope that they would be evacuated in Operation Babylift, a U.S.-government-backed effort to fly out tens of thousands of Vietnamese orphans. To hide their ties with the family, the two children were given different birth certificates and names. The airlift started on April 4, 1975. Two weeks later, Phuong’s mother returned to the orphanage to collect the children, having found passage for them on a plane leaving Saigon airport and was mistakenly told they had already been evacuated. A week later, on April 27, Phuong and his sister were among over 7,000 Vietnamese refugees flown out in the biggest one-day evacuation of the war. Phuong and Le Mong Hoang were transferred to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, then Guam, then San Francisco, then Portland, Oregon, where they spent a year in different foster homes. They had no way of knowing where their mother was. A social worker in Portland took away from Phuong the picture he carried of his parents, the only connection with his family. He despaired of seeing them again. A Portland couple with four children applied to adopt them. Three days before the papers were to be signed, their mother arrived on their doorstep in Portland to reclaim her lost children. She and her husband, Pham The Truyen, had gotten out of Vietnam and had been placed in a refugee camp in Little Rock, Arkansas, and then moved to Atlanta. She had undertaken a desperate search for her missing children, going to church and refugee groups, showing their photographs. At last someone recognized them. Phuong and his sister were reunited in Atlanta with their parents.
Phuong trained as a doctor and obtained a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Although he began practicing as a physician in the United States, he felt himself drawn back to Vietnam. “On the one hand I was trying to fit in as an American; on the other I felt this calling, what I needed to do,” he said. In 1998, he went with a group of American Vietnamese doctors to Hanoi, and Dr. Linnan, health attaché of the U.S. embassy in Hanoi, offered him a job helping to develop public health in Hanoi schools at $300 a month. He returned to the United States, gave up his $10,000-per-month job, sold his house and his Mustang convertible—“That was hard,” he said with a laugh—and returned to live and work in Vietnam. “It was the most wonderful feeling of freedom,” he said.
Like others before him, Le Nhan Phuong came to regard Chuck Feeney as a father figure. He became Vietnam country manager and program executive for Atlantic and accompanied Feeney on visits as guide and interpreter, sharing his jokes and keeping up with his evening consumption of white wine. “He pays attention to individuals,” he said. “He told me I should pay attention to my parents and call them often. I never forgot that. We work our hearts out to fulfill his vision.”
Because of Feeney’s personal involvement, hospital and university directors in Vietnam got to know him and to appreciate that he was the visionary and moving force behind the philanthropy. They reluctantly respected his wishes to remain anonymous. “They pestered us about putting plaques up, but Chuck doesn’t want any, so we just don’t do it,” said Conroy. However, some plaques appeared in Vietnam indirectly honoring Feeney, like that on Tupi Hoa School, opened in 1998, which declared, “Funded by Golden Heart.” “Often I would be asked to write a thank-you letter for the donors and some poor uneducated people used that term,” said Conroy. “There are probably a dozen ‘Golden Heart’ plaques out there. Chuck never said anything to me, but Bob Matousek said there should be no more.”
One isolated school in Thang Binh, deep in the heart of rural Vietnam, didn’t get the message about anonymity. Its director erected a plaque saying, “Funding provided by Feeney.” It is almost certainly the only public recognition of Chuck Feeney by name on a building anywhere in the world.
The directors of Da Nang Hospital did find a way of mischievously honoring “Golden Heart” after Feeney organized funding for an engineering and diagnostic center with a helipad on top. When he came by in November 2005 to see the completed building, the director said proudly, “Look at the color!” He had had the six-story building painted green, in honor of Feeney’s Irishness. Later over lunch in the little boardroom with a bust of Ho Chi Minh in the corner, Feeney explained to top hospital staff why he resisted the temptation to take any credit. “The truth is all the credit for this is yours. We have carried out our side, but that was the easy side. The real work was on your side. Atlantic is proud to be associated with high-quality people doing what they say they will do.” The director pointed out that the high standards that Feeney made possible in turn attracted more funding from other foreign foundations.
Feeney rarely encountered evidence of government interference, though at the Da Nang Learning Resource Center in the College of Education and Foreign Languages, he was quietly told that the man wandering around the computer terminals where students were accessing the Internet was a Communist Party censor known as the “human firewall.”
Feeney was most at ease with the students. On that visit to Da Nang, he abandoned his no-photographs rule and stood beaming with different groups, his arms around them as they took pictures. He told them, “There are lots of people in the world who need help and if you help, then you are a better person.”
As a doctor, Phuong used his position with Atlantic to conduct a personal campaign against smoking in Vietnam, where at least 40,000 people die from smoking-related diseases each year. Instead of plaques honoring the giver, he insisted that No Smoking signs were put up everywhere, and that the rule was rigidly enforced. “A No Smoking sign is Vietnamese for Funding by Atlantic,” joked a hospital official in Hue.
Feeney’s low profile allowed him to sustain his anonymity outside the small number of hospital and university directors who got to know him. Sometimes people knew he was in the room but couldn’t pick him out from other Westerners. In Vietnam, he generally wore his aloha shirt, looking like an amiable American tourist on a budget. The Australian ambassador to Vietnam, Michael Mann, held a dinner in Hanoi for Feeney and members of the board of Atlantic who were touring the foundation’s projects. “I knew who he was, and the background, but very few people knew because it was all kept very confidential,” said Mann. “He came in with a very distinguished group of people, but Chuck was the most unassuming. He was sitting off in the corner with my eight-year-old daughter Alexandra chatting, and he was not involved in the general discussion.” At dinner he put Feeney sitting beside his wife, Monique, knowing that both spoke French. She was charmed by him. He told her about his five children and how they had all gone through college, and what they were doing. After dinner she asked her husband, “Who was that nice old guy sitting next to me at dinner?” He replied, “That was Chuck Feeney you were sitting next to, mate!” She had assumed that the important-looking American sitting next to her husband was the “billionaire.” Harvey Dale recalled that he was sitting next to Mann. “Chuck would have enjoyed that,” he chuckled, when told the story.
“The impact of Atlantic on Vietnam is enormous,” said Le Nhan Phuong, looking back seven years after Feeney’s first visit. “It is so unlike any other philanthropy group operating in Vietnam. Chuck is not one to give orders. He will steer us now and again to what he is interested in. He identified where and when Atlantic should take action. And when we do, we mean business. Once we identify something, we get there speedily.”
The success in Vietnam reflected the remarkable flexibility of Atlantic Philanthropies, which was able to accommodate Feeney’s inspired methods of bold problem solving. Oechsli recalled that “Chuck’s initiatives sometimes went through the foundation in a perfunctory fashion, sometimes coming in at the last minute before a board meeting and getting a rubber stamp with little documentation. Chuck wanted to ‘do’ Vietnam, so the rubber stamp was used freely, and we managed to do a lot of low-cost major construction.” Later, a strategic plan evolved for Vietnam that focused on health
and education.
From 1998 to 2006, Atlantic Philanthropies provided $220 million for a series of building and scholarship projects and health initiatives in Vietnam. This included the construction and equipping of what are now the most modern libraries in the country, designated as learning resource centers, at four major regional universities: Can Tho, Hue, Da Nang, and Thai Nguyen. It also included the building of dormitories, student centers, and sports facilities at the universities of Da Nang, Hue, and Thai Nguyen. Atlantic also supported the establishment of an English Language Institute at Da Nang University to improve English training in the central region. Feeney strongly believed this was vital for the students in central Vietnam eager to get on in the world. “Not to be chauvinistic, but good English is very important,” he said.
Almost half of the money was plowed into health programs. Da Nang General Hospital was modernized with the building and renovation of most of its departments, including obstetrics and gynecology, burns, pediatrics, internal medicine, surgery, emergency, tropical medicine, oncology, morgue, and waste management. Atlantic funded new construction and renovations at Quang Tri Provincial Hospital, including pediatrics and surgery, and buildings and equipment for Hue Central Hospital’s pediatrics department and cardiovascular center—the only one in central Vietnam. It also paid for new equipment for the catheterization laboratory for the Heart Institute in Ho Chi Minh City and provided money for the first phase of construction of the National Hospital of Pediatrics in Hanoi and a new campus for the Hanoi School of Public Health. “We started putting a lot of money into being the driving force in the creation of the public health system in Vietnam,” said Feeney. Atlantic also provided funding for a wheelchair manufacturing unit, overseen by Bob Matousek and opened in 2007.
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