The Billionaire Who Wasn't

by Conor O'Clery

  “I think we have made 3,000 grants, so I suppose there is a scope for one of them to go sour,” Feeney mused in his apartment in San Francisco one rainy day the following January. Connolly failed to convince him that he was not “the guy down in Colombia . . . there for no good purposes.” He reflected that he might have gone further into the situation when Charles Lewis of the Washington Center for Public Integrity refused to meet Connolly, and looked at the allegations being made before starting up the Irish center. “We certainly won’t venture into that area again,” he said. As for the negative political and media comments, he said, “I’m a tough nut. I can put those things aside.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Charity Begins at Home

  By the start of the twenty-first century, Chuck Feeney had made a measurable impact on several countries. He and his secret giving were becoming known in ever-widening circles abroad. He was less well known in the United States, the country where he devoted most of his giving, despite the surge of publicity in 1997 when he was unveiled as a big-time secret philanthropist. By 2006, Feeney had given more money to American causes—$1.7 billion—than to all other countries combined, the biggest portion to higher education and research. The sheer size of the United States meant that the impact of his foundation’s giving was proportionately less on a national scale than in smaller countries. But the impact on one single institution was enormous. From the time he started his philanthropy, Chuck Feeney directed over $600 million to Cornell University. No other American university has ever received such a sum from a single alumnus.

  Up to the early 2000s, Feeney was always referred to at Cornell University as the Anonymous Donor, or AD. Cornell, however, was the one place in America where AD’s identity was an open secret. If someone gave anonymously to Cornell, people not supposed to be in the know would say, “Oh! Chuck Feeney!” “As time went on it was done with a nudge and a wink,” said Frank Rhodes. “That became a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit absurd for some people, but to begin with it was taken very seriously. The nudge and wink meant that the “anonymous donor” became a kind of formula in the foundation world for Atlantic Philanthropies, and yet with a perfectly straight face you had to be careful to say that you didn’t know who it was.”

  Feeney’s request for anonymity set him apart from other big donors to Cornell, such as Class of ’55 alumnus Sanford I. Weill, the former chairman and CEO of Citigroup, who made donations to the medical school and hospital approaching $200 million and for which he is commemorated by the Weill Cornell Medical College. Duffield Hall at Cornell is named after software millionaire David A. Duffield of California, who made a gift of $20 million to build a laboratory complex. Feeney’s name did not appear on any of the many buildings he funded at Cornell, though he did once honor his old friend Bob Beck by funding the $16-million state-of-the-art Robert A. and Jan M. Beck Center at the Hotel School.

  Ernie Stern, the fund-raiser for the Cornell Class of ’56, believes that there is a connection between Feeney’s drive to increase alumni giving at the start of his philanthropic work in the early 1980s and the enormity of subsequent gifts like that from Sandy Weill. “Sandy Weill was Class of ’55,” said Stern. “They were a nowhere class. Who the hell cares that the Class of ’56 gave X million dollars? Well, the Class of ’55 cares. And the Class of ’57 cares. Competition is a wonderful motivator. It’s completely stupid when you think about it. It’s nuts. But it works. Everybody looked at our class, said, well they can do it, we can do it. I know it sounds kind of immature or nonsensical but I take it seriously. Cornell has now reached a level of giving by its alumni never before achieved. Last year [2004] Cornell raised $350 million and it was No. 3 in the U.S., and No. 1 among alumni givers in the nation, and I attribute that in some measure to this gradual year-after-year thing started by our class.”

  Feeney’s insistence on anonymity was highly unusual. Only 1 percent of American givers ask to remain anonymous. Many rich Americans compete to make the most money, like the technology entrepreneur Jim Clark, who once aspired, unsuccessfully, to have more money than anyone else in the world. Feeney got involved with Clark in one of the biggest gifts ever made to Stanford University in California. In October 1999, Clark, the founder of Netscape, Silicon Graphics, and Healtheon, announced that he would donate $150 million to Stanford University for a new research hub to be called the James H. Clark Center. It was the largest single gift pledged to Stanford since its founding in 1891. The inventor said he felt indebted to the university for what it had given him: As a professor at Stanford in the early 1980s, he had been allowed to explore the technologies that he would later develop so profitably in the private sector. The university had made him rich, and he wanted to return the favor.

  The San Jose Mercury News enthused that Jim Clark “eroded the stereotype of stingy Silicon Valley tycoons” with his “jaw-dropping” $150-million contribution for the center, which would be at the heart of a biomedical engineering and sciences project known as Bio-X.

  Amid the flurry of glowing media testimonials, no one was aware that Chuck Feeney had agreed quietly to contribute $60 million to the project. Feeney had been an anonymous donor to Stanford since 1996—his son Patrick was a student there, and Chuck had been contacted in 1994 as a parent by Stanford’s vice president for development, John Ford, who had no idea at the time whom he was asking for money—and he had already made two gifts totaling $65 million for Stanford research projects. Feeney met Clark at a lunch at the home of Stanford’s president, John Hennessy, in March 2001. Chuck found him strange. He got a feeling that Clark was a one-time contributor, making a splash. “We like the project you are doing, and we would be happy to contribute to it,” he told Clark, who responded, “Fine, as long as I can retain the rights to my name.” Feeney replied, “Be our guest.”

  Six months later, after Clark had paid $60 million of his $150 million pledge, he dropped a bombshell on Stanford. He told Hennessy and Ford that he wanted to “suspend” payment of the remaining $90 million to protest the way President George W. Bush was limiting human embryonic stem-cell research, part of the intended purpose of the center. President Bush had said on August 9, 2001, that federal funding would only be available for stem-cell research using cell cultures established before that date. Hennessy was bewildered. Why would Clark want to punish the university—which had taken the lead in stem-cell research—for President Bush’s controversial decision? They pleaded with him to reconsider. Clark relented a little. He told them he would pay $30 million of the $90 million outstanding, but he was adamant he would not pay any more.

  The university had no legal redress. It preferred to trust donors to honor their promises rather than make them sign binding pledges. Stanford had to scramble to get the last $60 million to complete the Bio-X Center’s development.

  The Bio-X Center was opened in October 2003 to widespread acclaim for its architectural merits. Despite reneging on $60 million of his $150-million commitment, the inventor retained the naming rights. The visiting public is today informed that the James H. Clark Center was completed “thanks to the enormous generosity of Jim Clark and Atlantic Philanthropies.”

  Feeney’s total giving to Stanford at the time Clark pulled out amounted to $125 million, $35 million more than Clark gave, making him one of the top five givers in Stanford’s history, but nothing is named after him, as he wished. It equaled the Annenberg Foundation’s record 2001 gift of $125 million to the University of Pennsylvania, which was hailed by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as the largest sum given by a private foundation to a single American university. At the time, Feeney’s even greater giving to Cornell was still a secret.

  Impetuous withdrawals of funding are rare but not unknown in philanthropy. In June 2005, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle and Clark’s onetime rival, pledged $115 million to Harvard to fund the Ellison Institute for World Health. It was to be the biggest gift ever to the Ivy League university, far outweighing the largest previous donation of $70.5 mil
lion from John Loeb, the former U.S. ambassador to Denmark. One year later, Ellison, with a net worth of $16 billion and fifteenth place on the Forbes rich list, announced that he had changed his mind, because of the departure of Harvard president Larry Summers, whose concept the project was. Twenty researchers, three top academics, and managerial staff, who had already been hired, were told to find other work.

  Many of Atlantic Foundations’ gifts in the United States arose from the initiatives, in the early years, of Ray Handlan, president of the Atlantic Service Company, and after 1993 of his successor, Joel Fleishman. But on his frequent commutes between New York and San Francisco, Feeney was always on the lookout for his own “new new thing.” When spending a few weeks in San Francisco in 2004, he learned of a problem faced by the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). In 2003, it had received a $35-million gift from property developer Sanford Diller for the construction of the Helen Diller Family Cancer Research Building at UCSF- Mission Bay. The university had to raise a balance of $40 million, and for over a year struggled to find it. Feeney sat down with the development officer and asked for the list of wealthy San Francisco people. He pointed to the name of venture capitalist Arthur Rock. What about him? Rock had just given $25 million to Harvard, he was told. “That just proves he has $25 million to give,” said Feeney. “Why not offer him a challenge grant? If Rock puts up $20 million, Atlantic will match it with $20 million.” Not only did Rock agree, he put his gift up to $25 million when the cost rose $5 million because of the delay. “That’s what happens if you screw around a couple of years,” said Feeney. “You get inflation.” In March 2007, Atlantic gave the university its biggest cash gift ever—$50 million for a cardiovascular research center and clinic.

  Feeney also relied on a network of contacts to identify good and worthy causes in the United States, and he was constantly reading local newspapers, listening to news, and studying reports. A major grant was as likely to flow from a page Feeney tore from a magazine as from a consultation with a research institute director. Few magazines survived Chuck’s attention intact, and no university president was immune from the prospect that a nondescript man in blazer and aloha shirt, carrying his papers in a plastic bag, would one day walk into their office and ask how they were doing. Sometimes small academic institutions got as much, or more, of his attention and time as Ivy League universities. This was the case with Chaminade University, a tiny Catholic college nestled on the slopes of Kalaepohauku overlooking the Pacific Ocean just outside Honolulu in Hawaii.

  When Dr. Mary Civille (Sue) Wesselkamper became the first woman president of Chaminade in 1997, she found the university was run down and that the undergraduate population, many from the original Hawaiian population and from the Pacific Islands, had declined to about 660. “The financial situation was much worse than I or the board imagined,” she said. “We were very close to bankruptcy.” When she appealed for help to the founding Marianist Order based at the University of Dayton, Ohio, they sent Brother Bernard Ploeger to be her vice president and to sort out the finances. He told her, “Your worst fears are realized, the institution is unraveling.” Dayton paid $4.3 million to eliminate operating debt, but the fundamental problems of outdated facilities and substandard student accommodation remained unsolved.

  A few months later, a taxi drove up the steep driveway that curved between the neglected campus buildings. “The most unassuming man stepped out and wanted to know everything about the university,” said Wesselkamper. “I took him on the tour. He even wanted to see the bathrooms in the residence hall. He said, ‘I’ll be back to you.’”

  Feeney had been on one of his periodic business trips to Honolulu and had heard about Chaminade’s woes from a friend. After his tour of the campus, he invited Sue Wesselkamper to New York to meet Harvey Dale. “We have a general rule we don’t do religious giving, and Harvey is always strong on those kind of things,” said Feeney—who had already bent the rule with a $2-million gift to a Benedictine monastery in Ireland for library development. In New York, Wesselkamper explained that they had a two-tier system of a lay governing board and religious corporate board. Dale asked for a clearer separation from the religious side. “She came away from the meeting thinking, “We are small potatoes! I couldn’t go to the Marianists and say we wanted to separate from them.”

  Feeney asked Wesselkamper to compile a strategic plan for the university, which she and Brother Bernard did. They sent Feeney the plan. “Most people would just take it and leaf through it,” she said. “Chuck actually read the whole thing, and it was a hefty document.”

  “All of a sudden, later in 1998, Chuck comes into the office again—we had much older furniture then, and he sat on this bumpy couch—and he said, ‘I really like what you are doing for students here. I want to help you get started.’ I brought up the separation issue and he said, ‘I think we can work this out.’ He said, ‘I’m going to give you a check for $3 million.’ I asked him: ‘Could you say that again?’ Then he handed me a check for $3 million.”

  The standard letter arrived from Harvey Dale, telling her she would have to give the money back if anyone found out where it had come from. She recalled thinking, “This is Hawaii, it is a small island: There are no secrets here.” But she dutifully told the board, “I can’t tell you where the gift came from.” She reckoned some guessed that it was Feeney—he was well known in Hawaii—but kept quiet.

  Feeney became a regular visitor and took a close interest in the provision of new buildings and modular units to solve the accommodation shortage. Wesselkamper believes that what got Chuck’s attention was the poor condition of the buildings—something that could readily be fixed—and the fact that the students were up against it, compared to those in other universities. Most were from low-income families and disadvantaged groups. Many were judged to have the potential for university study but were not quite “prepared.” Some from the Philippines, Samoa, or Guam did not have English as a first language.

  “His gifts were truly transformational,” said Wesselkamper, on a walk around the campus in January 2006. “His giving is now close to $14 million.” A new library was erected with $5 million from Atlantic and $5 million from Jenai Sullivan Wall, daughter of a friend of Chuck’s from early DFS days, called Maurice (Sully) Sullivan, an Irishman who secured the McDonald’s franchise in Hawaii and founded the largest grocery chain on the islands, called Foodland, and who died in 1998.

  In keeping with his practice of bringing universities into conversation with each other, Feeney brought Sue Wesselkamper to Vietnam and sponsored a Vietnamese student for her university.

  Hawaii, though part of the United States, was an extension of Chuck’s giving to a new geographical zone. His ability to seek out and identify major worthy projects for the cash-rich foundation was the key to Atlantic Philanthropies’ success. But it was difficult for Atlantic directors and staff to keep up with him. Doing serious and thoughtful philanthropy in several countries required staffing and management.

  With Feeney showing no sign of slowing down, directors expressed doubts about the wisdom of “opening up any new geography.” Thomas J. Tierney, founder of the Boston-based Bridgespan management consulting company, summed up their apprehensions at a private seminar he conducted for Atlantic in 2000, by writing on a flip chart: “No Incremental Geographical Creep.” “There was kind of laughter at that and it went into some document or other as “No geographical creep,” said Harvey Dale, “and that was intended to constrain Chuck from opening up another geography.”

  Chuck Feeney’s moral authority in the organization was, however, so great, and the board members held him in such reverence, that they would have deferred to his wishes should he have opted to open up another territory. When asked what would happen if Feeney wanted to get involved in directing large grants to a new country, for example, Zimbabwe, Harvey Dale replied, “In my view if Chuck decided there was something important to do in Zimbabwe, that may be smart or not smart, but if he really,
really wanted to do it, I say—we can deal with that. And let’s help him instead of trying to stop him.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Geographical Creep

  In 2003, Harvey Dale’s reservations notwithstanding, Chuck Feeney started planning to go to a new country. It was perhaps inevitable that Cuba should attract his attention. He had become involved in Communist Vietnam and that had worked extremely well. Like Vietnam, Cuba had gotten a raw deal from the United States, he believed. Cuba and Vietnam came from the idea of righting an American wrong, said his daughter Juliette.

  For most Americans, helping Vietnam was not a problem. Under the Clinton administration, America’s relations with Vietnam had sharply improved. The wounds from the Vietnam War were beginning to heal. The U.S. economic embargo on Vietnam was lifted in 1994 and relations normalized in 1995.

  Cuba was different. Hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles in Florida were passionately opposed to any engagement while Fidel Castro was alive. They had bipartisan support in Washington. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Helms-Burton Act, which made a punitive U.S. trade embargo permanent. There were no diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana. U.S. citizens were subject to heavy fines if they entered Cuba without Washington’s permission.

  The political risk of Atlantic’s going into Cuba was therefore much higher than with Vietnam. “We haven’t yet got to the reconciliation step with Cuba, whereas we had with Vietnam,” said Chris Oechsli. “We are allowed to rebuild Vietnam, but we are not yet allowed to rebuild Cuba.”

  The Atlantic directors acquiesced in, rather than endorsed, Chuck’s plan to explore giving in Cuba. “I would not personally do it, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world if Chuck chooses to do it,” said chairman Frank Rhodes. Many of Chuck’s American admirers were taken aback, however. “I don’t know where this thinking comes from,” said his old friend Fred Antil. “He is a good man with a Catholic upbringing and blue-collar Catholic background.” Lawyers for Atlantic Philanthropies advised the American directors they should not even discuss giving funds to Cuba (and they didn’t). John Healy, who had become chief executive of Atlantic and moved to New York in 2001, was an Irish national but would not even talk about Cuba in interviews because he was based in New York. As an American citizen, Chuck could not direct the foundation’s operation in Cuba. However, he could inspire it.