“To this day we are all a bit uncomfortable with what we have,” said Patrick, who feels that his father inherited a Protestant guilt from living in America, a sense that made someone uncomfortable with luxury and wealth. “He has this tremendous weight. He passed some of it on to us. Everything was always very serious. The world is a heavy place, not a place to enjoy.”
What was most important to them was that despite the constant travel and absences and the divorce, he always tried to be involved in their lives. He once flew from Hong Kong to Los Angeles to see Caroleen act in Amadeus at a little theater in Woodland Hills and flew back the next day. “The truth is, my father is very happy,” said Caroleen. “He lives the way he wants to live. He likes to read his books, he likes to read the newspapers, he likes getting the news, he likes a good bottle of wine, he likes good food. He has his children and the things that he values around him. I think he actually has greater access to happiness than most. We are so measured today in society with accumulating and coveting symbols of wealth and happiness like being on the cover of a magazine, or driving a big fancy car. My father has his own idea of what happiness is for him and what makes him happy.”
What makes Chuck Feeney happy in his philanthropy is evident to anyone who has traveled with him. His face lights up with pleasure when he walks around a hospital—taking shorter steps now, as his knees are acting up—and sees babies in incubators that actually work; when he watches an eye doctor restore a peasant’s sight; when he sees clean new hospital wards with one patient to a bed where there were three; or when he goes into a learning center and watches disadvantaged kids working on computer terminals. The dividend of his giving is the satisfaction of seeing people use a building he has helped build. He might drop into a library and just watch students working late in the evening. “I sit there and pick up a magazine to read,” he said. Friends tease him that he does this because it is free.
Among history’s notable businessmen and philanthropists, Chuck Feeney stands out for several reasons. Starting from nothing, he built a vast fortune, and then in a single act, at the height of his powers, he transferred it irrevocably to his charitable foundation. Not only did he create one of the biggest and most successful philanthropies in the world, he often alone found the countries, the institutions, and the people to support, and then went out to “kick the tires,” as he is fond of saying. He brings his entrepreneurial acumen to the causes he feels passionate about, and helps build organizations to become self-reliant. He leverages money and favors and has created networks of people across the world to support each other. He shows the greatest respect for his beneficiaries. He goes to their premises. He never asks them to come to him. He means it when he says thanks and almost resents being thanked himself. He insists that it is the people who do good with the money that deserve the gratitude.
His philanthropic model is unique in its combination of size, offshore location, freedom of action, flexibility, anonymity, limited life span, willingness to make big bets, and global impact. It is a philanthropic landmark of the new century. Feeney’s creation is not just a good foundation but a great foundation. It has “Level 5 Leadership.” His promotion of bold problem-solving rather than self-perpetuation is a challenge to the tight-fisted rich, and to foundations that dole out very little every year. “Wealth brings responsibilities,” says Feeney. “People have to determine themselves whether they feel an obligation to use some of their wealth to improve life for their fellow human beings rather than create problems for future generations.”
“It is their call what the rich do with their money,” says Feeney. “I would not want to impose my thoughts on any rich person—he can keep it all or spend it all. If he doesn’t find anything wrong with buying big yachts, fine, more power to him.” But however reticent he is about saying it publicly, he believes strongly that the rich should start giving early in life, when still full of energy and drive. If they get heavily engaged in giving, they will see more opportunities to do good. “It’s a lot of work when you are over sixtyfive to start a giving program. It doesn’t happen overnight. If you want to give it away, think about giving it away while you are alive because you’ll get a lot more satisfaction than if you wait until you’re dead. Besides, it’s a lot more fun.”
Asked to elaborate he—typically—produced a newspaper cutting about unhappy American billionaires, which concluded with the story of how the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol found to his astonishment that giving money away was life’s most pleasurable act. “Read it,” he commanded.
Feeney’s giving while living has already exceeded that of his philanthropic icon, Andrew Carnegie, who before he died in 1919 gave away $350 million, equivalent to $3 billion in the year 2000, according to the New York Times.
Of the $4 billion Atlantic Philanthropies has given in a quarter of a century, over $2 billion has gone to the United States, more than $1 billion has been given to the island of Ireland, and well over $200 million each to Australia and Vietnam, making Feeney the biggest private foreign donor, by far, in each of these countries. His giving has also had a significant impact in South Africa, and extends to the United Kingdom, Thailand, Cuba, and Bermuda.
It is a paradox that in a world afflicted by poverty and disease, a big problem facing philanthropists today is finding causes where the money will make a difference. “Spending is not a big problem, but spending it meaningfully is,” says Feeney. Atlantic Philanthropies must spend $1 million a day if it is to meet its target and limit its life span. To illustrate the point, Frank Rhodes told staff at a 2006 seminar about a French general who ordered a sergeant to plant a tree. The sergeant said it would take 100 years to grow. “Then plant it before lunch,” said the general. “There isn’t a moment to lose.”
Chuck Feeney has been ahead of his time. By giving away his fortune, personally overseeing that it is put to the best use, and determining that Atlantic Philanthropies should spend itself out of existence, he ensured his personal legacy as the champion of giving while living. Giving while living has recently won important advocates. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, top of the Forbes list today, and his wife, Melinda, devote themselves to running the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest foundation in history. In 2006, the investor Warren Buffet, number two on the Forbes rich list, pledged $31 billion to the foundation. The three trustees of the foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet, have decided that it will spend all its assets within fifty years of the death of the last trustee, so as to do “as much as possible, as soon as possible” to further health, education and economic development globally.
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 thi
nk 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.”
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