Today, though Atlantic Philanthropies lists its grants on its website, it still won't issue news releases touting accomplishments. Black tie thank-you dinners, along with plaques, remain verboten.
Feeney's practical reason for not plastering his moniker on buildings is to attract matching donors who would want naming rights -- as was the case at Stanford with high-tech tycoon Jim Clark and at a UC San Francisco cancer facility with venture capitalist Arthur Rock.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, March 13, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 17 words Type of Material: Correction
Philanthropist: The Column One article in Saturday's Section A about philanthropist Chuck Feeney misspelled Liechtenstein as Lichtenstein.
Does Feeney have no ego, then? "It doesn't matter who put the building up," he says. "The important thing is that it happens."
In Vietnam, he recounts with a chuckle, "the people at the Da Nang General Hospital felt so bad that we wouldn't put our name on the hospital that they painted it green" -- shamrock green. He pauses, adding, "Which used up a lot of paint."
Although his parents were American-born, Feeney's attachment to the land of his ancestors runs deep. The Republic of Ireland in the 1980s was plagued by high unemployment, a brain drain and the festering guerrilla war to the north. Anonymously, Feeney began pouring money into renovating Ireland's seven universities, along with two in Northern Ireland.
He offered $125 million for postgraduate research if the Irish government would match the amount, nearly 20 times what the Republic was spending a year. Soon, Ireland's best and brightest flocked to the new research institutes. In all, Atlantic Philanthropies has spent more than $1 billion in Ireland.
In 1993, O'Dowd, who had worked with Feeney to promote U.S. naturalization for Irish immigrants, asked him to join in what would become the Connolly House Group, named after the Belfast headquarters of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army.
The small, secret group of Irish Americans offered the newly elected Clinton administration a back-channel to negotiate a cease fire between Britain and the Irish Republican Army.
"At the time, it was risky business to be seen 'talking to terrorists'--that was the label," said former Rep. Bruce Morrison, one of the group.
Feeney was intensely involved in the negotiations that led Clinton to grant a visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and he funded a Washington office for Sinn Fein to the tune of $750,000.
"It was New Jersey working class meets Belfast working class," O'Dowd recalled of a secret meeting between Feeney and Adams in a Dublin safe house. "These two guys understood each other right away."
The peace process was ultimately successful, and Feeney has since funneled millions into reconciliation programs in Northern Ireland.
"The only way you're going to solve things with your friends or enemies is to sit down and talk to them," he says today. "It didn't seem right to me that Irish people were killing Irish people."
On the coffee table in his daughter's living room, Feeney opens Bill Clinton's recent bestseller "Giving."
He turns to the chapter "How Much Should You Give and Why?" and reads from statistics derived from U.S. income tax data showing that if the top 14,400 taxpayers gave a third of their income, the total would be about $61 billion.
Feeney shakes his head. "People who wouldn't miss it," he muses. "Sixty-one billion in one year!"
And why isn't it happening? "People traditionally collect money. I guess there is an attraction to be known as a wealthy person," he says. "It's not my role in life to tell them what they should be doing. . . . I'm just convinced if people gave money to things they've identified as being in the public interest, they'd get great satisfaction out of it."
Feeney mentions one of his favorite charities, Operation Smile, which sponsors surgeons to operate on children with cleft palates in developing countries.
He tells of watching a little girl in a waiting room sitting with her hands covering her mouth.
"I kept an eye on her," he recalls. "After she had the operation and she was smiling [like], 'It's not the ugly me you knew before. It's the new me.' "
On another occasion, he says, a man in a restaurant called him over and said, "Do you realize you educated me in this business? I had one of your scholarships . . . and here I am now, the general manager of this chain. "
O'Clery, who hung out with Feeney for several years at P.J. Clarke's, the Manhattan pub, before broaching the topic of a book, attributes Feeney's generosity to growing up with charitable parents and in a neighborhood where people helped one another.
He calls his subject an "enigma. . . . He likes to make money, but he doesn't like to have it. He travels all over the world, but in a way, he's never left Elizabeth, N.J."
Feeney suggests with a cryptic smile, "There's a thin line between sanity and the other side. Some people might even say the idea of giving money away is crazy."
For those folks, Feeney has a Gaelic proverb: "There are no pockets in a shroud."
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