The
Good Citizen, continued
During his lifetime, Annenberg gave more than $2.5 billion toward education, arts and culture, medicine, and community causes. He subscribed to the principle that if one segment of society remains burdened, the whole of society suffers. “When he saw injustice, it distressed him, and he was a fixer,” says Penn president Dr. Judith Rodin CW’66.
To the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest single recipient of his philanthropy, Annenberg donated his entire Impressionist and post-Impressionist art collection, valued at $1 billion. For September 11 relief efforts, his foundation sent $600,000. He gave millions to Philadelphia’s educational, cultural, and medical institutions, prompting Pennsylvania Governor-Elect Ed Rendell to proclaim in his eulogy at Annenberg’s memorial service: “As Walter Annenberg made his mark across the length and breadth of the globe, he never forgot Philadelphia. And tomorrow morning, thousands of Philadelphians will … go to schools … made better because of Walter. They will work in jobs that were created in part because of Walter’s generosity, have vistas open to them that would have never been possible were it not for Walter Annenberg.”
An Annenberg Foundation printout of the gifts he made from 1984 to 1998 is a staggering 80 pages long. The foundation’s list of grantees—Statue of Liberty centennial restoration project, Library of Congress, colonial Williamsburg—also reflects Annenberg’s lifelong love affair with America. An equal-opportunity donor, Annenberg matched his $1 million gift to West Point, made after a 1993 tour of the military academy, with identical offerings to the Naval and Air Force academies.
He funded Catholic schools and built an altar—at a cost of $50,000—for an outdoor mass for Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to Philadelphia. A non-practicing Jew, Annenberg was also extremely generous to Israel and to Jewish organizations, particularly the United Jewish Appeal and the Jewish Federation of Philadelphia. And he endowed a $100,000 Georgetown University scholarship honoring assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. He provided the United Negro College Fund with a $50 million challenge grant, its single largest gift ever. At the request of then-General and current Secretary of State Colin Powell, he gave $250,000 toward a monument at Fort Leavenworth to the Buffalo Soldiers, two black cavalry units that fought in the Indian wars. Of his egalitarian philanthropic style, he once explained to the press, “I made my money from Catholics, Protestants, Jews, whites, blacks, men, and women, and I give it back the same way.”
The lion’s share of Annenberg’s philanthropy went to education, which he regarded as an investment in America’s future. “Learning,” he once said, “unlocks the joy of a great painting, book, or sonata. It cures fanaticism, cures social chaos, elevates the soul.”
Penn, Annenberg’s college alma mater, tops his list of individual education grantees. Likewise, Annenberg, who had given the University about $350 million since 1984 (much of it anonymously) tops its list of most generous benefactors. Through the Annenberg School for Communication, he single-handedly institutionalized the study of media messages. Former University president Dr. Sheldon Hackney Hon’93 once declared that Walter Annenberg and his wife, the Honorable Leonore (“Lee”) Annenberg Hon’85, had done more for Penn than had anyone since University founder Benjamin Franklin.
Annenberg’s munificence extended to over two dozen other universities and secondary schools as well. He was surpassed in sheer philanthropic dollars given during the past century by four other billionaires: Bill Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and the Irish-American duty-free stores king, Charles F. Feeney. Nevertheless, Annenberg, who ranked 39th on Forbes magazine’s 2002 list of 400 Richest Americans, led the American Benefactor’s list of 100 Most Generous Americans for years.
He was also quick to praise those whose generous intentions—if not means—matched his own. Levin recalls her boss’s exultant reaction as he read a newspaper article a few years ago about an elderly black woman named Oseola McCarty, who had just announced a gift of $150,000—her life savings as a laundrywoman—to establish a scholarship fund for black students at the University of Southern Mississippi. “He slapped his hands on the table,” she recalls with a smile, “and shouted, ‘That’s the American spirit!’”
Walter Annenberg was a complex man, whose contradictions balanced each other harmoniously but could both inspire and occasionally baffle those who saw him in action. “Usually people are described as smart and hard-charging, or sensitive and supportive, but not all of these things combined,” notes Rebecca Rimel, president and CEO of the Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia, who collaborated with Annenberg on several projects and knew him well.
Randy Vesprey, 17, a senior at The Peddie School, where Annenberg went to high school and donated many millions over the years, says, “A person would have to wonder how so much grace, compassion, love, and care could come from one being.”
According to Gregorian, who knew him for over two decades and was perhaps his closest friend, there is no easy way to solve the puzzle that was Walter Annenberg. “He learned a lot along the way,” he says. “He went through a long process to become Walter Annenberg.”