When asked why he gave, the late Walter Annenberg—Penn’s largest benefactor, who for years headed the list of Most Generous Americans—always said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
By Joan Capuzzi Giresi | Photography by Kyle Cassidy
Wealth can rid one of life’s many annoyances. Among the peskiest of these, perhaps, is waiting. Waiting for interest rates to fall. Waiting for clothes to dry. For a table. A bargain. A bus.
Once, as the Honorable Walter H. Annenberg W’31 Hon’66 navigated the steps of a medical building in Philadelphia on his way to a doctor’s appointment, he noticed an elderly African- American woman standing outside, lingering expectantly. He asked her if she needed a ride somewhere, and she replied that she was waiting for a bus. Leaving his appointment an hour later, Annenberg was dismayed to see her standing there in the December chill, still waiting.
“He grabbed her arm and said, ‘We’re going to take you home,’” recalls Annenberg’s longtime chauffeur, Philip Howe.
As they drove the woman to her South Philadelphia home, chatting along the way, it became clear that she had no idea who Annenberg—publisher, ambassador, billionaire, art collector, philanthropist—was. He didn’t seem to care, says Howe. His only concern was easing the burden for this woman, whose quiet plight probably had aroused no more than a few anesthetized glances from the scores of doctors, nurses, patients, and delivery people who had passed her. Somehow, as though a fish could understand thirst, he understood her struggle—humanity’s eternal one to catch a bus, eat a meal, nourish a mind, just get through life unmaimed and perhaps progress a little along the way.
“He was a man of passion, compassion, and action. A man of few words and many deeds,” said Dr. Vartan Gregorian Hon’88, former Penn provost and current president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, as he eulogized Annenberg at a memorial service held a couple months after his death on October 1 at the age of 94 [“Obituaries,” November/December]. “He believed that with wealth comes responsibility. That from those to whom much is given, much is expected.”
A wise investor, driven businessman, and brilliant visionary, Annenberg launched Seventeen magazine during the World War II years and TV Guide—the most profitable weekly ever published—in 1953. He rode the broadcast wave as well, building stations and unveiling era-defining programs like American Bandstand. By the time he sold the family business, Triangle Publications, in the late 1980s, Annenberg had tacked three more zeros onto the estate left to him by his millionaire father. With equal energy, he then set about giving much of his money away.
In 1986, Annenberg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
In the course of his long life, Annenberg received numerous honors—including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1986 and Penn’s Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1994—but according to Dr. Gail Levin Gr’74, executive director of the Annenberg Foundation, he felt that the highest compliment one could receive was to be called a good citizen. An oft-repeated statement Annenberg used when making gifts reads: “It is the obligation … of those who have been fortunate in life to support those who are less fortunate. And if you don’t understand that, you’re not very much of a citizen.”
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.”
That process began in the tiny farming village of Kalvishken, East Prussia, near the border of present-day Lithuania, where Annenberg’s father, Moses, lived with his parents and 10 siblings. In 1885, when the elder Annenberg was eight years old, the family emigrated to the U.S., settling in Chicago. There, on the city’s brutal streets, “Moe,” who quit school before the fifth grade, picked up critical survival skills—which he would later pass on to his son—and entered the then rough-and-tumble world of newspaper publishing. Starting out selling subscriptions for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American, he eventually rose to oversee circulation for Hearst Publications and to make millions of his own in newspaper distribution.
In the 1920s, he purchased the Daily Racing Form—the gambler’s bible of detailed statistics on racehorses—and founded Cecelia Investment Company. Though Cecelia grew to include a number of other publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Tribune, it was the Formthat brought the Annenberg family its real wealth. When the Inquirer, then a leading Republican newspaper, launched an editorial attack on Roosevelt’s New Deal politics in the 1930s, the president got even with Moses. Federal indictments for tax evasion and corrupt business practices relating to the Form’s racing statistics followed. In 1940, Moses pleaded guilty to a single count of tax evasion and agreed to pay $9.5 million in penalties. He went to jail, but was sent home to die two years later. The company was renamed Triangle Publications, but the stain on the family name remained.
In later years, Walter Annenberg’s philanthropy would be described by detractors as an effort to atone for the sins of his father. Indeed, a brass plaque that still sits on his massive oak desk in his foundation office is inscribed with the words, “Cause my works on earth to reflect honor on my father’s memory.” This said, the atonement theory falls short of explaining the sheer, heartfelt vigor with which Annenberg approached his philanthropy even 60 years after the indictments—and, in fact, Walter’s first charitable gift long predated his father’s legal troubles.
Walter Hubert Annenberg was born to Moses and his wife Sadie on Friday the 13th of March, 1908, in Milwaukee. The family moved to Long Island for Moses’s job as Hearst’s righthand man when Walter was 12. The youngest of eight children, he grew up in a privileged world of mansions, servants, piano lessons, and fine clothes, coddled by his mother and seven sisters. Sensing that his son needed more discipline and a solid education, particularly if he were to one day take over the family business, Moses chose The Peddie School, a Baptist boarding school in Hightstown, New Jersey, for its educational practices and egalitarian principles.
Years later, Walter Annenberg would speak of his five years at Peddie as some of the happiest of his life. He arrived there in the eighth grade, a shy, lonely boy with a bad stutter, who had been born with a deformed ear and partially deaf. The small school offered “Annie,” as he was known there, a safe harbor. He graduated a self-confident young man, popular with both students and teachers, and voted “best businessman” and “most likely to succeed.”
“He came here and found family,” says Anne Seltzer, Peddie’s director of development. “Whenever we tried to thank him for anything, he would always say, ‘I’m the grateful one.’” Annenberg refused to allow the school to rename itself after him, as was offered more than once. “’I went to Peddie. I didn’t go to Annenberg.’” Seltzer recalls him replying.
In his lifetime, Annenberg donated more than $200 million to Peddie, including a $100 million gift announced—no coincidence in timing—on Father’s Day, 1993, that propelled it from an obscure prep school to one of the nation’s seven richest schools in a single day. (Those funds were announced as part of a $365 million dollar package—the largest gift to private education thus far—that also included grants to Penn, the University of Southern California, and his son Roger’s alma mater, Harvard University.)
Even before he left Peddie, in his first act of philanthropy, Annenberg donated $17,000 he had made in the stock market during his senior year for the construction of a cinder running track. So that his gift to Peddie would keep on giving, he intended that the track also be rented out to local schools to generate revenues. This concept—teaching others to fish rather than giving them a fish—would become Annenberg’s fundamental philanthropic tenet.
Young Walter’s gift for picking stocks would prove his undoing at Penn, where he headed after graduation from Peddie, entering the Wharton School in the fall of 1927. Moses had pushed Penn, for both its distinguished business school and its renowned speech-disorders clinic headed by prominent speech pathologist Edwin Twitmyer, who would later work on Annenberg’s congenital stutter. (This was a lifelong battle for Annenberg; into his nineties, he performed elocution exercises every morning in an effort to keep his persistent stuttering at bay.)
Jews were not permitted to pledge gentile fraternities at the time, so Walter joined the Jewish fraternity Phi Sigma Delta. Popular on Penn’s lively campus, he developed a distaste for Wharton’s curriculum, which he considered too hypothetical. With the ever-rising stock market beckoning, Walter began cutting classes in favor of frequenting a Philadelphia brokerage office. By the start of his second semester at Wharton, the 21-year-old’s portfolio was worth $3 million. By the close of his first year, Walter had departed school to play the market full-time.
His father, disappointed in his decision to quit school, warned him about speculating on the market. Walter didn’t listen. When the crash came in 1929, he had nothing left except $350,000 of debt. (Moses bailed him out, in exchange for the promise that he never again trade on margin.) Annenberg would later tell Christopher Ogden, who authored Legacy—A Biography of Moses and Walter Annenberg, that leaving Wharton was “ridiculous … the biggest mistake I ever made.”
Annenberg was an eternal optimist,who comforted his friend Richard Nixon with the axiom, “Life is 99 rounds,” during the Watergate debacle and whose usual response to the query, “How are you?”—delivered with conviction in his booming voice—was, “Hopeful and grateful.” He would have his secretaries type onto index cards short sayings that inspired him—Beware of despairing about yourself (St. Augustine) and There is always room at the top (Daniel Webster)—that he kept on his desk and within eyesight. He took to heart Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same;/ … Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,/ And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools/ … Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,/ And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”
Annenberg’s own son, Roger, never made it to manhood. Roger’s suicide in 1962 at the age of 22, while on leave from Harvard to undergo therapy for schizophrenia, would become Walter Annenberg’s greatest tragedy. Yet it didn’t dampen his determination to “stoop and build ’em up” for other young people.
Even when his altruistic efforts were met with scorn, Annenberg had a knack for turning a negative into a positive. When his offer to ante up $40 million to build a branch of his Annenberg School for Communication at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was panned—rather coarsely—he didn’t hold a grudge. Rather, he later selected the Met over several runners-up to receive his beloved art collection because, he said, “quality should go to quality.”
When President Nixon appointed Annenberg to the coveted post of U.S. Ambassador to London’s Court of St. James, the most venerable honor of his life, the British press made Annenberg out to be garish, inept … a laughingstock. Critics had him resigning, but he stayed the course. In time, Annenberg would become the only U.S. ambassador to be knighted by the queen, who, like many British citizens, came to greatly admire Walter and Lee.
Criticism was a strong motivator for Annenberg. Following his landmark grants to private education in 1993, a prominent newspaper derided him for not doing anything to assist public schools. Rather than shrug off the attack, recalls Gregorian, Annenberg researched the issue in depth. He concluded that the paper made a valid point and, by year’s end, went to the White House to announce the Annenberg Challenge, a five-year, $500 million gift to reform public education. Gregorian, then the president of Brown University and a chief architect of the project, calls it “the first public act of rallying everyone around public education.”
Annenberg knew that it would take far more than half-a-billion dollars to fix public education. No matter, says Levin: His goal was to shine a bright light on the problem. It worked. The challenge generated over $600 million in matching grants from private and public sources, and earmarked a total of $1.1 billion for initiatives at 18 sites, in more than 2,000 schools, affecting some 1.5 million students around the nation. “The Annenberg gift reawakened Americans’ support and understanding that receiving a quality public education is the basic step one takes to do well in life,” says Wendy Puriefoy, president of the Public Education Network, in Washington, D.C.
Annenberg set aside time each morning to think. It was during these early hours that many of his initiatives, which his associates dubbed “Walter’s epiphanies,” sprang to life. He would think about teen smoking, violence on television, babies who were not being immunized, college students who were financially strapped …
“When he worried,” Rodin says of Annenberg, “he always did something monumental.”
He started the Annenberg Foundation in 1989 with one-third of the proceeds of the sale of Triangle, for which Rupert Murdoch had paid him $3.6 billion the year before. Annenberg, recalling his father’s admonition about stock speculation, was an astute investor who liked to consolidate his dollars into a few carefully chosen blue-chip stocks, and his investment strategy tripled the foundation’s endowment at one point. Today, it ranks in the top 20 in size, with over $2.1 billion in assets.
Although his foundation dealt in huge sums of money, Annenberg liked to keep it small and personal, with never more than 15 employees (plus two or three in its Los Angeles office, overseen by his daughter, Wallis). For six months each year, when he and Lee stayed in Pennsylvania, Annenberg would make the short drive from Inwood, his Wynnewood estate, to the foundation’s Radnor offices every weekday. Even while in Palm Springs the other half of the year, he tracked what was going on at the office. He cared passionately about what he was doing, says Levin, and “he felt connected personally to each grantee.”
That was particularly true of Penn,which was the centerpiece of Annenberg’s philanthropy. The University was the recipient of his first major gift since the cinder track at Peddie. And also his last: The Annenberg Foundation gave $200 million to the communication schools at Penn and USC just 13 days before his death of pneumonia at his Wynnewood home.
Although Annenberg opted to cut short his collegiate career, he had fond memories of his time on campus. He also believed in Penn’s academic excellence and superb faculty, and had great affection for two Penn-affiliated people, in particular: Founder Benjamin Franklin, whose accomplishments inspired Annenberg, and Thomas S. Gates W’1893 L’1896 Hon’31 Gr’46, president of the University when he was a student, who impressed Annenberg with his fiscal responsibility and the leadership skills he deployed to make Penn flourish.
“He loved the people at Penn. It’s feisty. It’s entrepreneurial. It’s Philadelphia,” says Rodin. “He often said of Penn, ‘This is a place that captures your heart.’”
Though Annenberg’s principal legacy at Penn is its School for Communication, his generosity spanned the University and included gifts to the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), School of Dental Medicine, Law School, School of Social Work, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and Scheie Eye Institute. His gifts to SAS endowed numerous faculty chairs in the humanities and sciences.
Regardless of the form his gifts took, Annenberg’s bottom line was always to serve the students. He soaked up their energy and delighted in their inquisitive minds, seeming to identify with them. He remained visible on the Penn campus—particularly at the Annenberg School—up until his health began to falter two years ago. “He loved to see his philanthropy in action,” Rodin says.
In 1998, he gave Penn $10 million for scholarships for financially needy students who had exhibited leadership potential in any sphere, from academics to athletics, entrepreneurship to music. His main stipulation was that the recipients were to have shown capacity to rise above adversity, an aptitude that defined Annenberg’s own life.
Along with all of the dollars he directed to Penn, University leaders also received the benefit of his counsel. “He had tremendous acumen about human nature, and great political instincts,” says Rodin. “He had the ability to think analytically and to not always take the most obvious solution.”
Take Annenberg’s wooing of Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson to become the Annenberg School’s third dean in 1989. Eager to see the school refocus its efforts toward evaluating the nation’s political discourse in the media, he contacted Jamieson, a renowned expert on the use of the media in political campaigns and chair of the communications department at the University of Texas, to ask her to interview. An outspoken feminist who had protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s and critiqued the presidential campaign of Annenberg’s good friend George H.W. Bush in the 1980s, Jamieson was well aware that Annenberg’s views contradicted her own.
“And that meant we couldn’t work together,” Jamieson says.
She sent Annenberg passages from her books and television transcripts to convince him of the scope of their political differences. Unfazed, he said to her, “None of that matters to me. You’re doing what you think is right based on the standards which you hold. What matters to me is that I stand for excellence, and you’re excellent.”
At Annenberg’s request, Jamieson made a list of what it would take to bring her to the school. Topping her list were removal of financial barriers to graduate students, a public policy center, and a Washington presence. “It amounted to lots and lots of money dedicated to creating access and opportunity,” she recalls. “I gave him my list, he looked at it and said, ‘Is there anything else?’”
Ultimately, Jamieson and Annenberg developed a close mutual affection. “His lively intellect and oddball sense of humor,” says Jamieson, drew her in. And their shared vision for the Annenberg School’s future was proof that the field of communications had come of age.
In the 1930s and 1940s, there was a great deal of concern about the use of propaganda to enforce authoritarianism. There was also a sense of awe at the power of the media. “The question of the media as a force for good or for evil became pertinent,” explains Dr. Larry Gross, the Sol Worth Professor of Communication at Annenberg. The 1950s brought Senate hearings on the impact of television and comic books on juvenile delinquency.
Up until this point, there were a handful of communications programs in the country, spotty research projects, and little validation for the field. But Annenberg, who had spent the previous two decades working in publishing and broadcasting, read several papers daily, and was intrigued by the burgeoning technology of television, knew that the media were more than peripheral subjects.
“As a publisher and editor, Walter understood the importance of communications to a democracy,” says Lee, his wife of 51 years.
In 1958, he gave Penn $3 million to create a communications school, and, in 1970, he gave $2.1 million for what ultimately became the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, located adjacent to the school. (In the early 1970s, he established a counterpart communications school at USC for hands-on work in the electronic media. And his impact on the field of communications goes beyond academe as well. In 1980, he directed $170 million towards funding the Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting Project, which rallies federal monies for public broadcasting stations and produces educational programs like The Brain and Art of the Western World.)
Annenberg wanted the school to decipher the impact of the media, particularly the emerging electronic forms, on the populace. “Walter Annenberg was a visionary in the mid-fifties in understanding that this set of questions deserved to be at the center of an established interdisciplinary enterprise,” says Gross.
Indeed, when he founded the school, Annenberg proclaimed, “Every human advancement or reversal can be understood through communication.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, the school became known for its study of television as a cultural denominator of public consciousness, the representation of genders and aging in the media, and the effects of media violence on society.
“Annenberg felt very keenly about children and violence in the media,” says professor emeritus and former dean Dr. George Gerbner.
Jamieson’s arrival signaled a new era. Annenberg kept his promises and, in 1993, gave $20 million to fund the Annenberg Public Policy Center. With offices in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., the Center consists of a community of Penn scholars, headed by Jamieson, who study public-policy dialogue at the federal, state and local levels. Annenberg also endowed tuition-plus-stipends for the school’s 50-75 master’s and doctoral students. Jamieson says this funding has attracted higher-caliber students. Prior to 1994, when the funding began, nearly half of the graduate students in the school were carrying heavy student loans, she explains, and the best applicants often went elsewhere in order to avoid going into debt.
Dr. Lynne Y. Edwards ASC’92 Gr’95 recalls that when she applied, “I figured I’d have to give up my first six kids to get there.” Now an assistant professor in the communications studies and theater department at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa., Edwards says she had planned to take out loans and work two or three jobs, but was delighted to learn that she had been awarded a full ride. “I think if I had done it the way I’d planned, I would have had just enough time to run to class, copy my reading assignments, and go to work. [Walter Annenberg] allowed me to get the full graduate-school experience.”
Doctoral student Kate Kenski notes that Annenberg’s financial cushioning has quelled rivalry among students, who do not have to vie with each other for funding. “As students, we learn to treat each other as colleagues and not competitors.”
Kenski, who is working with Jamieson to evaluate political races, also credits Annenberg’s generosity with drawing together “an immensely creative and intellectually rigorous faculty. At other institutions,” she continues, “you’re lucky if you take a class with one star. But at Annenberg, they’re all at the top of their field.”
Since its founding, more than 1,000 students have received graduate degrees from the school. Most have had the opportunity to meet Annenberg, who loved to mingle with the students—wherever the opportunity arose, even in a Democratic White House.
Margaret (“Maggie”) Williams ASC’92, currently chief of staff in the office of former President Bill Clinton, became well acquainted with Annenberg while a student. During the Clinton Administration, Williams served as chief of staff for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, which didn’t stop the staunchly conservative Annenberg from placing regular “checking-in calls” to her. “He was a person for whom political affiliation didn’t mean much compared to human relationships,” she says.
Annenberg basked in watching graduates go out into the world and make a contribution, Williams adds. She recalls a White House event that Annenberg attended. While President Clinton was trying to engage him in “things that presidents and billionaires talk about,” Annenberg motioned Williams over and made her the focus of the conversation, repeatedly informing the president that he should be proud to have an Annenberg grad working for his administration.
Like his ability to see past political labels to the individual beneath, Annenberg’s philanthropic decisions were essentially personal. Whenever Levin would inquire about his decision to make certain grants, she says, “He would answer, ‘Because it’s the right thing to do.’”
A sentimental and impulsive giver, he was equally skillful and strategic. Solicited endlessly, says Levin, “He always knew how to cut to the chase.” In addition to performing his own evaluation of the merits of a solicitor, he would usually consult with Lee, his partner in philanthropy as well as in life.
Now that Annenberg is gone, Lee is the sole director of the foundation, while Wallis and his three grandchildren are trustees. He was confident that his family would carry on his philanthropic work with distinction. In a letter he wrote to his grandchildren in 1994, Annenberg expressed his wishes that they become “capable stewards who fully appreciate the values of service and sacrifice in the process of ‘giving away money.’” Levin says that Annenberg’s will, which has not yet been read publicly, has directed an additional $425 million towards carrying on the foundation’s mission.
At Annenberg’s memorial service, President George W. Bush, in a message delivered by his mother, said, “Ambassador Annenberg’s life served as a shining example of generosity, patriotism, and dedication to serving others.” Referring to her husband’s famous reference to volunteerism as an “endless sky with a thousand points of light,” Barbara Bush added, “Today, that sky is just a little bit dimmer, a little bit emptier.”
Many—from universities to nations to an old lady waiting in the cold for a bus—would agree.
Joan Capuzzi Giresi C’86 V’98, who holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from the Annenberg School, is a journalist and a veterinarian in the Philadelphia area.
