|
Corporation News
For
further information contact:
Office of Public Affairs
(212) 207-6273
A
statement on the death of Ambassador Walter Annenberg by Vartan
Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corportion of New York.
New York, NY—October 1, 2002. Ambassador Walter Annenberg
was truly one of the most inspiring and visionary philanthropists
I’ve had the honor of knowing and serving. He was a man of
few words and many great deeds. He was a man of passion and a man
of compassion. And he was a man of integrity, with many convictions.
Two things he used to say capture a sense of his character: “My
country has been very good to me. I must be good to my country;”
and “I have always tried to support things that were essential,
and few things are as essential as education.”
Annenberg
always backed up his convictions with a generosity that put him
in a league with John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. It’s
unlikely we’ll ever know the full extent of Annenberg’s
philanthropy because he did not seek publicity for his gifts and
gave many anonymously. A mere summary of his philanthropy in a single
period--between 1984 and 1998--fills an 88-page document with $2
billion worth of gifts. It records his support for five American
presidential libraries as well as the Winston Churchill Archives.
He supported community organizations, ranging from the American
Red Cross to the Philadelphia Zoo. He contributed to medicine, from
the Albert Einstein Medical Center to the Weizmann Institute of
Science. He supported arts and culture, from the Academy of Music
to the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art--which
received his art collection, valued at $1 billion. And he supported
education in a big way. He invested in dozens of colleges and universities,
ranging from small, historically black colleges to Ivy League universities.
And in 1993, he made the largest single gift ever made to public
education--$500 million, which was matched by others. He endowed
the Annenberg Foundation with $1 billion because he believed that
generosity spawns more generosity and philanthropy spawns more philanthropy.
He saw it as mankind’s best hope. When he heard that Oseola
McCarty, an 87-year-old laundress, had given her life savings of
$150,0000 to the University of Mississippi for scholarships, Annenberg
pounded his desk and exclaimed: “That’s the American spirit!!”
That,
too, was Annenberg's spirit. A great man has died, but his spirit
and good works live on.
|