The child who lives in the shadow of a famous parent is a well-known figure in culture and history. But the parent who lives in the shadow of a famous child is not quite so familiar. That might well describe William H. Gates Sr., and he probably preferred it that way.
Bill Gates’s father, who died last week at his home near Seattle, age 94, was already an influential lawyer and civic grandee when, in 1975, his son dropped out of Harvard and migrated to New Mexico to found Microsoft with a fellow computer enthusiast from high school. Twenty years and umpteen billions of dollars later, he was standing in line outside a Seattle movie theater with his son and daughter-in-law when the younger Gates complained to his father that, in the words of the New York Times, “he was being inundated with appeals for charity but … was far too busy running Microsoft to answer them.” Gates’s father offered to look at the appeals and, if his son approved, write some checks.
Thus was born the William H. Gates Foundation, which, combined with other family charities, became the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now the second-wealthiest and arguably most influential philanthropic institution in our time. What Bill Gates mentioned to his father turned out to be dozens of boxes filled with thousands of letters ranging from personal appeals to complex proposals for ambitious programs. The elder Gates’s first check, written on his kitchen table, was $80,000 for a Seattle cancer treatment program. Then the younger Gates put $100 million at his father’s disposal, and the rest is history.
At age 70, Gates’s transition from Seattle lawyer to global philanthropist was accidental but not implausible. The son of a Bremerton, Washington, furniture store owner who suffered losses in the Great Depression, he served in the Army during the occupation of Japan and attended the University of Washington and its law school on the GI Bill. He was co-founder of a successful law firm, Preston Gates & Ellis (now K&L Gates), counselor to ambitious local startups such as Starbucks, president of Seattle’s bar association, and a fixture on the boards of the chamber of commerce, Planned Parenthood, and the United Way campaign. Once the son began directing larger and larger donations to the coffers of the Gates Foundation, the father’s earlier work continued but with millions and billions of dollars, rather than thousands, at his disposal.
In that sense, Gates was a faithful steward of his son’s charitable instincts, which they both shared: elementary and secondary education, health and medicine, and the eradication of poverty in America and the world. It was Gates who designed the foundation’s primary missions and encouraged colleagues to learn as much as they could from firsthand experience as well as expert advice. And he took his own counsel: Unlike many philanthropists, he approached problems not with a foregone conclusion in mind but in the spirit of inquiry, spending money when persuaded that the goal was practical as well as exemplary.
By 2006, when Bill Gates began to distance himself from the daily management of Microsoft to devote more time to charitable causes, his father was 80 years old, and the Gates Foundation was moving swiftly in directions he had charted, governed, and would supervise effectively for several years more. In that same year, Warren Buffett’s pledge of a portion of his fortune significantly increased the value of the Gates Foundation that, by 2019, had spent approximately $50 billion but is worth yet another $50 billion.
As with all philanthropies big and small, the ultimate value of the Gates Foundation remains an open question. Its quest to revolutionize agriculture in Africa has neither failed nor succeeded, and the hundreds of millions spent to develop an AIDS vaccine have not yet produced one. Still, as the marveling father was impressed by his prodigal son, Bill Gates must be thankful for the cheerful, benevolent vision and industry of his father.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
