Elizabeth McCormack: the Legacy of an Unofficial Power in Big Philanthropy

Elizabeth McCormack, who died in early December, just a few months shy of her 99^th birthday, was an American original, a leader over the course of more than 50 years in two fields: higher education and philanthropy. Like the only other person I know well who lived to such a great age, the ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, she was one of the few people who lived to almost a century of whom those who knew and loved her cried out at her passing: “Why was she taken so young?”

I met Elizabeth over the first of many lunches at the Sea Grill at Rockefeller Center, near her office as a philanthropic adviser to the Rockefeller family. A few years later she encouraged me to apply to be president of the Atlantic Philanthropies. I was an edgy choice for the foundation at the time, since the Open Society Foundations, where I’d led the U.S. Programs, were under constant attack from the right, and I don’t think I would have been selected to lead Atlantic without Elizabeth’s internal advocacy. The opportunity to work with her as a board member was a significant plus in the job. Shortly after assuming the position, I was told that Elizabeth, then in her mid-80s, had planned to step down from the board once a new president had been chosen. I had other plans for her, so I asked her out to dinner to encourage her to rethink her decision.

“Now that you’re here, I feel I can leave,” she told me, “but I don’t want to.”

“So don’t leave,” I urged her, “I need you around.”

Elizabeth agreed to stay, but first made me promise “if as I get older, I’m not cutting it or you need the seat, just tell me, and I’ll resign.”

“I promise,” I told her.

Then she seemed to have a second thought, and revised her offer. “If I’m not cutting it, just tell me you need the seat.”

There was never a moment during her time at Atlantic or since when Elizabeth wasn’t “cutting it.” She was a force of nature to the very end.

She was a nun in the Society of the Sacred Heart for 30 years — Mother McCormack — and led Manhattanville College in its transformation from a Catholic school for women to a progressive, co-educational, secular institution. That alone would be legacy enough, but she spent her last 40-plus years in a dazzling array of parallel roles helping to steer the philanthropy of one of America’s great civically minded families, the Rockefellers, and as a board member of numerous colleges and universities, foundations, research institutions, and nonprofits, along with a few corporations. She had a particular attachment to small colleges educating nontraditional students in nontraditional ways, like Cambridge and Marlboro, and was a passionate advocate in her later years for access to palliative care.

Blazing a Trail for Women

It’s not easy to tell the story of the last chapters in Elizabeth’s career, when her impact was largely out of the limelight, for the most part not reflected in public writings and utterances, grants dockets or annual reports, and even harder since she was not one inclined to boast. That suited her perfectly. Yet she was a trailblazer as one of the first women with the power to direct grant money, several years before her friend Margaret Mahoney became the first woman to direct a major foundation when she was named to head the Commonwealth Fund.

Elizabeth saw herself as a champion for others, and she certainly was. She was one of life’s great connectors. Aryeh Neier, whose career spans the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Foundations, often told me that she played a pivotal role for him not long after he became the ACLU’s executive director at the age of 33 in the early 1970s. “You’re trying to transform an institution, and you need flexibility — you need a director’s discretionary fund,” Elizabeth told him, seeing, as she so often did, what the people she was advising needed before they could recognize it themselves. In short order, she got a Rockefeller family member to underwrite it and the Taconic Foundation to administer it.

Avoiding the Arrogance of Power

Elizabeth and I had many conversations about governance, and she distilled them in a conversation we had through StoryCorps — whose board I chair and which she joined in her mid-90s, a few years ago. For me and for the many institutions and individuals she devoted herself to, her influence lives on through the advice she gave, in Yoda-like fashion, choosing carefully when to speak in a board discussion or over a dinner spent drawing you out about what was going on in key areas of your life.

She recognized the limitations of boards — “They can’t manage anything” — and over all believed in finding good people and trusting them to do their best work. If you were the CEO and she was your trustee, she had your back and made sure the other board members did also. She understood that not everything can be measured and was an early advocate for what are now called “big bets,” encouraging the foundations she advised away from numerous small grants. She was constantly alert to the dangers of the arrogance that is too often a byproduct of philanthropic power and advised young people coming to her for advice never to work for a foundation as a first job but to get real world experience first.

Charles Kenney, who wrote a biography of Elizabeth called No Ordinary Life, said that her beloved husband, Jerry Aron, who died some years before she did, captured something central to her value to the boards she served on: “The interesting thing is, she does have an agenda, but it’s not a personal agenda. Her agenda is what’s going to be good for the institution.”

Her good friend, the Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, who served on the MacArthur, Swarthmore, and Atlantic boards with Elizabeth, hailed her “spare truth-telling that is grounded in an amazing self-confidence.” But as engaging a dinner companion as Elizabeth was, Sara had it right that “with Elizabeth, the quiet is more than half the story.”

As I was writing this in the days after Elizabeth died, I must have heard from four or five people who, aware of my friendship with her, reached out with a story about her sagacity and generosity of spirit, which, as Peggy Dulany observed on the occasion of one of Elizabeth’s honorary degrees, “makes room for everyone in her impossible calendar.” That rang true with Marc Freedman, the CEO and Founder of Encore.org, who read her obituary and said it “reminded me of cold-calling her as a 22-year old, on the recommendation of one of my mentors, and her willingness to meet with me sight unseen.”

An extremely social person who until the pandemic dined out with others for virtually every meal, the last nine months of isolation were not easy for Elizabeth, but she retained her spirit to the end. I talked with her two nights before she died peacefully in her sleep, and as we prepared to sign off, she said of my impending career shift, “Let’s talk about that soon. I can help. I ask good questions.” Indeed she did, and my life from now on, and those of the scores whose lives she touched, will be much poorer for the absence of Elizabeth McCormack’s questions.