Learning on the Job

Bill Gates Sr. was a respected lawyer and community leader here long before his son became the richest man in the world, but he will be known to posterity as the man who helped the biggest foundation of our time get off the ground. In Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime, released this month by Doubleday, Bill Gates Sr. lays out the moral beliefs that have guided his thinking during the 15 years of his second act — helping his son, Bill, a founder of Microsoft, give away a vast fortune.

Bill and Melinda Gates turned to “Senior,” as the elder Gates is known around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for help with their giving as charitable requests began to pile up in the early 1990s. Mr. Gates went on to become co-chair of the foundation, which fights poverty worldwide, supports global health, and works to improve American education. The foundation expects to spend $3.8-billion this year.

“One good thing about growing older is that it gives life the time it needs to present you with unexpected opportunities,” Bill Gates Sr. writes.

In Showing Up, Mr. Gates, who is 83, relays how a lifetime of experiences has honed his own moral compass. Chapters include “Open-Mindedness,” “Showing Up for Your Family,” and “Never Forget to Ask: ‘Is It Right?’”

His co-author is Mary Ann Mackin, who has written speeches for Mr. Gates and for his first wife, Mary, who died in 1994. (Bill Gates Sr.’s second wife, Mimi, is director of the Seattle Art Museum.)

Charles F. MacCormack, president of Save the Children, says he recently distributed Showing Up at a gathering of the charity’s young leaders.

“The book is deceptively simple, but I feel like there are a lot of insights and take-aways in there,” says Mr. MacCormack, who has known Mr. Gates for more than a decade. “The key points are giving back and keeping your commitments at every level — family, friends, community, country, and globally. That’s certainly what we’re about in this organization.”

Modest Upbringing

In the book, Mr. Gates lavishes high praise on several charities and nonprofit leaders, including Roy L. Prosterman, founder of the Rural Development Institute, which helps poor people in developing countries obtain legal rights to land; and Rotary International, which has worked for more than 20 years to eradicate polio worldwide.

But Mr. Gates is modest about his own accomplishments.

As a child, he feared his family would end up poor. His father, who owned a furniture store in Bremerton, Wash., and was anxious about making ends meet, would pick up stray pieces of coal that had fallen off delivery trucks to take home and heat the family’s house.

As a teenager, Mr. Gates spent three summers felling trees by hand to help build a Boy Scout lodge. He served three years in the Army near the end of World War II, earned a law degree from the University of Washington, and helped build Preston Gates & Ellis into one of Seattle’s premier law firms.

He headed his son’s first foundation, the William H. Gates Foundation, for six years before it was merged with another family foundation, focused on bringing computers to libraries, to form the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Several current and former employees of the Gates foundation say Bill Gates Sr.’s willingness to step forward to help oversee the family’s philanthropy sharpened the foundation’s strategic thinking at a time when his son was still preoccupied with his work at Microsoft and Melinda was busy raising the couple’s young children.

“He was critical — he was the voice of the family,” says Helene D. Gayle, president of CARE USA, who previously spent five years at the Gates foundation and oversaw its programs related to AIDS and tuberculosis. “His being there was critical for making sure that this didn’t become just another charitable organization — it became one that really embodied the heart and soul of the Gates family.”

The book describes some of the odd grant requests the foundation received in the early days, including one from a woman who was anxious about volcanoes and wanted the foundation to vent the magma chamber in Yellowstone National Park.

But the letter that hit home with Bill Gates Sr. came from Bill and Melinda.

After reading an article about how children in developing countries were dying of measles, malaria, and diarrhea — illnesses that are rarely fatal to children in the United States — they sent Mr. Gates the article along with a note that said, “Dad, maybe we could do something about this?”

That note led to a strategic shift at the foundation, which early on had focused primarily on reproductive health and population issues.

The foundation’s global-health program, its largest, has faced criticism for putting too much emphasis on the development of new vaccines over other approaches, like providing life-saving medicines. Mr. Gates generally shies away from directly responding to such concerns in the book, and he declined to discuss this and other criticisms — such as complaints about a lack of openness in the foundation’s grant-making — in an interview this month at the organization’s offices here alongside Lake Union.

“We chose vaccines because when you look at the benefits they provide, vaccines probably represent the most efficient and cost-effective tool medicine has to offer,” he writes in the book.

Estate Tax

Along with Warren E. Buffett, who has pledged most of his wealth to the Gates foundation, Bill Gates Sr. is one of the country’s most prominent proponents of the estate tax.

In Showing Up, Mr. Gates makes an economic case for the tax. The government provides infrastructure and basic research that creates a fertile ground in which entrepreneurs acquire vast fortunes, he argues, and entrepreneurs should help reseed that ground upon their deaths.

“I believe that the government has the right to recover from the heirs to the fortunes of its most successful citizens some portion of those fortunes so it can keep this important investment stream going,” he writes.

Mr. Gates does not discuss many other foundations in Showing Up, but he does heap praise on the Rockefeller Foundation, established by the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Sr. nearly a century ago. From his study of Rockefeller, Mr. Gates says he has learned about the importance of forming partnerships with other organizations, and of staying with tough problems for generations.

“The Rockefellers have done so many things for so many people it’s hard to get your arms around it,” Mr. Gates writes. “Every corner we’ve turned in the field of global health, we’ve found the Rockefellers were already there and had been there for years.”

Near the end of the book, Mr. Gates talks about his optimism for global progress, and he calls on young people to work toward achieving the Millenium Development Goals — which were established by the United Nations in 2000 and focus on topics like poverty reduction, education, and child mortality.

“My hope,” he writes, “is that they will take on the cause of global equity as their challenge the way our generation took on civil rights.”