Joan Kroc and the Politics of Generosity

By Colman McCarthy

WASHINGTON—Joan Kroc had a private jet for long trips and a helicopter for short ones. She had multiple houses, a yacht, servants and an inherited fortune estimated at $1.7 billion.

That was her outward wealth, which didn’t much distinguish her from those who make the annual lists of the world’s richest people. But she had inner wealth, which did: an active and often restless conscience that earned her a revered place in the American peace movement.

At her death in mid-October—at her home in Rancho Sante Fe, near San Diego—Joan Kroc’s generosity to peace and antiwar groups was unrivaled, both in the amounts she gave and in her disinterest in being hailed. Days after her death, the University of Notre Dame revealed that she had left $50 million to the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies—an operation she established at the campus in 1986 with a $12 million gift and reluctantly allowed to be named after her. In 2001 she gave $25 million to the University of San Diego for a similar peace studies institute. She understood the necessity for education: unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence.

Following the death in 1984 of her husband Ray Kroc, the owner of McDonald’s, she all but franchised her donations: in the hundreds of millions, to groups such as the Salvation Army, Special Olympics , homeless shelters, hospitals, hospices, relief organizations.

Among her closest allies was Gene LaRocque, the former admiral who founded the Center for Defense Information in 1972. “Joan was horrified of war—nuclear war, conventional war, any kind of war,” he recalled last week. In the mid-1980s, LaRocque organized a peace conference in Washington. Only women were invited. Joan Kroc came. An enduring friendship began, with the former admiral mentoring the newcomer to the peace movement. “I never asked Joan for money,” LaRocque said, which may explain why she became one of the center’s most generous backers. It was well-known in the peace community that approaching Joan Kroc with a tin cup—give me some money, I’m against war!-- was the worst way of getting it filled.

Some 15 years ago while visiting San Diego—to write about Latinos coming across the border from Tijuana--I spent an evening with Mrs. Kroc and her daughter Linda. At the time, Linda was running an antiwar organization called MEND (Mothers Embracing Nuclear Disarmament) that she had founded. I came to know her during one of her stays in Washington, where she sought to learn how to work the gears of the political machine to steer it away from war. She spoke in one of my classes, and a few months later, when in La Jolla, her hometown, she invited me to speak in schools where her daughters were students.

Over a dinner—Mercedes McCambridge, the Oscar-winning actor, was the fourth--both Joan and Linda sparkled with all the right graces: ample wit and plenty of probing questions, and with no pretensions that their roles in the peace movement were superior to anyone else’s. Joan was a teller of stories that made moral connections between public problems and personal commitments to find solutions. A Minnesotan whose father lost his railroad job in the Great Depression, her experiential knowledge of poverty became one of the forces that drove her philanthropy.

It was also what moved her to align herself with liberal Democrats, starting with Maureen O’Connor, then the progressive mayor of San Diego, the nation’s six largest city. At Joan Kroc’s urging that I write about her, I went with Mayor O’Connor on a nighttime excursion to the Canyon of the Dead—a desolate haven bordered by ravines and rutted roads on the Mexican-U.S. border where hundreds of impoverished refugees gather at dusk to make the trip North. O’Connor walked among them, saying that these were her people too, and staying for Mass offered by a Salvadoran priest. That Joan Kroc was an ardent backer of this unlikely mayor—of San Diego, a balmy golf coursey kind of town dominated by a military base and with a weak congressional delegation in Washington—suggests that her political convictions were liberal, lasting and lively.

Uncounted lives were improved by Joan Kroc’s generosity. A brief story about one. In 1988, one of my students—a Georgetown University student from Hungary—wanted to do postgraduate work in peace studies. I told about the Notre Dame program and the Kroc institute. She applied, was accepted and excelled, and went on to earn a doctorate. She is now a professor of peace studies at Lafayette College

Colman McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington DC. His e-mail is colman@earthlink.net.