April 2003

On the first day of the U.S. war in Iraq, Jim Kimsey was on the telephone with a friend, assuring her that it was safe to continue her book tour in the United States.

Jim hopes the war in Iraq will help the U.S. get a foothold in the Middle East so that it can broker peace. But Jim, the founding chairman of America Online and a VPP investor, knows firsthand that war is hell. These days he’s in the business of cleaning up war’s aftermath. Early in 2001, Gen. Colin Powell asked Jim to chair the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). The goal of the organization is to locate some 40,000 missing people—most in mass graves—from the 1990s conflicts in the Balkan states, and to identify their remains through DNA so as “to help speed up the healing process for the families,” Jim explains.

Like other ICMP board members—including the prime minister of the Netherlands, the British defense minister, and Jordan’s Queen Noor—Jim visits the headquarters in Bosnia several times a year to work with Serb, Croat, and Muslim representatives to gain cooperation in identifying mass gravesites and getting bodies exhumed. Over the last three years the organization has hired international DNA experts who have developed the technology to match bone samples with blood samples from relatives of the dead. To date, ICMP has made 2,000 matches. “It’s grisly stuff,” Jim says, but he was glad to be able to offer the technology to New York’s then-Mayor Giuliani after the September 11th attacks.

Jim also chairs Refugees International, which advocates humane treatment of refugees around the world. Jim, whose Pennsylvania Avenue office is next door to the White House, intends to visit Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to “try to preserve the relevance of the United Nations.” Without an empowered and cooperative UN, refugees in many countries will suffer.

For all the darkness of war-related problems, Jim’s large and colorful life provides a good deal of balance. He jets around the world in a private airplane and is squired around town in his Bentley limousines. But this Washington area native and leading donor was not always rich. He grew up in a modest home in Arlington. His father was a government clerk who sent his children to Catholic schools. Jim, an admitted “wise guy,” was thrown out of Gonzaga College High School during his senior year. A sympathetic brother at St. John High School ensured that Jim was able to graduate on time. Both schools have benefited from Jim’s generosity in recent years.

To the surprise of many, the unruly Kimsey decided to attend West Point, which he says changed his life. That led to an eight-year career as an Army airborne ranger. He took part in the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. He also served two tours in Vietnam, helping to build an orphanage in Duc Pho along the way. As the war wound down, Jim’s appetite for military service waned. He returned to Washington and purchased several successful bars and restaurants, including the Madhatter and Bullfeathers. His business acumen prompted a friend to ask him to take over a fledgling video game company. Eventually, Jim transferred the company’s assets to another company, including “a little piece of software I licensed for $50,000 that became the kernel of AOL.” He hired a young, creative marketer, Steve Case, who helped the business take off. By 1996, Jim says he was ready to do other things and ready for Case, another VPP investor, to take over. He is proud of the company’s quick international success but dismayed by the destructive clash of cultures when AOL acquired Time Warner. Today he fears the company is moribund. He shrugs. “I’m just a stockholder now.”

When Jim is not abroad, much of his attention is focused on Washington, DC, where he chairs the Washington Opera and sits on the boards of the Kennedy Center and the National Symphony. “I want this city to rival New York in terms of cultural attractions,” he says. But he adds that he doesn’t want communities like Anacostia to get left behind. He established the Kimsey Foundation in 1996 to focus attention on improving education and social conditions in Washington, DC (see story about New Leaders for New Schools). Mike Kimsey, the eldest of Jim’s three sons, works at the foundation, spending most of his days in Southeast DC learning about that community’s people and issues. Mike, a former military officer, also teaches math at Kipp Academy, a charter middle school on Capitol Hill.

Jim Kimsey says he is continually surprised at how much money and energy are expended in tackling the same problems in the city with little coordination. Increasingly, he sees his foundation’s role as one of bringing together people from different sectors and backgrounds to address the city’s most critical issues. The work that he and his foundation face in the city often mirrors the challenges he encounters among international factions in his work overseas. Nevertheless, Jim believes he is obliged to share his good fortune, and he says that philanthropists, like physicians, should honor the Hippocratic Oath: “First do no harm.”