CAPITALIST AND ACCIDENTAL HUMANITARIAN

Michael T. Kaufman quit his job at The New York Times to edit a magazine in
Prague, becoming one of a cast of thousands bankrolled by George Soros to
promote "open societies" in Eastern Europe. There, Mr. Kaufman became
fascinated with Mr. Soros, a billionaire who preferred hanging out with
dissidents and ragtag idealists to hobnobbing with his fellow pinstripers.
Mr. Soros was far from touchy-feely, yet his beneficiaries felt comfortable
calling him George. Would Carnegie's librarians have called him Andrew?

Intrigued, Mr. Kaufman proposed a biography of this quirky, unpredictable,
self-deprecating, galling, curmudgeonly tycoon who has lately become the
Lone Ranger of philanthropy.

The subject gave the cooperative nod after a telling exchange in which Mr.
Kaufman laid out the negatives. "I told him that I would be professionally
bound to look for skeletons in his closets," Mr. Kaufman writes. "I also
told him that I had been raised to believe that it was impossible for a
really rich man to be a really good man. He answered that so had he, and
that this was a reasonable position to take."

Mr. Soros is his own worst critic. In things he aspired to and toiled at he
admits he's a flop, describing himself as a "failed philosopher" and giving
his first book, "The Alchemy of Finance," a disparaging review: "I could
have probably done it in five sentences." In things he didn't aspire to --
investing and philanthropy -- he did brilliantly, yet he plays down his
abilities. "I didn't know what the hell I was doing," he says of some
initial philanthropic bungles. Is there a lesson here? Attaching your ego
to things for which you're ill suited leaves you free to excel
un-self-consciously at what you do best.

Mr. Kaufman doesn't dwell on the investment angle. That spares us the
chapter on how you, too, could make a billion shorting the British pound or
the Malaysian ringgit. The Soros method is scattershot and unfathomable.
This was no buyer and holder like Warren Buffett, wedded to his Coca-Cola
shares and his Washington Post. In his Quantum Fund and related vehicles,
Mr. Soros cruised through world markets, betting for and against stocks and
bonds, pouncing on weak currencies. He credits philosophy, not number
crunching, for his speculative triumphs. From the philosopher Karl Popper
he learned "reflexivity," which in one sentence boils down to "Life is
unpredictable." This concept kept Mr. Soros from holding onto losing
propositions just because they made sense.

His father's canny maneuvering saved the family from the Nazis and later
from the Russians in Budapest. First, they were Schwartz, then switched to
Soros (sounded less Jewish), then, with the swastikas flying and Jews being
hunted down, they took on fake identities and farmed themselves out to
Christian acquaintances. At 14, Mr. Soros moved away from home and became
Sandor Kiss. For three years he played the part and avoided detection. When
the Russians seized control, he left Hungary for London. He tells Mr.
Kaufman that he preferred living as Kiss, a potential Holocaust victim, to
living as Soros in a free country. Among the British, he felt miserable and
alienated. Much later and inadvertently, he got revenge with his huge bet
against the British pound.

Though Mr. Kaufman draws no conclusions from Psych 101, after you read the
childhood section you aren't surprised that Mr. Soros claims no strong
allegiance to any nation, any investment, investing in general, capitalism,
relationships (his are described here as "transactional"), work, and even
to his great passion, philosophizing. (He once called it an "ego trap.")

He's not entirely Hungarian, definitely not British. He studied at the
London School of Economics, but wasn't interested in economics. The only
person he seemed to want to impress, Popper, he never succeeded in
impressing. He never pursued finance as much as he fell into it, working in
a handbag factory, then hiring on at a succession of investment houses,
first in London, then in New York. He moved to the United States in 1956,
but never considered himself fully American.

His real work, as he saw it, was perfecting a philosophical tract that
never escaped his desk drawer. He planned to make $500,000 in New York and
return to abstract thinking, but lingered on Wall Street as his trades paid
off and the cash compounded. In any event, the most intriguing parts of
this book deal not with Mr. Soros's getting, but with his giving.

To John D. Rockefeller, sharing the wealth was a religious duty, to
Carnegie, a social obligation, but there was no tradition of tithing or
philanthropy in Mr. Soros's background. For most of his adult life he
avoided and even disparaged the charitable impulse, then suddenly it
overwhelmed him, and he quit the Quantum Fund to pursue it full time.

A perfunctory, passive donor he isn't; a meddling, Steinbrennerish donor he
is. The speculator in currencies now speculates in causes, making
impulsive, large, eccentric bets, initiating quick strikes in global
crises, outmaneuvering sluggish governments and relief agencies. In the
Russian economic collapse, Mr. Soros kept science (or at least, scientists)
alive by awarding $500 grants to 35,000 researchers and academics.

To stir up free expression in Hungary (this was pre-Internet), he shipped
1,000 copying machines into the country. During the siege of Sarajevo, he
teamed up with Fred Cuny, the Indiana Jones of war relief (now deceased),
to cobble together a do-it-yourself water system for the city. This made
life easier and also saved lives. With taps flowing again, people stopped
filling pails at public wells attacked by snipers.

Soros money built a university in Budapest, but generally he has avoided
brick-and-mortar trophy philanthropy in favor of putting cash in people's
pockets and rattling the establishment at home and abroad. He rattled Wall
Street with his rambling essay "The Capitalist Threat," in The Atlantic
Monthly (1997). In that grumpy piece, Mr. Soros bit the Invisible Hand that
fed him, debunking the free market and calling for unspecified regulation,
presumably so people like him couldn't get rich doing what he'd already done.

Mr. Soros makes no effort to win popularity contests, and Mr. Kaufman
doesn't try to win any on his behalf. This is a flinty-eyed exposition of a
brilliant capitalist, devoted provocateur and accidental humanitarian. You
come away believing it is possible to be a really rich man and a really
good man after all.