(FORTUNE Magazine) – John Whitehead, 69, is accustomed to managing Big Money for Very Important People. Since 1989, five years after he left as co-chairman of investment bank Goldman Sachs and shortly after retiring from his second career as Deputy U.S. Secretary of State, he has been handling investment portfolios for the likes of Henry Kissinger and former Citicorp boss Walter Wriston. Whitehead claims an average annual return for such clients of 45%. But these days the ex-Wall Streeter seems to be getting a bigger thrill from overseeing the Hungarian American Enterprise Fund, a for-profit group set up by Congress to put venture capital into private Hungarian businesses. Now in its second year, the fund has invested some $30 million in 100 companies. Example: a $922,000 stake in Fotex, a Budapest eyeglass chain. Whitehead says he hopes all his investments will yield a profit. The fund's anticipated 9% total annual return seems modest compared with what he makes for Kissinger, say, but that isn't the point. Says Whitehead, who finds time for an annual Outward Bound wilderness jaunt between trips to Budapest and running clients' money back in New York: ''Our principal purpose is to stimulate the transition of the Hungarian economy.''