A Mighty Purpose Read online

  ALSO BY ADAM FIFIELD

  A Blessing Over Ashes:

  The Remarkable Odyssey of My Unlikely Brother

  Copyright © 2015 by Adam Fifield

  Frontispiece: James P. Grant holding a small child at a UNICEF-assisted center for unaccompanied children in Nyamata, Rwanda, while a worker looks on. Photograph © UNICEF/NYHQ1994-0481/PressRWANDA, 1994

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Fifield, Adam, author.

  A mighty purpose : how Jim Grant sold the world on saving its children / Adam Fifield.

  p.; cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59051-603-4 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-59051-604-1 (e-book)

  1. Grant, James P. 2. UNICEF—History. 3. United Nations—Officials and employees. 4. Child welfare—History. I. Title.

  [DNLM: 1. Grant, James P. 2. UNICEF. 3. Administrative Personnel—Biography. 4. International Agencies—history. 5. Child Advocacy—history. 6. Child Health Services—history. 7. Child Welfare—history. 8. History, 20th Century.]

  HV703.F54 2015

  362.7092—dc23

  [B] 2014050069

  v3.1

  To my wife, Kathy, and my children, Will & Audrey

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Introduction: Your Child Will Live

  Chapter 1: The American is Crazy

  Chapter 2: The Quantum Leap

  Chapter 3: Turning off the Tap

  Chapter 4: The Revolution

  Chapter 5: The Famine and the Crusade

  Chapter 6: Silencing the Guns

  Chapter 7: Buy Italian

  Chapter 8: The Salesman

  Chapter 9: One Life that Could not be Saved

  Chapter 10: The Alive Girl

  Chapter 11: Everything is not All Right

  Chapter 12: Lifeline

  Chapter 13: We Will Have our Summit

  Chapter 14: The Impossible Made Possible

  Chapter 15: What Would it Take?

  Chapter 16: Not a Good One

  Chapter 17: A Bigger Mission

  Epilogue: What If?

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

  —George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman,

  “Epistle Dedicatory to Arthur Bingham Walkley”

  I had never heard of Jim Grant until about a year before I decided to write a book about him. I was aware of the organization he led, the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, mostly from its popular Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF fund-raising campaign on Halloween. In late 2007, as a journalist who recognized how precarious my profession was becoming, I decided to try something different—at least for a while. I answered a job ad for a writer and editor at the US Fund for UNICEF, a nonprofit that raises funds and awareness for the UN agency in the United States. I ended up staying for more than five years, leaving in 2013. In my second or third year there, while rummaging through a filing cabinet, I found a tattered copy of an anthology of essays about Grant that was entitled Jim Grant: UNICEF Visionary. It had been published by UNICEF and was out of print; Grant had been dead for more than thirteen years. I thumbed through the pages and was transfixed—how was it, I wondered, that I was just now learning about someone who had so profoundly altered the course of recent history, who had shattered the idea of what was possible and impossible in the fight against poverty?

  I was a new father at the time—I now have a son and a daughter—and felt an immediate, palpable admiration for what he had done for so many other parents around the world. Who was this man? How and why did he do this? I wanted to find out.

  The following account is not a comprehensive history of UNICEF. Nor is it a thorough chronicle of Jim Grant’s life. It is a narrative that selectively focuses on key moments during his tumultuous fifteen-year tenure at UNICEF and on several relationships that were pivotal to his unprecedented achievements. Many important episodes, issues, and individuals are not included in these pages or are mentioned only briefly. This is ultimately a personal story that I hope will inspire and enlighten and perhaps trigger some contemplation of the possibilities for progress and of one person’s ability to truly change the world.

  Introduction

  YOUR CHILD WILL LIVE

  The baby was almost gone. Eyes dull, skin pulled taut over tiny bones, mouth gaping silently, he lay slack in his mother’s arms. She had wrapped him in a towel. At only a few months, his brief life was receding. Malnutrition and dehydration had staked their claims on his brittle body. It was no surprise to anyone here on the outskirts of the City of Death.

  In September 1992, Baidoa, Somalia, was the epicenter of a raging famine kindled by a drought and vicious fighting. The mother and her baby had come to a medical tent in a camp teeming with sick, displaced people. About twenty other mothers and children waited there for help, though they did not look like they hoped for, or expected, much. Their despair was quiet and stifling.

  A thin, white, slightly stooped, seventy-year-old American man walked into the tent. He wore an untucked blue short-sleeved shirt with a bulging chest pocket. He glanced around and then asked, “Can someone get me a cup of water?” His voice was crisp, his words clipped. After someone handed him the water, he reached into his stuffed chest pocket and pulled out a plastic packet. He then produced a spoon. He tore open the packet, spilled some of its powdery contents into the cup of water, and stirred it. The solution he had made was a mix of salts and sugars that can quickly halt the deadly effects of severe dehydration. He walked over to the mother and baby and cupped the child’s head in one of his hands. He set the cup down and began to spoon the solution into the baby’s mouth. The mother’s eyes widened.

  “Everything is all right,” he told her gently as he fed the baby. “He will live. Your child will live.” A man standing nearby translated the words. After about ten minutes, he stopped. He said aloud: “I want the same thing done for all the children here.” Then he left.

  Jim Grant was the head of UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and he was in Somalia to see how his agency was faring in an almost impossible situation. Accompanying him was UN official and former UNICEF Somalia representative David Bassiouni, who relayed this story.

  A few days later, an inquiry into the child’s condition showed that Grant’s promise had been kept. The child had recovered.

  Grant visited many such places over the years, places where the death of a child was nothing out of the ordinary, where it was so commonplace that it was numbly, quietly endured. Countries racked by war and disasters, but also peaceful regions devastated by a sinister force even deadlier—poverty.

  In refugee camps, slums, run-down rural health cent
ers, thatch-walled classrooms, remote mountain villages, Jim Grant was an incongruous sight. Unrelentingly upbeat with seemingly no inhibitions, he would traipse through scenes of jubilant celebration and those of paralyzing despair. He would cheerfully join troupes of singing children. He would dance and clap his hands and laugh out loud. He would throw his arm around the shoulder of a local village chief or a reserved government minister. He would lift up babies and hold them to his cheek. Squatting amidst a throng of children, he would work the tiny crowd: “Can I get a smile? Can you give me a smile?” Himself the father of three boys, he became the most powerful champion for impoverished children the world has ever seen. They were his warrant and gave him the license to push every edge of every envelope.

  And push he did. His controversial tenure would upend this venerable UN agency and forever alter the face of global health and international development. The death of millions of children every year from malnutrition and disease had been seen by many in the international community as inevitable and was even tacitly accepted. Grant changed that. As a result, the issue of children’s well-being would soar to a position of unprecedented political and social prominence. During a grievous global recession, he spearheaded a historic surge in worldwide childhood immunization rates—an astonishing achievement that many had considered simply inconceivable. He convened the largest-ever gathering of world leaders, placing the needs of the world’s youngest inhabitants squarely on the world stage for the first time. But the most important legacy of Grant’s leadership is the children themselves. His child survival revolution, as he called it, is estimated to have saved the lives of tens of millions of children during his tenure and many millions more after his death in 1995.

  By the time Grant took the helm in 1980, UNICEF was already widely respected for its independence, decentralized structure, and hands-on effectiveness. Created as a temporary agency to aid children suffering the after-effects of World War II, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund had provided clothing, health care, and powdered milk throughout postwar Europe and Asia (it had also bolstered milk production by equipping dairies in Europe and, later, Latin America). Becoming a permanent member of the UN system in 1953, UNICEF shortened its full name (losing “International” and “Emergency”) but kept its acronym. It started to outgrow its original mandate, evolving from an emergency relief operation into a broader development organization that helped the most disadvantaged children all over the world—whether they were in the crosshairs of a natural disaster or enduring the quiet horror of sickness and malnutrition. This included providing vaccines and medicines (and in the case of malaria, the insecticide DDT) for mass antidisease campaigns; supporting feeding and nutrition programs; drilling wells, building latrines, and promoting sanitation; delivering basic medical supplies and equipment to support child and maternal health; and funding the training of health workers, midwives, and volunteers. In the early 1960s, UNICEF strove to find a place for children in the emerging international development movement and in countries’ national development plans, and its programs began to encompass other issues, including education and family planning. It has always been voluntarily funded—by governments, corporations, foundations, individuals, and others—and operates at the invitation of governments. Its assistance is designed to strengthen countries’ and communities’ services for children and is primarily funneled through partnerships with government ministries, other aid agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and local groups. For instance, while UNICEF provides vaccines and helps train immunizers, it does not actually administer immunizations; this is done by government health workers and volunteers.

  Grant believed that UNICEF’s annual income—$313 million in 1980—was too small to make a lasting difference worldwide. UNICEF could be and do far more. By cultivating the agency’s considerable but largely untapped political and social influence, he turned the children’s organization into a propulsive global advocate—unlike anything the UN or the international community had ever experienced. Leader by leader, country by country, donor by donor—Grant supplied a moral spark that jolted governments and communities and contributors to spend more and do more to take care of children and to combat poverty. UNICEF soon went from cruising speed into hyperspace. Not only was it providing aid, it was sweeping away hulking bureaucratic obstacles, beefing up government budgets, setting concrete targets for advancing children’s programs, and spurring an ethical shift in the developing and developed worlds.

  For all his energy and obvious compassion, Grant was not an emotional or sentimental man—he did not tend to get misty-eyed at the sight of suffering children. That was not what truly motivated him. The children were the end, but they were also the means—a Trojan horse, as he would say. He would use them to prove a point—to show that it was possible to bring the benefits of progress to all people.

  Though still revered in many countries around the world, Grant is virtually unknown in his own country. This may be a reflection of the population he and UNICEF set out to help—mostly nonwhite children from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, from forgotten corners of the world that many Americans couldn’t find on a map. Boys and girls whose suffering and death hardly ever make the headlines, except maybe when they find themselves caught in a newsworthy crisis—or what Grant called a “loud emergency” (like the Ethiopian famine of 1984).

  His triumphs did not come without a price. He drove UNICEF to its limits, and it cracked under the stress. He fostered a culture of risk-taking that turned red tape into ribbons and undoubtedly saved many lives, but also may have contributed to numerous lapses. A major financial scandal in the UNICEF Kenya office during his watch scarred the agency’s reputation. He ruthlessly batted aside many things not central to his mission of advancing children’s survival, and in so doing ignored unpleasant realities and dismissed some important issues. He punted difficult personnel decisions and refused to take action against staff members accused of serious wrongdoing. His management skills were both brilliant and reckless. As he strove more and more rapidly toward his unassailable goal, he was willing to do almost anything to reach it. Throughout it all, he never looked back—he was simply moving too fast. So fast, in fact, that he made no plan for a post-Grant UNICEF—after all, he was UNICEF.

  A US World War II veteran who was born and raised in China and who would become a premier international aid expert, he remains an enigma to many who knew him. Colleagues and friends alike marveled at his extraordinary energy (one staffer called him a “metabolic freak”), his childlike optimism, and his prodigious ability to persuade just about anybody to do just about anything.

  “Mr. Grant, he could conquer you,” says former UNICEF Central America representative Agop Kayayan. “Convince you very easily, sometimes just by the eyes that would be shining.”

  Known to some on his staff as “the mesmerizer,” Grant talked combatants into dropping their guns so kids could get vaccines and medicines; he cajoled taciturn presidents and prime ministers into setting aside big portions of their budgets for child health programs; he coaxed priests and imams into providing armies of volunteers to help immunize millions of children.

  Lanky and thin-lipped with big, protuberant ears and often wearing a wrinkle-free Brooks Brothers suit, Grant had an old-fashioned, almost priestly bearing. Some were surprised to learn that he was nonreligious, because he radiated a messianic zeal—he was, after all, an apostle of sorts, a crusader for children. Part of his persuasive power stemmed from his undeniable moral urgency. You quickly learned that you could not oppose him—doing so, one staff member suggested, was like wrestling with an angel.

  Some former UNICEF staff members get choked up talking about Grant—he still exerts an ineffable pull on them. Others roll their eyes and groan in annoyance. Sure, he was inspiring, but boy, could he be a pain in the ass. Holding meetings on the weekends. Keeping people in the office until one in the morning. Repeating the same thing over and over a
nd over again, in meeting after meeting, as though he suffered from short-term memory loss. Dispatching staff to remote corners of the globe sometimes with little more than a day’s notice. His unadulterated enthusiasm could chafe even his most loyal supporters. And his willingness to ignore major problems in order to maintain a locked-in focus on child survival was off-putting to many.

  Some people feel his influence is overstated—don’t get wrapped up in the mysticism and magnetism of this one man, they warn. The story is more complicated than a single person’s blazing influence—and surely that’s true. There was a vast network of allies, some of whom risked and lost their lives to advance the child survival revolution. It was not just Jim Grant’s mission—it was the world’s. But without him, would any of it have happened?

  “Jim cleared all the brush away,” says Richard Reid, former UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa and a close Grant adviser. “He went ahead despite tremendous drag from old-timers and naysayers, and he steadily collected allies and believers. He put people together in such catalytic perfection.”

  The UN had never really seen anyone like Jim Grant before. His kinetic “can-do” style clashed with the bureaucratic, consensus-driven culture of the world body. “His name and the UN in the same sentence are still jolting to me,” says Grant’s former chief of communications John Williams. “He was so adventurous and so free—in many ways, the epitome of what the UN is not.”

  He pushed political and diplomatic boundaries, and he also pushed the clock, wringing every encounter for every minute he could, wreaking havoc on every calendar he came across. He was perennially late to meetings, meals, and flights. He and his deputy executive director Richard Jolly even had a running competition to see who could leave last for the airport and still make the plane. Several staff members who accompanied Grant to the airport recall high-speed, white-knuckle rides during which Grant himself was perfectly calm, even relaxed. After a visit to the Philippines in the early 1980s, Grant and his chief of health, Dr. Steve Joseph, went on a “screaming ride through the traffic of Manila,” as a driver raced them to the airport at the very last minute. “I’ve had a number of hair-raising experiences,” says Joseph, “but this was the most hair-raising experience of my life. Jim, of course, was quite cool. He knew we were going to make that airplane … But it was insane. I was sure we were going to be killed.” Even more shocking than the ride itself, adds Joseph, was Grant’s “inability to accept the rest of the physical world around him.”