A Mighty Purpose Read online

  At the end of one of the vaccination days, the UNICEF team gathered in the Caracol radio studio to listen to the results. Microphones protruded from desks, and a red “on air” light glowed above them. The number of children originally targeted was 917,000; they had hoped to reach at least 80 percent. On this evening, the tally came in around 10:30 p.m.: the goal had been met. When everyone learned they had actually succeeded, “it was an explosion,” says Jara. People howled and hugged each other and wiped away tears. UNICEF staffer Juan Aguilar recalls that Grant was so happy, he jumped into the air. The UNICEF chief then took a moment to thank everyone and proclaimed giddily, “We did it!”

  In numerous speeches, he would equate the triumph in Colombia to “putting a man on the moon.”

  Now he had to repeat the performance.

  The brief note was typed on a small scrap of paper with a simple M anchored at the bottom. It was handed to UNICEF’s Washington, DC, lobbying chief, Kimberly Gamble, over lunch. It instructed her to work toward two goals: increasing the US contribution to UNICEF and establishing a “US Children’s Survival Fund” of between $100 million and $200 million. The letter dictated that the new fund would “support global type initiatives … not less than 50 percent of which shall be contributed to multilateral activities and the remainder to be administered by USAID.” The note’s brevity was inversely proportional to the challenge it posed—especially during a time of across-the-board budget cuts in Washington. It was as though Gamble had been handed a ten-dollar bill and had been nonchalantly asked to pick up some Chinese takeout—for the entire population of Washington, DC.

  The author of the note was Michael Shower, Jim Grant’s speechwriter and close aide. Trim, balding, and often grumpily serious, Shower was known for passing out notes like these, quick missives all signed with a typed M. Whenever you got one, you knew it had come from the musings of Jim Grant.

  Gamble did not hide her reservations. “I’m not going to live long enough to see this happen,” she told Shower.

  Recruited by Grant from USAID, Gamble (who now goes by Gamble-Payne) had developed a finely honed political pragmatism. She knew the Reagan administration well. She knew how little regard it had for the UN. She knew factions within USAID would resist this goal for fear it would siphon away their already threatened resources. She also knew that everything was being slashed everywhere, and that any new proposal would mean the money would have to come from some existing budget line.

  She asked Shower how serious Grant was about the idea. Shower answered by raising his eyebrows and nodding his head.

  “Oh God,” Gamble said.

  As with many of Grant’s plans, one of the first steps was to get the Catholic Church on board. Gamble won the cooperation of Representative David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin—a well-known Catholic—and eventually wrangled the support of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

  UNICEF’s coziness with the church made many people uneasy. “The women’s groups were saying UNICEF is in bed with the Catholic Church,” recalls Gamble-Payne. “A lot of women inside UNICEF did not like it.”

  But Grant was willing to sacrifice the “gender issue”—at least temporarily—in order to get Catholics in his corner. A lot of women and men in UNICEF would increasingly pressure him to take women’s rights and family planning more seriously; this did not include support for abortion (an issue UNICEF has diligently avoided), but rather “birth spacing.” Ethel, who was a staunch feminist, nonetheless reminded several staff members that her husband was “a man of his generation.” Grant would eventually acquiesce and take up family planning, in part as a result of pressure from the UNICEF board. The Vatican would protest and would later (after Grant’s death) cancel a paltry two-thousand-dollar annual contribution to the children’s agency over unfair allegations involving UNICEF and birth control.

  For now, Gamble knew what her marching orders were, and she followed them. She and her team then began cobbling together votes, gathering experts for testimony, and assembling a bipartisan consensus behind the scenes—at a time, she notes, when genuine bipartisanship was still possible on the Hill.

  Then, at Grant’s request, she got him an official, twenty-minute meeting with the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. A liberal New Deal Democrat from Boston, O’Neill was big and boisterous, a consummate, old-fashioned Washington insider—and a counterweight to Reagan’s swelling pro-business conservatism.

  Getting on O’Neill’s calendar wasn’t just about meeting the powerful political Mandarin—it was about showing everyone you meant business. “If you are on Tip O’Neill’s calendar, everybody in Washington knows it,” says Gamble-Payne. “That means that everybody knows you have access.”

  Grant knew O’Neill—he seemed to know everyone in Washington—and the affable Speaker even affectionately called him “Jimbo.”

  It was Gamble’s first time in the Speaker’s office. “I felt like Alice in Wonderland,” she says now. “The room seemed so big.”

  The two men wasted no time. “What can I do for you, Jimbo?” O’Neill bellowed.

  Grant pulled out his props, likely including an ORS packet. He probably told O’Neill that forty thousand children were dying needlessly every day. He may have even used his closing line: “This is obscene.”

  As he was speaking, O’Neill nodded and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  Grant told him he wanted $100 million for a Child Survival Fund, which would be run by USAID and would provide money for simple things that could save kids’ lives. It would be good for foreign aid, good for the United States, and a strategic choice that made economic sense.

  When Grant became stubbornly determined about something, says Gamble-Payne, his eyes appeared almost to change color. “They were normally blue,” she says, “but they would turn a certain shade of gray.”

  Sitting in the Speaker’s office, his eyes seemed to go steely.

  Finally, O’Neill stopped him.

  “Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo,” he said. “No, no, no. Times are a little tough right now. Tell you what we’ll do. Let’s just start with twenty-five. And you’ll get there, Jimbo, you’ll get there. It’s a good program, it’s a good idea. Let’s start with twenty-five and see how it goes.”

  O’Neill’s aide then stood up, and, at the same time, the door opened. The meeting was over.

  It wasn’t the answer Grant wanted, but it was a start.

  The Child Survival Fund was established in 1984 with an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. The initial allocation was $25 million—funds to be used mostly by USAID to combat child mortality (as much as $7 million was designated for UNICEF).

  Some UNICEF staffers groused that all the money should have gone directly to UNICEF. UNICEF badly needed it. Why was Grant raising money for his old employer, USAID?

  “Jim never wanted the money in UNICEF,” says Gamble-Payne. “It wasn’t about the money.”

  It was about placing the cause of child survival at the center of US foreign aid policy. It was about getting the United States government to join Jim Grant’s fight. By insisting the money go to USAID, “he created a vested interest in USAID,” says Kul Gautam. “Child survival became a big thing.”

  As a result, the Child Survival Fund increased year by year, becoming a recurring expenditure (despite Reagan’s attempts to cut it). It eventually resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding for child survival and maternal health programs; the money was in addition to the US government’s regular contribution to UNICEF.

  What had long seemed out of the question in many countries began to butt up against the edges of possibility. Immunization drives were launched in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria, and Grant began planning a big campaign in Turkey—a country with daunting logistical and political challenges. In 1984, UNICEF increased its shipment of vaccines by 50 percent over the previous year, delivering doses to eighty countries. It also provided 65 million packets of oral rehydration salts
and helped twenty countries produce the salts locally. By the end of 1985—as a result of expanded immunization and ORS programs—as many as one million children who would have otherwise died were now alive, according to UNICEF estimates.

  There were wrinkles, some of them mountain-size. On October 31, 1984, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards in the garden of her residence, cut down in a spray of bullets. The attack was in retaliation for a bloody military assault she had ordered on Sikh separatists holed up in a temple a few months earlier. Before her death, Grant had met with “Mother India” several times; he and South Asia regional director Dave Haxton had secured her commitment for a full-scale immunization campaign. Now, Haxton and Grant had to make sure the immunization campaign didn’t die with India’s leader. Haxton’s first order of business was to protect his eight Sikh employees from vicious anti-Sikh riots that were roiling the country (he insisted they camp out in the UNICEF office with their families). Then he and Grant eventually approached the country’s new leader, Indira Gandhi’s forty-year-old son Rajiv. They proposed that the neophyte prime minister make the immunization campaign a “living memorial” to his mother. Gandhi agreed.

  Grant accelerated his pace everywhere, visiting thirty-three countries in 1984, some multiple times. In the space of one month, he flew to Nigeria, then India for a week, then to Kenya, then Burma, then Thailand, and finally Algeria. After Algeria, he went to Italy for a week before returning to the States. Almost every trip to the airport was last-minute and involved a harried rush out the door, often with Ethel handing Jim his packed suitcase. He flew Pan Am and always took the same seat, 3A. He skipped in-flight movies—he either worked or slept. Once he lost one of his little brown notebooks, only to find it more than a year later under that same seat, 3A, according to his executive assistant Mary Cahill.

  During one of his many trips to Italy in 1984, at a special board session in Rome, Grant welcomed one of his most important funders and fund-raisers, Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia. The half brother of King Fahd, Prince Talal had first been approached in 1979 by UNICEF’s liaison in Riyadh, Sabah Al Alawi, according to Maggie Black’s The Children and the Nations: The Story of Unicef. Grant had actively courted him and persuaded the UN secretary general to appoint him as a special envoy in 1981. More important than his much-publicized concern for children were the prince’s bottomless, oil-slicked pockets. UNICEF’s director of personnel Manou Assadi once flew on Talal’s private Boeing 727 on a trip to Kuwait and remembers ashtrays made out of gold.

  Before one of Grant’s early meetings with the prince, Assadi, who is from Iran, gave his boss some pointers on interacting with Arab leaders. He told him, for instance, that in Arab countries, it is customary to offer senior leaders the seat farthest from the door. “Jim Grant was very informal,” says Assadi. “Things like that, he had no clue.”

  Grant once made a faux pas when meeting with a Muslim official in Indonesia, according to Assadi, who had heard about the encounter from a UNICEF regional director. Whipping out his packet of ORS, Grant reportedly told the government minister that not only was the solution effective for saving kids’ lives, it was also a great cure for a hangover. It apparently had not occurred to Grant that his devout Muslim host did not drink.

  Prince Talal became a vocal UNICEF booster and persuaded several other Arab countries to start a fund-raising consortium called the Arab Gulf Fund, or Agfund, that would support various UN causes. According to a 1981 Newsweek profile, Saddam Hussein, then president of Iraq, handed Talal a blank check in response to his fund-raising drive.

  As the churn of fund-raising and travel and meetings suctioned away more and more time from Grant’s already taxed and battered schedule, his personal life was diced into smaller and smaller pieces. He protected morsels of time with Ethel, and he corresponded with his sons and stepmother. On June 8, 1984, he welcomed his first grandchild, a girl named Joy, the daughter of his middle son, Jamie.

  At some point later that year or in early 1985, Peter Adamson and Ethel persuaded Jim to go to a movie—to take him away from his work just for a few hours. They went to see A Passage to India, David Lean’s film based on E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel about British colonial India (a time and place Grant had, of course, experienced firsthand). Grant sat with his wife and his friend, but he did not seem the least bit interested in the movie. “He didn’t really understand the film at all,” recalls Adamson. “He wasn’t really there.”

  Many people who encountered Grant, says Adamson, were “taken aback by the strength of his commitment and dedication … at the expense of all other aspects of life.”

  Chapter 6

  SILENCING THE GUNS

  It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke: “I met the president of El Salvador at a cocktail party last night.”

  Agop Kayayan was sitting at his cluttered desk in Guatemala City at around nine in the morning when the phone rang. It was Mary Cahill, Jim Grant’s executive assistant, who quickly put her boss on the phone. Grant’s voice was unusually charged, and he sounded very excited about something. Kayayan grew instantly nervous. The executive director of UNICEF doesn’t just call you out of the blue to say he met a head of state at a cocktail party in New York.

  So Kayayan, a jovial, chain-smoking Armenian-Lebanese man who was UNICEF’s representative for Central America, replied simply, “Yes, Mr. Grant.”

  The conversation that followed, according to Kayayan, would change his life and set in motion an extraordinary series of events.

  Grant continued his story about the president of El Salvador: “I asked him if we would have 80 percent immunization in El Salvador. He said, ‘Mr. Grant, don’t you understand, I have a war in my country?’ ”

  Kayayan grew more anxious as he listened to the story and tried to anticipate where Grant was going with this—and what part in it Kayayan was supposed to play.

  Grant went on: “I told him, ‘Why don’t we try to stop the war?’ ”

  Then Kayayan knew what was coming, and the panic in him welled up.

  “Then, the president says, ‘It’s not so easy—the Catholic Church has been trying many times.’ Then I said, ‘Can we try?’ The president said, ‘You are welcome.’ ”

  Finally, Grant wound up his story. “Agoop,” he said, adding an extra o to Kayayan’s first name. “I want you to see how we can arrange a truce in El Salvador.”

  As his mind whirred, Kayayan joked: “Mr. Grant, you are saying this to the next representative … you’ll have to find a new representative to do this.”

  “I know you’re joking,” Grant said. “And I know you’re going to do it.”

  Kayayan was apprehensive, but he was also excited. “I like things that are out of the common. I like challenges,” he says now.

  He accepted Grant’s challenge. He immediately called El Salvador’s minister of health. Kayayan relayed what Grant had told him, but the minister did not seem at all surprised. He had received a similar call from the president. The men agreed they had to do something. The question that then clawed its way into their conversation was a gargantuan one: How?

  El Salvador’s vicious civil war, which began in 1980, would eventually claim more than 75,000 lives and unleash some of the most hideous violence in recent Latin American history—much of it perpetrated by US-backed, right-wing paramilitary death squads. The assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romeo by a sniper as he said Mass in San Salvador on March 24, 1980, was the opening chapter in thirteen years of terror. Romero was a forceful champion of the poor, who spoke out against the abuses committed by both the left and the right—but it was the right who felt most threatened by him. The horror quickly escalated. Romero’s funeral was bombed, and attendees were sprayed with machine gun fire; as many as forty mourners were killed in the ensuing panic. Later that year, four American churchwomen were raped and murdered by members of the El Salvador National Guard; their bodies were interred in shallow gra
ves along the side of a road. More bodies would appear, dumped above ground, in plain view, with arms missing or eyes gouged out—each one a warning from the death squads to keep quiet, each one a reminder of the vise of fear that clamped down on the country.

  The most shocking atrocity occurred in December 1980, when members of the US-trained Atlacatl Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion massacred as many as one thousand civilians—including many children—near the remote village of El Mozote. The violence was stupefying. According to Mark Danner’s blow-by-blow account, published in the New Yorker thirteen years later, the soldiers started with the men, gunning them down and then beheading them with machetes. Next, they set about raping, torturing, and killing the women and girls, some as young as twelve. They saved the little children for last, hacking them with machetes or crushing their skulls with rifle butts.

  When reports of the massacre were first published in the New York Times and the Washington Post, the governments of both El Salvador and the United States staunchly denied them. The Reagan administration considered El Salvador a critical front in the Cold War and funneled billions of dollars in aid to the government. Even the merciless mass killing of children by government military units was apparently not going to stand in the way of that. The impunity of the death squads therefore seemed impenetrable.

  The president of El Salvador at the time, José Napoleón Duarte, had dismissed accounts of the El Mozote slaughter as a “guerrilla trick.” A civil engineer and former mayor of San Salvador, who was once beaten and forced into exile after opposing the right-wing theft of an election, Duarte was actually considered a moderate. He was first appointed to the presidency in 1980 after joining a civilian-military junta that had pledged reforms after five decades of military dictatorship. He served until 1982 and reclaimed the office in 1984 by winning a national election. Duarte, the country’s first freely elected president in fifty years, vowed to crack down on the death squads (though it became clear some were beyond his control). The man Duarte had defeated, Roberto D’Aubuisson, was a graduate of the US Army’s infamous School of the Americas and the founder of El Salvador’s ultraconservative Arena party. D’Aubuisson also happened to be deranged and murderous, but this did not prevent Senator Jesse Helms and other US Republicans from staunchly supporting him. The UN Truth Commission for El Salvador later deemed D’Aubuisson guilty of ordering Archbishop Romero’s murder. Next to him, almost anyone seemed palatable. Duarte was a cofounder of the country’s Christian Democratic Party and a political survivor who hewed close to the political center. The stocky and beleaguered man, who sometimes wore bulbous glasses and reportedly nursed a messiah complex, had himself received death threats from both sides.