A Mighty Purpose Page 16

  “We can’t accept that,” the king proclaimed. “Do whatever Mr. Grant wants us to do.”

  The staff from the Moroccan Ministry of Health visited UNICEF headquarters in New York, where Nyi Nyi welcomed them. An immunization campaign was launched. The country’s coverage rates for polio, DPT3, and tuberculosis would eventually climb from none at all in 1980 to more than 80 percent by 1990, according to WHO estimates. Coverage for measles would reach 79 percent.

  “He knew what would strike a chord,” says Nyi Nyi. “He would play one country against another.”

  He was also utterly shameless, never missing an opportunity to make his pitch, no matter how tacky or inappropriate. In the Dominican Republic, after an official field visit in 1985, President Salvador Jorge Blanco hosted an august state dinner in Grant’s honor. He was asked to make a speech. On the stage with Grant stood the president, wearing an expensive-looking suit, and three or four men in full military regalia—possibly generals or bodyguards. Grant began to tell the crowd of several hundred people what the Dominican Republic could do to save more children. About halfway through his speech, he stopped. According to Peter Adamson, who had accompanied him, he then reached into his pocket and pulled out a ribbon of red and blue stickers. Printed on each were the words CHILD SURVIVAL REVOLUTION. He walked over to President Blanco and the men surrounding him, peeled off some stickers, and began applying them liberally on the president’s suit and the men’s uniforms. “I am making you five-star generals of the child survival revolution!” Grant announced cheerfully.

  President Blanco smiled, perhaps stunned.

  Back at the hotel, Ethel chided, “Jim, you are such a ham.”

  Adamson says it is hard to imagine any other international leader getting away with a stunt that might well have been perceived as “tactless at best” and possibly even offensive. “Yet, because of who he was,” Adamson says, “it was fine.”

  Grant’s motives were so obvious, he adds, that even his greatest critics could not dispute his genuineness. Because everyone knew that all his enthusiasm, all his marketing ploys, all his badgering and berating—that it was never about him. It was always about saving kids. There was no ulterior motive, no hidden agenda.

  In India, during the mid-to-late 1980s, the government was ambivalent toward outsiders promising external aid or bilateral support, according to former Indian government official Gourisankar Ghosh. He is aware of one notable exception. “The only person who was not only well received, but also warmly received—starting from the prime minister down to state governments—was Jim Grant,” says Ghosh, who would go on to work for UNICEF. “Even if India had a visit by the UN secretary general, it would not create as much headline news as a visit by Jim Grant.”

  Samora Machel, the revered African freedom fighter who had liberated Mozambique from Portuguese rule in 1975, trusted Grant so much that he once agreed to a sudden and, some might say, wildly unreasonable request. On the way into the heavily guarded presidential palace in Maputo, the country’s capital, to see Machel, Grant clutched a briefcase under his arm. UNICEF’s Mozambique representative Marta Mauras advised Grant to leave the briefcase behind—security was too tight.

  “Jim, you cannot take that,” said Mauras, an assertive Chilean sociologist. “It’s going to be taken away.”

  Grant ignored her. He didn’t answer, didn’t even look at her. Then, suddenly, like a fugitive trying to ditch his parole officer, he bolted. Briefcase under arm, he darted into the palace. He rushed past the guards, as Mauras and UNICEF staffer Carl Tinstman ran behind him. Somehow, he made it inside.

  Something in that briefcase was very important, and Mauras and Tinstman would soon find out what it was.

  President Machel was waiting for them on a long, red velvet couch with four cushions, surrounded by several aides, an interpreter, and a government minister. Bearded and in military garb, the stout, former rebel leader commanded a striking presence. Machel was a Marxist and his philosophy, in one significant way, mirrored Grant’s: both men believed that the benefits of society should be made available to all. A vociferous critic of the evils of colonialism and apartheid, Machel once famously remarked, according to the New York Times: “The rich man’s dog gets more in the way of vaccination, medicine and medical care than do the workers upon whom the rich man’s wealth is built.”

  Grant likely would have agreed.

  Mozambique was then throttled by a nasty civil conflict that pitted the ruthless Renamo rebels (backed by the apartheid government in South Africa and formerly by white-ruled Rhodesia) against Machel’s government. Horrific human rights abuses abounded, most of them committed by the Renamo rebels. But Machel’s sense of justice was marred by his own despotic tendencies. According to Human Rights Watch, the military leader’s postcolonial regime subjected dissidents to re-education camps and set up a secret police force that tortured prisoners and carried out extrajudicial executions.

  Machel stood up to greet Grant. The head of UNICEF was then signaled by an aide to sit in a nearby chair, also upholstered in red velvet. Grant proceeded to give his child survival spiel and brandished a packet of oral rehydration salts as an interpreter translated his words into Portuguese (though Machel was rumored to understand and speak English). Then Grant said, “Mr. President, I have a favor to ask you.”

  “Yes?” said Machel.

  He opened his briefcase. As if triggered by the snapping motion, Machel’s aides stood up. No one had mentioned what was in that briefcase, and they now appeared concerned.

  Grant pulled out a folder. Inside it was a document, two or three pages long.

  As Tinstman recalls, Grant then said, “I have taken the liberty of developing this formal agreement for us to sign. If it’s all right with you, perhaps we can both sign it right now.”

  According to Mauras, Grant then explained that it was a “commitment for all children.”

  This was news to Mauras. Grant hadn’t said a word to her about the agreement before this meeting. Ostensibly, he had kept it secret to avoid sounding off alarm bells at the presidential palace. He wanted to walk out with a signature. He didn’t want to wait for vetting and bureaucratic approval.

  The president’s aides, in the words of Carl Tinstman, “went ape shit.”

  Frowns formed on their faces, and their heads shook vigorously. An aide bent down and whispered in Machel’s ear. “We could tell by the body language … that Samora Machel was being told not to sign it,” says Tinstman.

  Which was not at all bad advice. For one thing, the document was in English, not Portuguese. And, as the minister pointed out, “We haven’t seen it. We need to read it first.”

  Not an unreasonable demand.

  At this point, Grant stood up and, “against all protocol,” says Mauras, he asked Machel to make room for him on the couch. The president and father of independent Mozambique obliged and scooted over. Grant sat down next to Machel, as though he were a family friend, and handed him the document.

  Tinstman remembers that Machel raised his eyebrows, as an aide whispered insistently in his ear. The president then held up the document and glanced at it but did not take time to read it. Mauras notes that Machel needed glasses to read anyway, and he wasn’t wearing any.

  Then Machel looked at Grant. “This is a good thing for me and my country and the country’s children?” he asked.

  “Absolutely, Mr. President, of course,” Grant said.

  That was all it took. “I will sign,” said Machel. And against the advice of all his aides, he did just that.

  Grant peered down to inspect the signature and noticed that Machel had only signed his first name, “Samora,” in big, sweeping script.

  “Mr. President,” Grant said, “you have to sign the full signature.”

  This last request Machel refused. He told Grant: “There is only one Samora in the whole world.”

  Another gamble had paid off. But the weight of that signature would not last long. About a year later, Ma
chel would die in a mysterious plane crash. Many suspected that the apartheid government of South Africa was responsible, though the case has never been officially resolved.

  As Jim Grant canvassed the globe, UNICEF country staff quickly learned what a “Jim Grant field visit” meant—a breathless, 24/7 whir of activity from the minute he touched down to the instant he departed. Everyone was exhausted and frayed and perhaps secretly relieved by the time he left. A typical day began at or before sunrise with back-to-back meetings with a roster of government officials and local NGOs, then lunch (which was often just another meeting with food), then perhaps a visit to a village or health center or refugee camp, then dinner, then more meetings at the office. Grant always took more time than the schedule allotted and was nearly always late, as his staff scrambled to maintain appointments. Sometimes it was because he became ensconced in conversation with a government leader; other times it was because he took part in activities he had come to observe. Grant would administer vaccines (usually just oral polio drops), crank a hand pump to bring up water, hold a weighing scale steady so a child could be lowered into it, and, of course, mix doses of oral rehydration salts. He also sat down to chat with village elders and mothers, whether it was on chairs, stools, or the ground. And sometimes he would stay for a while. When a chorus of children would gather to sing for him, dance, or play drums, he would stand up and clap vigorously. Or he would join them, bobbing awkwardly into their midst with a beaming grin on his face. During a performance in China, when a half dozen child dancers began a formal show on a stage, Grant jumped up, grabbed Ethel’s hand, and pulled her onto the stage to dance with them (Ethel accompanied him on many trips). This was not the way most UN officials or Western leaders behaved, and it took many by surprise.

  The last day of a Grant field visit usually ended with a marathon session of thank-you note writing. Jon Rohde had moved to India in 1986 and worked as a consultant for a global health nonprofit and also for UNICEF. Rolf Carriere remembers staying up until dawn on several occasions with Grant and others at Rohde’s house in New Delhi, drinking wine and writing thank-you letters to members of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s government. “[Grant] would have to be at the airport at six a.m. to fly on to the next place,” says Carriere, who then ran UNICEF’s health and nutrition programs in India. “He would work throughout the night, and we would all be there with him.”

  This letter-writing all-nighter became standard practice. The letters had to be written before Grant left, so he could sign them. They were not brief notes. Each one summarized what had been discussed and reminded a minister or bureaucrat or even a head of state what he or she had agreed to and what, in Jim Grant’s opinion, would be needed to make it happen. Written in the most deferential diplomatic tone, they were nonetheless pointed reminders: you promised to do this for your country’s children, and I’m going to hold you to it. For those staying up until an ungodly hour to help compose the notes, it was hard to complain when your boss was staying up, too.

  After an eighteen-hour day of meetings in Ankara, Turkey, Grant and several staffers, including Steve Woodhouse, returned to their guesthouse late in the evening. Most were exhausted and probably ready to collapse. But, as Woodhouse recalled, the day was not over yet. “C’mon,” said Grant effervescently. “We’ll have a meeting in my room to discuss next steps.” He then bounded up a long flight of about forty stairs, the first one to reach the top. Everybody else was younger than Grant but struggled to scramble up after him. On another occasion, when one staffer complained that Grant was driving people too hard and asked how they were all supposed to cope, Grant’s reply was “I think you all need to sleep faster!”

  One high-level staff meeting in a Bangkok hotel conference room dragged on into the early morning, as Grant grilled country representatives one by one about their immunization programs, like an instructor administering a withering oral exam. Why is your coverage so low? What are your biggest obstacles? Who do you need to speak with to get things moving? What can you as the representative do? If you hadn’t done your homework, or didn’t have adequate answers, you were exposed and embarrassed in front of all your colleagues.

  Finally, at one a.m., India representative Eimi Watanabe raised her hand, like a tentative kid at the back of the classroom.

  Grant pointed to her.

  “Can we continue this in the morning?” she asked.

  Grant looked at her. “No,” he said.

  The meeting went on.

  He would refuse many such pleas—whether it was to end a meeting or reconsider an eleventh-hour staff posting. Several UNICEF veterans have stories of getting a call from Grant, often in the wee hours, when he would share the surprise of a new job halfway around the world—in some cases with only a few days’ notice. According to his executive assistant Mary Cahill, one woman protested Grant’s decision to send her to Saudi Arabia—a country known for its harsh and brazenly unequal treatment of women.

  “What if men ask me to have sex with them?” she asked.

  “Simple,” he replied. “You tell them no.”

  In another instance, immediately after Steve Woodhouse had moved his family to New York at Grant’s request, Grant called and said he now wanted Woodhouse to go to Senegal. It would be a short-term assignment to help with the immunization campaign. Woodhouse pointed out that he had just relocated his whole family to a new city. Then he tried another argument.

  “I can’t speak French!” he pleaded.

  Grant was unmoved. “Neither can I,” he said. “That doesn’t matter.”

  Woodhouse went to Senegal.

  It was not just the late nights or last-minute global reassignments that grated on people. Grant was completely altering the way UNICEF worked in the field. Before him, many country representatives did not meet with heads of state and did not personally lobby them. They were supposed to get along with those in power, not challenge them. And immunization was the government’s job—how can a UNICEF field operative be held responsible for something the government is supposed to do? Grant’s response, according to former assistant Carl Tinstman: “Yes, it’s the government’s job, but not all governments are doing it as well as they should, so it’s your job as the UNICEF representative to make sure the government does it.”

  Some representatives protested that they feared trying to force their governments to do things would get them thrown out of the country. Plus, it was not always easy to get a meeting with a minister, much less a president. Tinstman remembers one senior representative raising his hand during a meeting and making a plaintive plea: “Mr. Grant, you want me to meet with the president? I’ve never done that. I’ve never met with any president.”

  “Well, you will now,” Grant said. “If you’re having difficulty, I’m going to visit your country, and you and I are going to see the head of state together.”

  This modus operandi pried open unparalleled channels of influence with world leaders. “The access really increased—it was absolutely extraordinary,” says longtime staffer Fouad Kronfol. More than anyone else ever had, he asserts, Grant managed to “prick the imagination of all the heads of state and convince them to do more for their children.”

  Tinstman, a versatile American who rapidly adapted to new situations, traveled with Grant on numerous occasions. His job was to help his boss prepare for meetings and get him from here to there. It was also, as he puts it, to be “a donkey.” “You have to carry a computer, you have to carry papers. You have to carry all kinds of stuff.”

  And you had to keep up with Jim Grant. Making this even more difficult was Grant’s penchant for traveling with only one carry-on. Which meant that “you’re bloody well only [bringing] a carry-on suitcase also,” Tinstman says.

  Grant had no time for laundry or dry cleaners either. He packed everything in his carry-on, washed his clothes in the hotel bathroom sink, and hung them around the room to dry. He wore a special, wash-and-wear, wrinkle-free Brooks Brothers suit that he would clean himsel
f. To get the wrinkles out of it, apparently all he had to do was hang the suit in the bathroom, run the shower hot, and fill the room with steam.

  Fancy accommodations were not required. The most important consideration was staying wherever the government had recommended. In one case, in Uganda, this was a dilapidated old hotel, in a room with no toilet seat and a door that didn’t fully shut. Grant didn’t complain.

  He sometimes traveled solo. Many people who met Grant at the airport were surprised that he did not have a big entourage, and, in this respect, the contrast with other UN leaders was striking. “I would sometimes be at the airport when other UN agency heads would come in,” says Richard Reid, the American logistical dynamo who had overseen the Turkish immunization campaign. “And one of them had three different people carrying his bags. He was like a British viceroy arriving in Afghanistan with two hundred and sixty-two camels. Just astonishing how simple Jim was and, at the same time, so able to make the waves part.” Nonetheless, all of this irritated Ethel, who believed that Jim did not take proper care of himself. It also spawned a trend in UNICEF: the “cult of no-suitcase.”

  Joe Judd, who worked in a number of UNICEF country offices, recalls one of his supervisors fretting about whether to check a suitcase while on a trip with Grant. “My boss said, ‘I can’t take a big suitcase. Jim Grant will think I’m not with it,’ ” says Judd. “It became absolutely ridiculous … I think the sales of wash-and-wear shirts went up in the world.”

  The spartan carry-on tradition was born out of sheer, unvarnished practicality—make every minute count. With so many connections packed into such short periods of time, the potential for losing a checked bag rose exponentially. There was also a tint of bravado. “When you got off that plane, you were right in the thick of things,” says Judd. “There was going to be no pause, no slowdown, no surrender to waiting for a suitcase.”