A Mighty Purpose Page 17

  The refusal to pause or rest caught up with Grant sometimes. At an airport in Swaziland, he was racing down the plane’s stairway during a rainstorm. An airport shuttle was parked about three feet away. To avoid the rain—and presumably to save a few seconds—Grant leaped from the stairs to the shuttle. Badly misjudging the distance, he collided with the top of the shuttle door and crumpled to the ground. Tinstman, on his first trip with Grant, was mortified. “I thought, ‘Oh my God … now we’ve lost him.’ ” He and several other passengers helped Grant up. Tinstman could see a lump growing on his boss’s forehead. Dazed, Grant sank into a seat and rested his head on the seat in front of him. “Are you all right?” Tinstman asked. “Do you need a doctor?”

  “No,” Grant mumbled. “I’m all right. I’m just a little stunned.”

  While meeting with the prime minister of Japan, after a full day without sleep, he dozed off as his host was speaking. As he later recounted to several staff members, the prime minister tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Mr. Grant?” the prime minister said. “Perhaps you would like to use my bathroom to freshen up?”

  He fought his fatigue fiercely. “His tiredness was defiance,” says Adamson. “I could see him wanting to sleep … Whereas other people would give in to it, you would see him bringing himself around.”

  To chip away at his burgeoning sleep deficit, Grant would take catnaps—twenty- or thirty-minute snatches of slumber. In the car, plane, train—he could conk out anywhere. Former UNICEF Rwanda and Somalia staffer Ian MacLeod remembers traveling with Grant in a mammoth Hercules military plane as it flew into or out of Somalia. There were little metal benches in the back of the plane. Grant took off his suit jacket, curled up on a bench and was out instantly. MacLeod was amazed. “There’s infernal noise in the back of a Hercules,” he says. A half hour later, Grant popped back up, slipped on his coat, and adjusted his tie. “He woke up and looked like he’d slept for twelve hours,” marvels MacLeod.

  When Grant started suffering bouts of stabbing back pain from a slipped disc, he did not slow down or adjust his schedule. If his back gave him trouble, no matter where he was, he would lie on the floor for some temporary relief. Reportedly, this sometimes meant lying in the aisle of a plane, midflight. He would conduct meetings flat on his back in the middle of the floor, as everyone gathered around and peered down at their executive director.

  During a trip to New Delhi, Alan Court (who had helped lead UNICEF’s response to the 1984 Ethiopian famine) heard a knock at the door of his hotel room. It was 11:30 p.m. He opened the door to see Richard Jolly, who said Grant wanted to see Court. “But try to make it quick,” Jolly cautioned. “Jim’s not well.” Court put on some pants and a shirt and walked down to Jim’s room. Ethel answered the door and invited him to sit down in the common area. “You know Jim has a back problem,” she said before going into the bedroom to fetch her husband. Jim hobbled out, in obvious pain, and gingerly lowered himself onto the floor beneath Court. He lay flat and looked up at his guest.

  “What would you say if I were to offer you the position of representative in Chad?” Grant said.

  Court was stunned. Here was his boss lying on his back on the floor, offering him a job. Court sat on the edge of his chair hovering over Grant. He said yes.

  Court was with Jim and Ethel on another trip when they experienced a brief moment of respite. In Kathmandu, Nepal, in November 1986, while meeting with the king, Jim had overrun the clock by forty-five minutes. He and Ethel missed their flight. Court, then a program officer in Nepal, booked a later one. Suddenly, they had some time to kill. They decided to visit the nearby Boudhanath Tibetan Buddhist temple. Ethel put her arm in Jim’s, and they walked along the paths below the ancient stupa that loomed in the night. They strolled in the glow of oil lamps as the chanting of monks drifted on a gentle breeze. The rest of the group hung back—a moment like this was rare.

  By the end of 1986, the chorus of naysayers and critics dwindled as Grant’s child survival revolution gained momentum in every corner of the developing world. Nearly one hundred countries and more than four hundred nongovernmental organizations had joined the campaign for universal child immunization. Donors and millions of volunteers from all sectors of society across the globe—priests, imams, monks, rabbis, teachers, students, police officers, soldiers, artists, nurses, doctors, athletes, mothers and fathers—had united to create what Grant would call “a grand alliance for children.”

  UNICEF spent $57 million on immunization activities in 1986, providing 500 million doses of vaccine—a 24 percent increase over the previous year. Global immunization coverage had more than doubled since 1980, now reaching over 40 percent in all categories. The supply of oral rehydration salts—the other “twin engine” of child survival, as Grant dubbed it—had grown by six times over the past four years, in large part due to UNICEF’s advocacy. These two interventions were now saving an estimated 1.5 million lives every year, according to UNICEF.

  The man who had sparked it all liked to keep the spotlight off himself or, at the very least, pull others into its gleam with him. Grant liberally doled out credit for these achievements, making a particular effort to lather praise on his erstwhile adversary, WHO. “Make sure WHO looks good,” he frequently instructed. This was not about being nice. Grant knew he could not prevail without WHO or without the International Committee for the Red Cross or without USAID, among many others. He continued to recruit allies and funders for his “grand alliance”—the more diverse his coalition and the broader the base of support, the more quickly obstacles would fall. Though he tried to remain in the background, though he was exceedingly modest, Grant’s quiet fervor was sustained by a “great sense of self,” says Cahill. “He had a great belief in himself and a great belief in the cause.”

  Packed between his constant trips abroad were dense batches of meetings in New York, Washington, and Atlanta—with donors, staff, the UNICEF board, the Child Survival Taskforce, congressional committees, various UN committees and bodies. And many mornings at the Grants’ “roof house” were working breakfasts, catered by Ethel (as one staffer recalls: “there was poor Ethel, making bacon and eggs, while Jim carried on”). He rarely watched TV or movies and never took in any sports; he once remarked to one of his sons: “I can’t believe how much time I save by not watching sports!” Often the only time UNICEF’s head of personnel, Manou Assadi, could find with Grant was in the limo on the way to JFK Airport; after Grant got out, Assadi would ride back to UNICEF headquarters by himself.

  An agitator, a pest, an irritant extraordinaire, Grant took every opportunity—clambered upon any podium, pedestal, or bully pulpit available—to plead the case of the world’s poor and dying children. On television news shows and on college campuses, in the halls of the UN and the corridors of power in Washington, he continued to decry the “obscenity” of the preventable deaths of millions of children. On the eve of UNICEF’s fortieth anniversary on December 11, 1986, when the annual State of the World’s Children report was released, he told the New York Times that “the most shameful fact of the late 20th century is that every week, over a quarter of a million of the world’s children are being killed, largely needlessly.” He frequently used a quote he attributed to writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: “When we know how to relieve torment and do not, then we join the tormentors.”

  Because he knew statistics failed to convey the true horror of mass child deaths—and because those deaths were mostly ignored by the mainstream media—Grant deployed simple, blunt metaphors. The number of children dying each day, he said, “is the equivalent of having two hundred jumbo jets packed with children crash every day with half killed and half crippled for life.” Or he invoked an event that had been covered in the news: the number of Indian children dying each day from vaccine-preventable diseases was higher than the total death toll of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal. His analogies didn’t always fly. Speaking of the shift in global attitudes toward children, he onc
e described UNICEF as “the yeast of this historic change.” However apt the analogy, it’s hard to get inspired by yeast.

  As his movement grew, emergencies both “loud” and “silent” flared up in dozens of countries. UNICEF constantly struggled to respond. The agency’s regular programs—those not included in Grant’s revolution—also had to keep operating. Many staff members felt that Grant gave short shrift to a host of other issues: water and sanitation, child protection, women’s empowerment, the fight against HIV—anything not blinking brightly on his radar screen.

  UNICEF’s resources were growing markedly at the time, but the pie was still only so big; under Grant, child survival would always get the biggest slice. Without survival, of course, not much else matters. A blunt sentiment expressed by several staffers: You can’t educate a child if he’s dead. (Though education was an issue Grant had long valued and was, of course, tightly intertwined with survival. Before GOBI, he had, in fact, initially considered making primary education the focus of his “quantum leap.”)

  Ultimately, the child survival revolution and Grant’s single-mindedness were as strategic as they were moral. His first priority was to figure out how to help as many children as possible: What could be done to save the most young lives? The next step was finding a “doable” solution. Part of it was the science: vaccines and ORS were both cheap and effective and ready to be put to widespread use. But it was also about marketability—could he sell it to donors? If something was abstract, or required a long time to explain, its “doability” would diminish. GOBI lent itself to a quick elevator pitch. And what many of his critics failed to realize was that child survival was only phase one, or as Rohde put it, “a foot in the door.” If GOBI did succeed, Grant planned to use it as a launch pad for progress in other areas (water, education, primary health care, etc.). But first he needed that walloping, seismic success.

  This is not to say that he should come out completely unscathed for skirting difficult topics, such as the fight against HIV and AIDS. The burgeoning epidemic in the mid-to-late 1980s seemed messy and uncomfortable (Grant was squeamish on issues related to sex), and delving into it risked drawing the ire of the Catholic Church—plus, there was no magic bullet, no vaccine, no ORS packet. He would eventually give HIV more than token treatment, but many felt it was too little and too late.

  His attention was also divvied up among regions of the world, and one onto which he heaped copious amounts was Africa. Fouad Kronfol, then UNICEF’s Africa section chief, had encouraged Grant to place more emphasis on Africa, and several board members had asked him why UNICEF’s presence was so paltry in some African countries. Grant set out to remedy that, expanding and upgrading dozens of offices across the continent and launching a major fund-raising appeal for Africa in 1986. Noting that the “tidal wave of human suffering” that racked parts of Africa in 1984 and 1985 had receded, Grant reminded donors that progress was “deceptive” and that millions of lives were still at risk. Between 1980 and 1994, UNICEF’s spending in Africa more than quintupled, going from $54.5 million per year to $303.5 million.

  “Mr. Grant was one of the key UN leaders that made the UN relevant to Africa,” says Abdul Mohammed, a former UNICEF staffer and currently the chief of staff of the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan and South Sudan. “He was very committed to Africa. He felt the UN and agencies like UNICEF could make a difference. He also felt that some of the international humanitarian roles crafted in the aftermath of the Second World War must be adjusted to take Africa’s reality into account.”

  To help keep the world’s eyes on Africa, Grant teamed up with former Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof to launch Sport Aid, a follow-up to Geldof’s Live Aid concert. Though Ethel found Geldof’s manners horrid—during a visit to the Grant’s roof house for breakfast, he reportedly swore up a storm and put his feet on the furniture—Grant knew the scruffy rock star had a knack for generating publicity. They hoped Sport Aid would equal or beat Live Aid, which had raised more than $100 million. Though it drew some twenty million runners from around the world for a “Race Against Time,” it fell well short. According to UNICEF, the event brought in more than $30 million to be split between the children’s agency and Geldof’s charity. One reason for the fund-raising deficit: Sport Aid clashed with Hands-Across-America, an American fund-raiser which focused on helping the poor in the United States. Many US news outlets, it seemed, virtually ignored Sport Aid in favor of the American event. Responding to reports of aid fatigue surrounding both events, Grant wrote a letter to the New York Times, hailing the achievements of each and noting “the people of the world are not ‘aided’ out … They wait for their governments to catch up with them.”

  By now, Grant’s relationship with the UNICEF board and with UN bureaucrats was smoother. As his successes mounted, they questioned him less. But some sizable bumps in the road still cropped up, some arguably a result of the head-spinning, ends-justify-means sense of exigency he had unleashed.

  The UN’s Board of Auditors dinged him and UNICEF in an August 1986 report that noted numerous financial errors and irregularities. Among the findings: UNICEF had purchased two office buildings at a cost of $424,367, “although no appropriations had been provided in either the original or revised budget estimates”; payments had been made to UNICEF staff for relocation expenses “in the absence of an appropriate evidence of relocation”; and UNICEF had failed to submit revised budget estimates for the purchase of additional computers, instead transferring money from one budget line to another to cover the expense.

  Though he may not have been aware of these particulars, Grant had given some field operatives carte blanche to move money around—or spend funds before they had them in hand—in order to meet urgent needs that couldn’t wait for bureaucratic approval. These were generally not grave violations, but in the ossified bureaucracy of the UN, such activity hoisted red flags. Some field staff may have gone too far. But Grant did not want to know about any financial fallout. He preferred to skip UN committee meetings where budgetary matters were discussed, according to former comptroller, and later deputy executive director, Karin Sham Poo.

  A year earlier, a few months after starting at UNICEF herself, Sham Poo had discovered a serious cash flow problem—a result, in part, of Grant’s rapid acceleration of activities. He had been unaware of it, because, says Sham Poo, “nobody had the guts to tell him that UNICEF was spending more than they had.”

  Sham Poo had steeled herself, made an appointment to see him, and disclosed the bad news. “He did not look happy,” she says. She remembers that his face was still, stern, unmoving, but out of it gleamed his penetrating, metallic blue eyes. “His eyes were so blue,” she says. Those eyes could stop you, freeze you where you stood. Grant asked her what this all meant. She explained that UNICEF would have to rein in expenses, halt the paying of some bills, and lay off temporary staff. He relaxed, his face loosened. He got up, walked around, and sat down again. Then he said, “Do what you think is necessary. I’ll support it.”

  When the alarming report on the audit came out in 1986, Sham Poo was on a UNICEF visit to Mali. Her boss, Deputy Executive Director Karl Eric Knutsson, sent her an urgent Telex: Cancel your trip. Come back immediately. The Board of Auditors is not qualifying UNICEF’s audit.

  “Jim Grant was extremely upset,” she recalls, “because to get a nonqualified audit report could be a big hamper on fund-raising.” He did not yell or scream or curse, at least when Sham Poo spoke to him. He was simply stone-faced, much as he had been when she told him of the cash flow problem. This is when you knew he was upset.

  Sham Poo felt the findings were unfair—“a lot of garbage,” in her words. There were some errors and technicalities, but it wasn’t purposeful mismanagement. No one had pocketed any money. Though he did not want to, Grant attended a meeting at the UN and issued a statement. It was eventually resolved, but the stain it created lingered for years.

  Grant shook off distractions as he drov
e UNICEF more and more relentlessly. But one crisis became very hard for him to ignore. It was one of the darkest moments of his tenure and could have happened regardless of who sat in his chair.

  In March 1987, police in Belgium busted a huge international child pornography ring that included a volunteer on UNICEF’s Belgian national committee. The volunteer, Michel Felu, had allegedly been using the basement of the UNICEF Belgium office to sexually abuse children and produce and store more than a thousand child porn images.

  The revelation was sickening and shattering. The pedophile porn ring also included a former minister of the Belgian government, as well as parents who were charged with renting their children out to be abused. Felu and thirteen others were eventually convicted by a Belgian court, according to the Associated Press. The conviction of the former head of UNICEF Belgium, Jozef Verbeeck—who was accused of knowing about the activities and doing nothing to stop them—was later overturned on appeal. He was acquitted.

  When the news first hit, UNICEF was at the center of a maelstrom. “UNICEF has always stood for the love of children—an image now grotesquely defiled,” wrote Newsweek. In one respect, this statement was true, but it was also unfair. No one at UNICEF headquarters, including Jim Grant, apparently knew anything about this until the ring was discovered by police. They were as horrified as everybody else. The Belgian UNICEF committee—like the dozens of other national committees around the world—operated independently of UNICEF headquarters and had its own governing board. Felu was not a UNICEF employee. Still, he was a member of the UNICEF family.

  UNICEF issued a statement expressing its shock and reaffirming its commitment to protect children from acts of exploitation. The statement also alluded to what was perhaps Grant’s greatest fear: a potentially grave injury to UNICEF’s reputation and fund-raising ability. “The first to suffer from the discredit which would unjustly fall on this organization as a result of this affair would evidently be the children of the third world,” the statement warned in part.