A Mighty Purpose Read online

  In September 1994, then noticeably wasted and withered by cancer, Grant asked for a private meeting with Pakistan’s prime minister Benazir Bhutto. He had been invited to a high-level education conference at Bhutto’s residence with other UN agency leaders and major donors, and she had agreed to see him ten minutes before the meeting started. The glamorous forty-one-year-old heir to a political dynasty and the first woman elected to lead a Muslim nation, Bhutto had already acceded to many of Grant’s wishes on child survival. But there were a few outstanding issues, according to former UNICEF Pakistan representative Jim Mayrides. Grant may have wanted Pakistan to improve on immunization gains it had already achieved and may have asked that it iodize its salt (iodine deficiency disorders were then the leading global cause of preventable mental impairment in children). In Bhutto’s home office, Grant sat on one end of a long sofa and she sat on the other. Mayrides sat in a side chair. An armed guard hovered nearby.

  Grant began his pitch, and as he spoke, started sliding across the couch closer to Bhutto. Like a magician, he began pulling items out of his pocket—a polio dropper, a packet of oral rehydration salts, an iodized salt testing dropper—and waving them at her. She smiled politely and nodded. Ten minutes became twenty, then thirty, then forty-five. Through her interior windows, Bhutto could see the shadows of her other guests, milling around in the hall. At this point, Grant had scooted a full two yards down the couch, like a prom date moving in for the kiss. He was now sitting right next to Bhutto. The armed guard was looking anxious. Sitting nearby, Mayrides nervously thought, Jim, don’t get too close. Out of Grant’s sunken, gaunt, wizened face, his eyes sparkled and pleaded. Bhutto said she would consider his requests. Then she tried to end the meeting.

  “I think it’s time now,” she said firmly. “You said ten minutes, and it’s been more than double that. It’s been charming.” She then reached for an intercom button to tell the other guests to come in. But before her finger touched the button, Grant reached out and grabbed her hand.

  “Madame Prime Minister,” Grant said. “I have one more thing.”

  He told her that her presence at a major, yet controversial, population meeting in Cairo in a few days would be critical to the meeting’s success; Grant believed that slowing population growth would advance child survival (and vice versa). Bhutto had already indicated she might not attend. Another UN official had asked Grant to try to convince her, says Mayrides. “You would make a stunning presentation,” Grant told her, smiling brightly.

  Bhutto laughed. “Everybody says if I go to the conference, they’re going to kill me, they’ll assassinate me,” she said. This was not an idle concern; Bhutto had received death threats and would be assassinated thirteen years later. She told Grant, “I will consider what you say, my dear James.”

  A few days later, Prime Minister Bhutto attended the meeting with Grant.

  Many of his former staff wondered aloud what kind of a businessman Grant would have been, had he chosen a career in the private sector. He was a masterful salesman. In his office at UNICEF headquarters, he kept a carefully filed collection of more than two hundred packets of oral rehydration salts, the “miracle” mixture of salts and sugars that he had dissolved in water and given out at the Somali refugee camp. Each packet had been manufactured in a different part of the world. The salts were central to Grant’s crusade, and he carried packets with him everywhere; when visiting a village, he would often stop mothers and health workers on the street so he could show them how to use the solution. The packets were also a key marketing tool.

  When an Italian official visited Grant in his office, recalls Sir Richard Jolly, Grant produced a packet of oral rehydration salts. “Do you realize that for ten cents, one can save a child’s life if we have enough oral rehydration salts?” Grant said. He selected one of the packets from his collection, held it up, and said, “This is the packet.” He then tossed it on his meeting table, but made sure that it landed upside down, so that its manufacturing location label was visible. Grant had chosen this particular packet because it had been made in Italy. The Italian aid minister picked up the packet, looked at it, and chuckled. “Do you realize, Mr. Grant, this packet is actually manufactured in a town ten miles from where I live?” At this point, says Jolly, Grant suddenly wore a look of surprise—as if to exclaim, You don’t say?

  If official channels were not available or accommodating, he would use unofficial ones. He had been doing these so-called end runs throughout his lifelong career in international development. In the mid-1960s, as the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Turkey, Grant nurtured the Green Revolution, helping provide farmers with high-yield wheat seeds developed by American agronomist Norman Borlaug—seeds that would eventually help to avert starvation for up to one billion people worldwide. But the Turkish agricultural research establishment didn’t want the high-yield seeds brought in, because they feared they might make their own work irrelevant, according to environmental analyst Lester Brown, who then worked for the US Department of Agriculture. So Grant collaborated with a group, including Brown, to secretly smuggle the seeds into the country. “We did get the high-yielding wheat [seeds] in,” says Brown. The Turkish Green Revolution went on, and wheat production went up.

  A decade earlier, at the age of thirty-five, Grant had led the American aid mission in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) when floods paralyzed the country, stranding scores of people without food, water, or medicine. In the wee hours, he secured the help of a US military helicopter squadron, stationed on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. But they would not deliver the aid without an invitation from the Sri Lankan government. Instead of waiting for the sun to rise and following proper protocol—according to a close friend to whom Grant had relayed the story—Grant went to the prime minister’s home in the middle of the night. He threw stones at his window. He roused his wife first, and she woke the prime minister, who gave Grant the emergency approval he needed. The helicopters apparently arrived shortly thereafter.

  An obsessive quality fed his determination. During his rare vacations, he loved to snorkel. His senior communications adviser, Peter Adamson, remembers snorkeling with Grant in the waters off Montserrat when Grant noticed an old fishing trap on the sea floor. Several fish were stuck inside, and Grant decided he would free them. The trap was about twenty feet deep—“deeper than I could go,” Adamson said. Grant dove down but could not release the fish. Eventually, after several attempts that left him gasping for air, he was able to let them out. “He could not stand the thought of these beautiful fish caught in this trap,” says Adamson.

  Despite his optimism and his cheerful exhortations and luminous smiles, “there was something lonesome about Jim,” says Joseph. “There were times you would sense he had this crushing weight on him.” Whatever success he had, it would never be enough. The more he pushed, the more children would live. With that knowledge, how could he rest?

  Chapter 1

  THE AMERICAN IS CRAZY

  The American made them uneasy.

  In a venerated international organization with a gravely important purpose, his enthusiasm was a little too incandescent, his banter a little too bold, his back slaps a little too brisk. Didn’t he have any idea where he was? What this was all about? That this was not some think tank or law firm? That the decisions made here could mean the difference between life and death for millions of children? It was not a place for recklessness or bravado—mistakes and missteps could simply not be afforded. Was he naive? Clueless? Out of his depth? Or just bullheaded?

  James Pineo Grant took over as the executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund on January 1, 1980, its third leader since the organization’s founding in 1946. He was not a total stranger to UNICEF—he had represented the United States on the organization’s board for two years, and his kinetic ambition was well known. He had, in fact, had his eye on the job and had lobbied hard for it. Nonetheless, his appointment arched many an eyebro
w among UNICEF staff and others at the UN. Jim Grant? Really? That American think tank guy?

  The man he was replacing, a respected diplomat and statesman named Henry Labouisse Jr., was also an American. (UNICEF has never had a non-American at the helm—tacit recognition of the fact that the US government has long been a major financial contributor.) But Labouisse was a cultured, genteel Southerner from New Orleans. He spoke French. He kept a neatly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit. He was understated in almost every respect and was essentially considered an honorary European. The word most often used by former UNICEF staff to describe him is “patrician.” He was married to Eve Curie, the daughter of Nobel Prize–winning French scientists Marie and Pierre Curie. Labouisse himself had accepted the Nobel Prize on UNICEF’s behalf in 1965.

  In contrast, Jim Grant was a “cowboy”—a blunt, buoyant, sometimes uncouth, very “American” American. He was a World War II veteran who employed frequent military analogies, drank black coffee out of Styrofoam cups, whistled while strolling into his office, jogged in place to psych himself up for meetings, used words like “yesable” and “doable” and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches his wife had packed for him.

  Ostensibly lacking any pretense, he at first seemed devoid of another quality: finesse. Some Europeans on the board and staff “felt he was not right for the position,” recalls Mary Racelis, UNICEF’s former regional director for eastern and southern Africa. “There was a feeling that he is too much of a maverick … that he doesn’t know how to operate as a UN diplomat in these rarefied circles.” It didn’t help that Grant told some people that President Jimmy Carter had “appointed” him to the job. Carter had nominated him, but it was UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim who had officially appointed him (though everyone knew that the American president’s choice would likely not be disregarded, which made Grant’s phrasing all the more impolitic). He often invoked Carter’s instruction to him that his job was not only to make UNICEF run well, but to improve the image of the UN as a whole within the United States. “He kept making references to the mandate he had from the president of the United States, over and over and over again,” says Margaret Catley-Carlson, who represented Canada on the UNICEF board and who was later recruited by Grant to work for UNICEF. “There are several of us who said, ‘Jim, you’re working for an international organization.’ ”

  Many staff members bristled at his frequent references to Carter and his old employer, USAID, where he had led several foreign missions. R. Padmini, an Indian woman who served as UNICEF’s Ethiopia representative, recalls some reactions by staff: “ ‘Does he think he’s an agent of the US Government?’ … ‘He thinks he’s still in USAID!’ … ‘This is the United Nations, not the United States!’ ” (In a testament to the smallness of the international development world, Henry Labouisse had previously run the International Cooperation Administration, the predecessor to USAID, in 1961, and had been Grant’s boss.)

  One rumor that would eventually leak into the corridors: Grant worked for the CIA. While this carried the sharp whiff of delusional paranoia, he had, decades earlier, briefly worked for an American college student group that would later be exposed as a notorious CIA front organization. According to his résumé, from August to October 1950—after enrolling in Harvard Law School—Grant conducted surveys of student movements in Southeast Asia for the National Student Association “for the purpose of initiating program[s] to offset increasing Communist domination of SEA student movements.” Grant may well not have been aware of any possible links with the CIA at the time, though “offsetting Communist domination” does not sound like a typical extracurricular activity.

  Despite the taint of his Americanness, everyone at UNICEF would soon learn that Grant was far more sophisticated and worldly than he first seemed. His idealism was matched by his shrewdness, and in some ways he knew the peaks and pitfalls of international aid better than anyone else in the building. Still, the label of “American Dilettante” clung to him like old gum to a shoe.

  His deeply lined face—a filigree of grooves earned from a life packed with intense and harrowing experiences—suggested an age beyond his fifty-seven years. So did his occasional tendency to stoop slightly, as though ducking under a low doorframe.

  But what struck people more than anything else was that he was in a hurry. The jaunty lawyer moved fast and never let up on the gas. Except, that is, when he locked his gaze on you—his luminous blue eyes fixing you like tractor beams. In that moment, something in those eyes told you that the rest of the world did not matter. It was just you and him. “He really did burn with this fierce light,” Catley-Carlson says. To fire up staff, he would sometimes cheerfully exult, “Onwards and upwards!” Or he would wish someone well by hollering, “Godspeed!” (though he was not religious). People would learn that it was only when you challenged him or shunted away from something he wanted to discuss that those iridescent eyes could dim or go glassy.

  He insisted everyone call him “Jim,” and, in a place of rigid hierarchy, gave little, if any, regard to rank or station. He stopped to talk to everyone, from secretaries to doormen to janitors to drivers to mail room employees. Unlike many other high-ranking UN officials, he did not seem to care about pomp or protocol. On visits to countries where UNICEF worked, he eschewed government limos; he’d rather ride in a van packed with his staff members. He traveled with only one small bag, a carry-on, and washed his own clothes in the hotel bathroom sink. He scribbled copious notes on tiny steno pads, napkins, envelopes, Post-its, and scraps of paper, and his swollen wallet, by one estimate, was more than three inches thick. He collected Chinese cookie fortunes (affixing them to his notebooks with Scotch tape) and had a fondness for historical quotes and inspirational aphorisms. One of his favorites: “The greatest pleasure in life is doing what other people say you cannot do.”

  Personal space, it seemed, was not a concept he understood or appreciated. Like a gregarious grandpa at a family gathering, he gripped wrists, pecked cheeks, wrapped his arms around shoulders. He behaved this way with everyone, from staff members to heads of state. His rapturous energy became a topic of water cooler speculation: Where did it come from? How can it not run out? And what is he going to do with it?

  In his first communiqué to staff, Grant wrote of the need to accelerate UNICEF’s work, equating the preventable deaths of as many as fourteen million children each year to “more than 100 Hiroshimas annually.” He exhorted, “if more of us care” and “if more of us start acting now,” the deadliest aspects of poverty could be defeated. You can excuse UNICEF staff for rolling their eyes a little after reading this. They were certainly aware of the dire odds facing impoverished children, and there was no doubt that they cared. Even so, could they do more and do it faster? Grant was priming them for something big.

  If he annoyed or irked or simply confused staff members, Grant also disarmed them. Part of it was his anomalous even temper—many people said he was simply incapable of becoming upset, even in maddening circumstances. On one of his first field visits, to Pakistan, his humorous reaction to a freakish incident stunned the man who considered himself responsible.

  Steve Woodhouse, a chipper Briton who was then a program officer in UNICEF’s Pakistan office, took Grant to slums in Karachi to see some “soak pits”—big, sandy holes excavated to collect sewage from nearby homes. In a place where plumbing was nonexistent and drinking water could become contaminated with open sewage (“It was like Boston around 1650,” says Woodhouse), the pits were critical to halting the spread of deadly waterborne diseases. Grant walked up to inspect one of the fifteen-foot-deep holes, and Woodhouse began to describe the program. Then, suddenly the edge of the pit gave way, crumbling down. It was the exact spot where Jim Grant stood. He tumbled in and fell, by Woodhouse’s estimation, at least ten feet. “If he’d fallen any more, he would have been buried in the sand,” he says.

  Fortunately, the pit was not yet in use. Woodhouse and others quickly leaned over
the side and reached down to pull him out. Coated with sand, Grant grabbed their hands and clambered back to the surface. Relieved his boss was alive and apparently uninjured, Woodhouse braced himself for a lashing. But he did not get one. Grant dusted himself off and remarked, “That was an interesting experience.” Then he quipped, “Did you plan that, Steve?”

  Reflecting later, Woodhouse still marvels at the reaction. “Any normal person would have been shaken up and angry,” he says. “But he wasn’t. He took it as a joke.”

  What also surprised Woodhouse during that same trip was Grant’s rapport with children. In the slums of Karachi, Grant stooped down to pick up children and tried to get a laugh or giggle out of them. Most were malnourished and wearing tattered clothes or rags. “A lot of kids picked up by strangers would cry,” says Woodhouse. “But I didn’t see that happen with Jim. He felt very much at home with the kids, and the kids understood that, so they didn’t cry … He was absolutely brilliant with children.”

  Former American UNICEF staffer Carl Tinstman witnessed Grant’s soft spot for kids on numerous field visits in Africa. “Suddenly, you’re looking around for the executive director, and there he is, surrounded by forty or fifty children.” The father of three would wade into throngs of children and squat down to reach their level. If a child carried a notebook or a schoolbook—often his or her most prized possession—Grant would ask to see it. Then he would crack it open and inquire about the contents. “He had this sparkle in his eye,” says Tinstman. And the kids could see it. They crowded around him as if he was Santa Claus.