Authors: Adam Fifield
Earnest and polite, he did not blend in with his fraternity brothers. “I was different from most of the students who were much more rah-rah, beer drinking, women talking, and I was a different student.” After he became the fraternity’s business manager, someone suggested that he put Coca-Cola machines in the frat house and other buildings. He explored the idea and realized how profitable it could be. Each bottle of Coke cost five cents—Coca-Cola kept two cents and he would keep three. He bought and installed more than twelve machines, and they quickly paid for themselves. The proceeds covered a big portion of his tuition and expenses.
But the budding entrepreneur was also an activist. He became involved in the Fair Bear movement, which shamed local businesses into paying student workers a minimum wage and ensuring decent working conditions. The name of the campaign presumably alluded to California’s state flag, which features a bear; the official mascot of the University of California was also the Golden Bear. Those establishments who obliged could affix a “Fair Bear” placard to their storefronts; those who refused were hit with boycotts and protests. Grant’s involvement with Fair Bear earned him the nickname “Pinko.”
The affable underclassman made friends quickly and fell in with a small group of students who shared his progressive views.
Their meeting place was often the YMCA off campus. One member of the gang was a young man named Doug North, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Another was a vigorous, amiable woman, a few years older than Jim, named Catherine Henck. Catherine (who went by “Kaki”), Doug, and a few others decided that Jim would be a good match for Catherine’s younger sister, Ethel, and conspired to bring them together by inviting them to the same events.
One of them was a Delta Delta Delta sorority party in September 1941. Ethel Henck was from the mountain town of Skyforest, California. The youngest of four, she was always known as the little sister. She and Kaki were both thin and liked to ski (Kaki was apparently close to the Olympic level). Sociable and cute, Ethel had bright eyes and a beaming smile. She was a freshman, two years younger than Jim; he was a junior. The matchmaking efforts worked splendidly, and within a few months she was wearing Jim’s fraternity pin—a sign, Jim said, that “she’s spoken for, hands off to others.”
As Jim and Ethel’s courtship became serious, the darkness and horror engulfing Europe cast an advancing shadow (despite the relative paucity of news coverage in American newspapers). Three months before they met, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, expanding the war eastward. The widespread massacres of Jews by Nazi mobile death squads known as
Einsatzgruppen
were becoming more and more frequent. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; the next day, the United States declared war. As a member of the Army ROTC, Jim knew his own involvement was imminent.
Ethel was sweet, but Jim soon learned that she was also tough. A few months after they met, he went home with her for Christmas in Skyforest. She drove in her “little blue racer,” an MG, up into the snow-clad mountains. At one point, they encountered a police officer, who cautioned them not to go farther; the roads were too bad. “Oh, officer,” Ethel said, “we just live around the corner.” And she drove on. Then Jim spoke up. “Aren’t you worried about getting caught in the snow?” Ethel did not want to turn around. Her wordless reply was to gun the engine, stomp on the brakes and jerk the MG into a complete 360-degree spin in the snow. Then she kept driving up the mountain. Jim was completely, irreversibly taken with this pretty, scrappy mountain girl—within a few months they were engaged.
Ethel shared her beau’s penchant for activism and standing up for a cause. After the US government began rounding up Japanese Americans and incarcerating them in internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor, she reportedly protested against the brutal and racist policy. According to Warren Unna, a friend of Jim and Ethel’s from Berkeley, Ethel visited one of the camps to see the living conditions for herself.
On August 24, 1942, Jim became a naturalized American citizen, five years to the day after he arrived in the United States. A few months later, in December, he graduated from Berkeley. He stayed on campus for several months to take an intensive Chinese study program. To contribute to the war effort and make some extra money, he started working the swing shift as a welder at the Kaiser Shipyards in nearby Richmond. At the
time, the facility employed many “Rosie the Riveters,” women welders who were celebrated for filling the shoes of men who had gone to the battlefields of Europe and Asia. On Friday night, after his eight-hour shift, he would often walk out to the highway and extend his thumb. He would then hitchhike all the way to Skyforest, a ten-hour trip. He would sometimes spend the time sleeping in the seat or chatting with the truckers or families who had picked him up.
Jim and Ethel were married on December 30, 1943, in Chicago, where his mother was then living. It was, they would both later joke, an arranged marriage, thanks to the machinations of Ethel’s sister two years earlier.
Their wedding was made all the more meaningful by what immediately followed it. For the last two years, Jim had worn an army uniform around campus. This may have appeared incongruous for someone with left-leaning proclivities and a nickname suggesting Communist sympathies. But Grant’s activism was never fueled by antiestablishment fervor. On the contrary, he seemed proud of his ability and willingness, throughout his life, to “work with all groups.” Joining ROTC was the beginning of a career with the US government that would span nearly three decades, with a few interruptions (including a two-and-a-half-year stint with the Washington, DC, law firm Covington and Burling).
That spiffy uniform also projected an obvious special significance in the early 1940s. The Axis powers were bent on exterminating an entire people and on unleashing a scourge of death and slavery upon the whole world. Those who
wore an American army uniform were part of the essential (though long-delayed) effort to stop them. Grant did not talk in his oral history about his decision to serve in World War II, but his father’s qualm about not being able to participate in World War I must have nudged him. He would not have that same regret.
In August 1943, he had enrolled in the US Army’s Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Fort Benning, Georgia. The arduous, sixteen-week course included strategy and leadership training along with a punishing physical regimen: push-ups, hurdling walls, and crawling under barbed wire while live ammunition was fired above you, Grant claimed, so that “you really learned to keep your head down.” The “washout rate” was steep: up to 60 percent of those who signed up did not pass muster. Those who did became second lieutenants; those who did not became corporals, a much lower rank. The graduation date was just two days before his wedding, and the two events entwined in a knot of panic. “I had enough vanity to fear being washed out and that our marriage would also be, and that I would be a corporal … I was on pins and needles all the way through.”
But he did not wash out. He suspected that one particular skill put him over the top. It was not physical toughness or endurance or strategic acumen. It was his fluency in Chinese. An American army general named Boltner based in northern Burma specifically asked for Grant’s services upon his graduation. He knew John Grant and had learned that his son was in OCS at Fort Benning and that he could speak Chinese. Grant said, “It’s very clear I was helped” by General Boltner’s request.
After their wedding in December, Jim and Ethel practiced married life for a few scant weeks in January at a one-room apartment in Fort Benning.
In February 1944, at the age of twenty-one, he shipped out of Norfolk, Virginia, in a twenty-seven-vessel convoy. He was crammed in the bow of a freighter with five hundred other young men, whose stomachs whirled as the bulky ship plowed across the jagged waters, seesawing over hill-sized swells, crashing up and down. It took twenty-one days to cross the Atlantic. Then the ship plied the Mediterranean Sea, wended through the Suez Canal, and eventually docked in the port of Bombay, India. The harbor was scorched and virtually leveled, after several munitions ships had apparently been accidentally blown up. The soldiers boarded a freight train, which took them across the baking country through days and days of 110-degree heat. They arrived in Calcutta on May 12, 1944, Jim Grant’s twenty-second birthday. They would move on after a few days into Burma, to help repel Japanese forces.
But it was the brief stay in Calcutta that would haunt Jim Grant more than anything else he saw during World War II. In the waning days of the British Raj, an estimated three million people had died in the great Bengal famine—many of them starving on the streets of Calcutta. Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has written that the mass tragedy was not just due to a shortage of food or the disruption of food supplies by nearby fighting in Burma—it was about entitlement, or rather a lack thereof. Prices had soared, and many poor families simply could not afford to buy enough food to survive.
According to Madhusree Mukerjee’s book
Churchill’s Secret War
, Britain not only woefully failed to provide enough aid to those who were starving—it reduced its shipping of food to India and, as the famine set in, actually exported rice out of the country. Boatloads of Australian wheat, which drifted right past the famine-racked nation, were diverted to the Mediterranean region “not for consumption but for storage.” Mukerjee describes a British “denial policy” to thwart Japanese forces, whereby boats and rice stocks in the Bengal region were intentionally destroyed. Britain also refused American and Canadian offers of food for starving people in Bengal, all the while continually building up the United Kingdom’s own ample food stocks (some of which it apparently planned to use
after
the war). The effect of these policies, as detailed by Mukerjee, was calamitous.
Indian photojournalist Sunil Janah tried to chronicle the enormity of what was, in great part, a man-made disaster. His chilling pictures show a field littered with skeletons, a dog gnawing on what appears to be a child’s corpse, and a small, naked, emaciated boy lying alone in the fetal position on a rough, stone street.
When alerted to the potentially catastrophic toll of the famine, British prime minister Winston Churchill’s reported response was telling: if the shortage was so bad, Churchill asked, why hadn’t Mahatma Gandhi died yet? A notorious racist, Churchill reportedly blamed the Indians themselves, saying that they breed “like rabbits.” At one point he bluntly told the secretary of state for India: “I hate Indians … they are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
Jim Grant was stunned by what he saw. The bullish, rookie lieutenant was witnessing an atrocity that resulted, in part, from gross callousness—not of the Nazis or the Fascists, but of one of the Allies, one of the good guys. There were families staggering, suffering, dying in plain view on the streets, and no one was coming to their aid. He had heard that nearby warehouses groaned with lentils and rice and grain in big wicker baskets, yet their doors remained closed and under police guard. Decades later, he told a UNICEF colleague that he saw people going door to door, begging for the water left over from boiling rice, hoping it might carry some nutritional value. But Grant and his fellow GIs were instructed not to get involved, or as he put it, “to mind our Ps and Qs.”
A vast feeling of helplessness—and anger—billowed in him. The British government “barely lifted a finger to help” and exhibited “quite a strong indifference to what happened to people,” Grant later said. He drew a parallel with the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, when the British seized crops and exported them “while the peasants died.”
For fifty years, the memory of Calcutta smoldered, an ember that never went out.
Jim Mayrides was doodling.
At a large square table, ringed by about forty colleagues, he listened to Jim Grant speak. Then his pen started to shimmy. It drew a
G
with an upward-facing arrow, an
O
with eyes and a mouth, a
B
that looked like a pair of breasts with nipples, and finally, an
I
in the shape of a syringe.
Grant had summoned program staff to announce the new initiative called GOBI. He explained the elements that made up the acronym—growth monitoring, oral rehydration, breast-feeding, and immunization—but offered few other details, according to Mayrides.
After he was finished speaking, silence cocooned the table. For a few seconds no one seemed to know how to break it, what to say. Many did not appear to grasp what Grant was proposing. “He didn’t really explain the technical issues of what all these things were,” Mayrides recalls. “It was, ‘Here are your marching
orders. This is what I want everybody to get in line on.’ ” He adds, “Nobody really understood what the strategy was.”
At some point, Mayrides passed his first take on GOBI, the product of his doodling, around the table. A jocular, bearded American who worked as a desk officer for eastern and southern Africa, Mayrides had a mischievous streak. In meetings with an unspoken but closely observed seating protocol—based on who got to sit closer to the head of the table—he would often try to stir things up by taking someone else’s seat. He would then watch with delight as a coworker walked in a complete circle around the room to find somewhere else to sit.
This time, he thought his sketch would leaven the uncomfortable mood. It did elicit a few chuckles as it made its way around the table. But then it reached Grant. Glancing at the paper, the normally sanguine boss did not smile. Instead, he shook his head disapprovingly. The message Mayrides picked up was simple:
We don’t need that!
He says now: “It was not a very happy moment.”
A few questions and skeptical comments trickled out. How will GOBI affect our work with the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization? How will it affect our relations with other agencies? The underlying point was that UNICEF would be venturing into other agencies’ territory and stepping on lots of toes.