Authors: Adam Fifield
Grant believed that UNICEF’s annual income—$313 million in 1980—was too small to make a lasting difference worldwide. UNICEF could be and do far more. By cultivating the agency’s considerable but largely untapped political and social influence, he turned the children’s organization into a propulsive global advocate—unlike anything the UN or the international community had ever experienced. Leader by leader, country by country, donor by donor—Grant supplied a moral spark that jolted governments and communities and contributors to spend more and do more to take care of children and to combat poverty. UNICEF soon went from cruising speed into hyperspace. Not only was it providing aid, it was sweeping away hulking bureaucratic obstacles, beefing up government budgets, setting concrete targets for advancing children’s programs, and spurring an ethical shift in the developing and developed worlds.
For all his energy and obvious compassion, Grant was not an emotional or sentimental man—he did not tend to get
misty-eyed at the sight of suffering children. That was not what truly motivated him. The children were the end, but they were also the means—a Trojan horse, as he would say. He would use them to prove a point—to show that it was possible to bring the benefits of progress to all people.
Though still revered in many countries around the world, Grant is virtually unknown in his own country. This may be a reflection of the population he and UNICEF set out to help—mostly nonwhite children from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, from forgotten corners of the world that many Americans couldn’t find on a map. Boys and girls whose suffering and death hardly ever make the headlines, except maybe when they find themselves caught in a newsworthy crisis—or what Grant called a “loud emergency” (like the Ethiopian famine of 1984).
His triumphs did not come without a price. He drove UNICEF to its limits, and it cracked under the stress. He fostered a culture of risk-taking that turned red tape into ribbons and undoubtedly saved many lives, but also may have contributed to numerous lapses. A major financial scandal in the UNICEF Kenya office during his watch scarred the agency’s reputation. He ruthlessly batted aside many things not central to his mission of advancing children’s survival, and in so doing ignored unpleasant realities and dismissed some important issues. He punted difficult personnel decisions and refused to take action against staff members accused of serious wrongdoing. His management skills were both brilliant and reckless. As he strove more and more rapidly toward his unassailable goal, he
was willing to do almost anything to reach it. Throughout it all, he never looked back—he was simply moving too fast. So fast, in fact, that he made no plan for a post-Grant UNICEF—after all, he
was
UNICEF.
A US World War II veteran who was born and raised in China and who would become a premier international aid expert, he remains an enigma to many who knew him. Colleagues and friends alike marveled at his extraordinary energy (one staffer called him a “metabolic freak”), his childlike optimism, and his prodigious ability to persuade just about anybody to do just about anything.
“Mr. Grant, he could conquer you,” says former UNICEF Central America representative Agop Kayayan. “Convince you very easily, sometimes just by the eyes that would be shining.”
Known to some on his staff as “the mesmerizer,” Grant talked combatants into dropping their guns so kids could get vaccines and medicines; he cajoled taciturn presidents and prime ministers into setting aside big portions of their budgets for child health programs; he coaxed priests and imams into providing armies of volunteers to help immunize millions of children.
Lanky and thin-lipped with big, protuberant ears and often wearing a wrinkle-free Brooks Brothers suit, Grant had an old-fashioned, almost priestly bearing. Some were surprised to learn that he was nonreligious, because he radiated a messianic zeal—he was, after all, an apostle of sorts, a crusader for children. Part of his persuasive power stemmed from his undeniable moral urgency. You quickly learned that you could not
oppose him—doing so, one staff member suggested, was like wrestling with an angel.
Some former UNICEF staff members get choked up talking about Grant—he still exerts an ineffable pull on them. Others roll their eyes and groan in annoyance. Sure, he was inspiring, but boy, could he be a pain in the ass. Holding meetings on the weekends. Keeping people in the office until one in the morning. Repeating the same thing over and over and over again, in meeting after meeting, as though he suffered from short-term memory loss. Dispatching staff to remote corners of the globe sometimes with little more than a day’s notice. His unadulterated enthusiasm could chafe even his most loyal supporters. And his willingness to ignore major problems in order to maintain a locked-in focus on child survival was off-putting to many.
Some people feel his influence is overstated—don’t get wrapped up in the mysticism and magnetism of this one man, they warn. The story is more complicated than a single person’s blazing influence—and surely that’s true. There was a vast network of allies, some of whom risked and lost their lives to advance the child survival revolution. It was not just Jim Grant’s mission—it was the world’s. But without him, would any of it have happened?
“Jim cleared all the brush away,” says Richard Reid, former UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa and a close Grant adviser. “He went ahead despite tremendous drag from old-timers and naysayers, and he steadily collected allies and believers. He put people together in such catalytic perfection.”
The UN had never really seen anyone like Jim Grant before. His kinetic “can-do” style clashed with the bureaucratic, consensus-driven culture of the world body. “His name and the UN in the same sentence are still jolting to me,” says Grant’s former chief of communications John Williams. “He was so adventurous and so free—in many ways, the epitome of what the UN is not.”
He pushed political and diplomatic boundaries, and he also pushed the clock, wringing every encounter for every minute he could, wreaking havoc on every calendar he came across. He was perennially late to meetings, meals, and flights. He and his deputy executive director Richard Jolly even had a running competition to see who could leave last for the airport and still make the plane. Several staff members who accompanied Grant to the airport recall high-speed, white-knuckle rides during which Grant himself was perfectly calm, even relaxed. After a visit to the Philippines in the early 1980s, Grant and his chief of health, Dr. Steve Joseph, went on a “screaming ride through the traffic of Manila,” as a driver raced them to the airport at the very last minute. “I’ve had a number of hair-raising experiences,” says Joseph, “but this was the most hair-raising experience of my life. Jim, of course, was quite cool. He knew we were going to make that airplane … But it was insane. I was sure we were going to be killed.” Even more shocking than the ride itself, adds Joseph, was Grant’s “inability to accept the rest of the physical world around him.”
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?