Authors: Adam Fifield
This case gave him, as the head of UNICEF, a special opportunity to shine a sorely lacking light on an extremely pervasive and shadowy problem that existed in every country. He could have taken the occasion to issue a clarion call to stamp out the
detestable sexual exploitation of helpless boys and girls. There was some pressure from within UNICEF for him to do just that—put out a press release, confront the issue head-on, and do right by the children in Belgium and elsewhere who were appallingly exploited by malicious adults.
But he didn’t. He kept quiet.
UNICEF supported many programs geared toward protecting children from abuse and neglect, but they were not a top priority for Jim Grant, not yet anyway. Not even a scandal of this revolting magnitude could change that.
It may well have tortured him, but he would not let it slow him down. He would stay fixedly, relentlessly, ruthlessly on message.
It began in the water. As the day sloughed off its heat and the fervent sun melted into a soft, gauzy haze, Ethel Grant went for a swim. Gliding across the hotel’s wide outdoor pool, she felt something in her chest—a twinge, a sudden stab of pressure. She swam to the side, pulled herself out, and sat there on the edge of the pool, keeping still, breathing. Her eldest son, John, saw her and came over to ask if she was all right.
Ethel waved it off, because that’s the kind of person she was. She kept her hair short, wore simple clothes, and assiduously deflected attention. And like her husband, she could be stubbornly sanguine—not one to let physical discomfort get in her way. Thin and fit, she jogged regularly, played tennis, pedaled an exercise bike, and eschewed anything with butter in it. At sixty-three she did not tire easily and was always up for the next activity. Even so, it must have flickered in her mind then, as her feet dangled in the water, that heart problems had plagued her family. Her father had died of heart failure, and her sister struggled with a heart condition.
But tonight, they had plans. They were going to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight. Everyone in the group—Ethel and Jim, their son John, her sister Catherine and brother-in-law Ted, and Jon Rohde and his wife, Candy—had agreed to meet in the lobby at six o’clock sharp. Ethel lifted her feet out of the water, stood up, and went back to the room to change. That pang in her chest could wait.
It was April 1, 1988, Good Friday. After an official state visit to New Delhi, India, Jim had taken a few days off to meet family in Agra. Ethel was with him; before India, they were in Bhutan for UNICEF business—reportedly one of the most enjoyable trips they had taken together. Jim came to India often—without India, of course, he knew he could not reach the global goal of universal childhood immunization. Since his life-changing visit to Calcutta in 1944, the vast country had exerted a strong and perennial pull on him. In the early 1950s, when he had served as a legal adviser to the US aid mission, the Grants had lived in New Delhi, and their youngest son, Bill, had been born in India’s capital city. Their grandson would be born there, too; their eldest son, John, now worked for USAID in India, and his wife was several months pregnant. An Indian government official would later marvel at what he called Jim Grant’s “bond of cosmic human activity” with the nation. Today, that bond would be tested.
The last year or so had ushered in more milestones, as the child survival revolution—officially known as the child survival
and
development revolution—hopscotched from one
country to another. In October 1987, to accommodate the organization’s rapid growth, UNICEF moved its headquarters into a more spacious building on Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan, called UNICEF House. Grant collected more allies, and immunization rates continued to climb. Screen legend Audrey Hepburn infused new dynamism when she was appointed as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in March 1988.
Grant had initially been opposed to appointing Hepburn. The idea was first broached by Victor Soler-Sala, a cultured, carefully spoken Spaniard who had worked for UNICEF since 1957 and was then in charge of celebrity relations. The UNICEF chief quickly shot down the suggestion, quipping, “Isn’t she a has-been?” When Soler-Sala left Grant’s office, Grant told Cahill, “You’ve got to screen a little better and save me from these crazy ideas.”
Cahill and Soler-Sala conspired to change his mind, and eventually they succeeded. Audrey Hepburn would become UNICEF’s most famous and effective celebrity ambassador, generating a level of attention and interest in the fight for child survival that, in some ways, surpassed even what Grant could muster. She had a special affinity for UNICEF; as a teenager in Holland at the end of World War II, she had been one of the millions to receive aid from UNICEF’s predecessor and Grant’s former employer, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. After meeting Hepburn, Grant quickly realized his mistake and—like many men at UNICEF—developed a crush on the thoroughly unpretentious and magnetic Hollywood darling.
“She just adored Jim,” says John Isaac, a UN photographer who became Hepburn’s friend. “She told me how much she admired him.”
With a note to Grant in November 1989, Hepburn included a photo of herself surrounded by giggling children in Bangladesh. “Dearest Jim,” she wrote. “Just to say THANK YOU for your warm, so encouraging cable, and thank you for sending me to Bangladesh … I wanted dearly to go … Now I know why. See you in New York on the 20th of November.” It was signed “Love Audrey,” with a little heart drawn above her name.
He had wrestled with other decisions in the past year (though the Hepburn one should have been a no-brainer) and had further bolstered UNICEF’s stature as an advocate and thought leader. After much internal debate and last-minute tinkering, he helped conceive and launch the controversial Bamako Initiative—an attempt to revitalize health care in African countries and to make it more locally driven by providing quality medicines at a low cost and by requiring patients to pay fees for those medicines and other services (the fees were intended to promote sustainability but drew heavy criticism; some people simply could not afford them). In 1987 he released two provocative reports, the first of which accused the apartheid government of South Africa of causing mass child deaths by fomenting civil conflict and economic destabilization in nine neighboring countries, including the former Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique. The second report, written by Richard Jolly and others, called for measures to protect children from the deleterious and even fatal consequences of
so-called structural adjustment policies—economic belt-tightening measures foisted upon developing debtor countries by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Both reports—and their concussive conclusions—garnered considerable media coverage and helped stir an outcry over injustices visited upon children because of the cruel and cold-hearted actions of adults. This was a testament to the aura of audacity fostered by Grant—people wanted to see what UNICEF was going to say, what position it was going to take. When UNICEF held a press conference, many reporters saw it as a must-attend event—what was Jim Grant up to now? (No UNICEF executive director, before or since, has drawn even a smidgen of the attention amassed by Grant.) Grant was, in fact, becoming the undisputed star of the entire UN system and sometimes even received a bigger reception than the secretary general himself.
Grant was a little worried about the political fallout from the anti-apartheid report, which was called “Children on the Frontlines.” UNICEF Mozambique representative Marta Mauras, who had accompanied Grant to meet Mozambican president Samora Machel, had first proposed the concept at a meeting of UNICEF’s Africa representatives. “I said, ‘We have to do some kind of a study that will prove apartheid is killing more children than we imagined, not just in South Africa, but also in southern Africa,’ ” Mauras recalls.
Richard Jolly immediately took up the idea. He recruited his friend, American economist Reginald Green, to write the report and then persuaded Grant to back it. When it was ready, UNICEF called a press conference in London. Mauras met
Grant at Heathrow Airport, and they got into a taxi. As the car sped into the city, Grant read the final draft. He looked up and bluntly asked Mauras: “Are you completely sure about what we’re doing here, Marta?”
“Yes,” she replied. “We have to go ahead with it.”
His reservations were not unfounded. The political ramifications were huge, says Mauras. But so was the potential reward. South Africa’s barbaric system of racial segregation and discrimination was already under siege, and this report could help deliver a jarring blow.
At the press conference, Grant didn’t hold back. He told the reporters that, as a result of conflict and other factors, Angola and Mozambique now had the highest child mortality rates in the world. A Mozambican or Angolan child, in fact, died every four minutes, Grant said, according to an account by United Press International. “The situation is sufficiently dark in these countries,” he went on, “that if it continues, of the one million children born in these two countries in 1986, by 1990, their fifth birthday, one out of every two will either be dead or crippled for life.”
The report set off tremors throughout the international community and may have contributed to the fall of the apartheid regime, according to Mauras.
“The South Africans felt the sting,” she says.
The India trip was a chance for some precious downtime. It also gave Grant a chance to catch up with Jon Rohde, with whom he usually stayed when he visited New Delhi. Rohde worked for
a global health nonprofit. But ever since the beginning of the child survival revolution, he had also been Grant’s de facto consigliere, his closest and most trusted adviser on health matters. Rohde didn’t want a UNICEF staff job—he found UN bureaucracy and internal politics too off-putting. (He would officially come on board in 1993, when Grant finally convinced him to serve as the organization’s India representative.)
But even then, his loyalty was not to UNICEF. “I never worked for UNICEF,” he says. “I worked for Jim.”
Like other Grant acolytes, Rohde viewed the UNICEF chief as not only a mentor. Grant was a moral beacon, a visionary guru who inspired almost religious devotion. But the connection between Grant and Rohde was even stronger, almost familial.
In a letter to Grant several years later, Rohde proclaimed: “I always leave you, buoyed up and ready to take on the dragons of poverty! Indeed, the only reward I need for whatever little I do is to spend a few days with you every now and then.”
It was almost dark on that Friday night when Rohde and his wife stood in the hotel’s grand lobby, underneath the chandelier, waiting for Jim, Ethel, and the rest of the group. Then Rohde spotted Jim crossing the lobby, Ethel on his arm. Jim walked his wife over to Rohde. He looked uncharacteristically serious.
“Now,” Jim said, turning to Ethel, “tell your favorite doctor what you told me.” Worry tinged his normally buoyant voice.
Ethel looked at Rohde, probably somewhat self-consciously. “Well, I was swimming,” she said. “And I felt really refreshed. Then I had this pain in my chest, and I—”
And right then, midsentence, under the chandelier in the middle of the hotel lobby, she collapsed. Rohde caught her before she fell to the floor, and they laid her on a nearby bench.
“Shit,” Rohde muttered, and quickly bent down and listened to Ethel’s chest. He felt her pulse. He knew that she had just had a cardiac arrest.
John Grant rushed over. He and Jim crouched down. Jim looked at Rohde, his eyes wide and scared. Rohde told him: “This is one I’m going to win.”
Then he directed Jim’s son John to “breathe” his mother, while Rohde began pumping her chest, trying to jump-start her heart. John Grant quickly lowered his mouth to his mother’s and began forcing air into her lungs. Like her, he was thin, vigorous, and moved with purpose—especially now.
As Rohde’s arms pistoned up and down on Ethel’s ribcage, he turned to his wife, Candy. “Get on the phone,” he ordered. “Get me a defibrillator. And call an ambulance.”
His head then swiveled to Jim. “Jim, talk to Ethel. She’s probably still conscious. Talk to her.”
Jim Grant leaned toward his wife of forty-five years, his life partner and best friend and closest confidante—a woman who had given up her career to support him, who had, in many ways, allowed her life to be subsumed by his—and took her hand. He was in shock, but he spoke calmly. He said her name. He told her she would be okay.
It was unclear if Ethel could hear him. Her eyes stared up blankly, but her pupils were moving. Rohde kept pumping her
chest. A hotel manager hurried over, and Rohde told him he needed a defibrillator,
now
.
The manager, formally dressed in a coat and tie, nodded nervously and disappeared. He eventually came back, panic etching his face. He said he was sorry, the hotel—a major luxury resort—did not have a defibrillator. He had made phone calls but could find nothing.
The ambulance finally arrived. It was, in the words of Jon Rohde, a “shitty van.” They carried Ethel out of the lobby and carefully placed her on a stretcher in the back. There was not much in the way of equipment, medicine, or anything else. There were built-in benches along the walls, and everyone perched on them and held on.
Candy had made a flurry of calls and had found a cardiology practice that claimed to have a defibrillator. Rohde told the driver to take them there.
The driver lurched off, barreling away from the hotel. After a few minutes, the van slowed, then stopped, stymied by a vast, dense, unmoving sea of cars, motorbikes, bicycles, and rickshaws that lay sprawled ahead of them into the night. The driver turned on a siren, but it made no difference.
Jon Rohde was still pumping, and John Grant was still performing mouth-to-mouth. Jim Grant held his wife’s hand and watched helplessly from the bench where he sat. He told her that her favorite doctor was taking care of her.
“We’ve got everything under control,” Jim said to his wife. “We’re moving through the town, and everything’s fine.”