Authors: Adam Fifield
They stayed in their rooms. Outside, it was eerily quiet. Reid got the impression that Grant was “beavering away” on something, so he didn’t bother him. The question that now hung ominously before them—the question that must have pried its way to the top of Jim’s teeming list of priorities—was this: With Sadiq al-Mahdi no longer in power, what happens to Operation Lifeline Sudan?
They would soon find out.
Rahman went to the diplomatic meeting; it was uneventful. The new leader, al-Bashir, did not make an appearance. Afterward, an official of the new government called Rahman. He had a message for Jim Grant—would Mr. Grant like to meet al-Bashir? Without consulting Grant, Rahman immediately said no. The head of UNICEF was “not very keen” on meeting with al-Bashir, he told the man. Then Rahman turned the question around: if the president would like to see Mr. Grant, Mr. Grant might consider that request.
Soon Rahman got another message: yes, President al-Bashir would like to meet Mr. Grant.
Rahman, Reid, Grant, and a few other staff members got ready to meet Sudan’s new president—the very first delegation to do so. Reid recalls being led out of his room by armed guards. They weren’t rough, but they weren’t friendly either. When they got to the street, he spotted Grant sitting in a military jeep. A flag jutted from the fender. Reid got in. He doesn’t remember
exactly what Grant said next, but he thinks it may have been a half joke: “This should be an interesting ride, Richard.”
A convoy, including several jeeps and UNICEF’s official vehicle—a Toyota Crown Royal Saloon—ferried the group through a hushed Khartoum. During the bumpy, ten-minute ride, Grant said little if anything. He seemed preoccupied, watching the buildings and streets trundle by.
The jeep stopped in front of a run-down, inconspicuous government building. The guards helped them out, led them up the steps, and opened the doors. They were ushered into a “small, dingy room,” recalls Rahman. Then they were led into another spare room. There was a table with papers strewn across it.
Behind the table stood a small, tense, sallow man in a rumpled military uniform that appeared to have been worn for several days. Stubble coated his face. Grant smiled broadly as he introduced his group. The man finally sat down, Reid recalls, and then they sat down. He greeted them in a friendly but official manner. Three other men stood nearby. “Shaggy-looking fellows,” says Rahman. “Highly unimpressive.”
This was Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, the country’s new leader. A decade and a half later, his name would be synonymous with the appallingly bloody violence and crimes against humanity in the Darfur region of Sudan; in 2008, he would become the first sitting head of state to receive an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court in The Hague. As they stood before him on that quiet night in June 1989, Reid feared al-Bashir was about to shut down Operation Lifeline.
Stern and speaking decent English, he told them that he knew what they were doing, he was aware of the relief campaign. He asked if it was worth all of the effort, and if it really did anything for the country, according to Reid.
Grant’s response was to make the same pitch he had made to rebel leader John Garang.
“Mr. President, how many children do you have?”
It is unclear how, or even whether, al-Bashir answered.
Grant provided one for him, saying something like: “You have millions of children! You have become the father of all the children in Sudan.”
Al-Bashir’s elbows were resting on the arms of his chair, recalls Reid, and he shifted his position after Grant’s proclamation. He looked uncomfortable.
“He was completely stupefied,” says Rahman. “Here is this general right from the bush who had a coup that very day and was probably totally bewildered.”
Grant asked al-Bashir for his commitment to Operation Lifeline Sudan.
Reid says now: “I think he was absorbing the meaning of it … He was used to barking things … he must have sensed that he was not in a barking circumstance with Mr. Grant.”
Sudan’s new president then told Grant that UNICEF was welcome to continue its work.
Operation Lifeline Sudan went on. By September, 110,000 tons of food had been delivered to the worst-hit areas, halting a gruesome famine many believed was inexorable. UNICEF later conducted a mortality survey in the south and found that the
death rate had not increased at all. “It was a success,” says Reid. If it hadn’t succeeded, he adds, “it would have been a population extinction.”
Less than a month after winning al-Bashir’s cooperation in Sudan, Jim Grant prepared to make another proposition. The circumstances and setting were a little bit different. He stood in his suit on a pool patio in front of giant sunflowers in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. As his sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren watched, he asked Ellan Young, Ethel’s longtime friend, to be his wife.
Ellan Grant Young missed her shot.
Jim Grant’s new wife had accompanied him on a field visit to Nepal, and they were flying in a UN plane past the immense, jagged, crumpled brow of Mount Everest. Ellan was a professional photographer, and she was furiously snapping pictures through the window as the great peak bobbed by on the left. As the mountain receded into the distance, she swiveled in her seat toward Jim.
“Jim, I missed a really nice shot,” she said. “Do you think we could go back?”
Asking a UN pilot on an official mission to turn a plane around so you could take a personal photograph was cheeky—even though Ellan probably intended no offense. If you were on the ground, rolling past an ancient ruin in a UNICEF Land Cruiser, stopping for a picture was not that big of a deal (except if it was dark; UNICEF drivers kept off the roads at night).
Ellan Grant Young apparently thought nothing of it.
Grant considered his wife’s awkward request.
“Hmm,” he said. “Let me see.”
According to Kul Gautam, who was then UNICEF’s director of planning and coordination and was part of the delegation, Grant got up and made his way toward the front of the small plane. He spoke with the pilot and asked if they could make another pass by Everest. His wife would like to take a picture, he said. Soon the plane began to turn around, and she finally got her shot.
He had known Ellan for nearly fifty years. She had gone to UC Berkeley with Jim and Ethel and had become Ethel’s lifelong friend. Her first marriage had ended in divorce; she was the mother of three grown children. She was personable and capricious and could be a lot of fun—a “free spirit” in Jim’s words. Her tousled hair was cropped short, and her youthful face would shine with a winsome, slightly mischievous grin.
Many UNICEF staffers were surprised at how quickly it had happened—she and Jim were married a little over a year after Ethel’s death. It was almost as though Grant were trying to fill a crucial staff position as quickly as possible, one that was too important to be vacant for long.
But Ellan was not interested in being the “first lady” of UNICEF.
Ethel’s dedication to Jim and UNICEF had been virtually unqualified and had meant countless early mornings, long nights, and routine personal sacrifice. She had entertained a litany of luminaries, diplomats, and staff and hosted 6:30 a.m. working breakfasts. She had packed Jim’s bags (or rather bag) as
he rushed to get to the airport. She had also immersed herself in the issues that engrossed her husband and could speak fluently on any of them. She was his liaison, sounding board, barometer, and center of gravity.
“She was his partner in all of this, without whom he might not have succeeded,” says UN veteran Mehr Khan Williams, who then served as UNICEF’s director of communications. “It was as much her project as it was his.”
In Ethel’s jarring absence, he became unmoored and disoriented.
Maybe that was why he so quickly set his sights on his wife’s good friend. Maybe he could infect her with his cause, sweep her up in his churning crusade.
Except that he couldn’t.
In fairness to Ellan, this was an outsized expectation. It’s a lot to ask someone to marry you
and
your job—especially when that job is a high-stakes, full-tilt race every single day. It was unlikely Jim Grant would ever find another partner like Ethel, who would so completely and selflessly embrace his mission. Such a relationship had also been obviously freighted by traditional gender stereotypes that were becoming less acceptable. And so he adapted.
His new wife helped him relax a bit more, and he would remark that she was “the most positive person I have ever met.” The newlyweds were very much alike in one respect: they were both perennially late. Add to that Ellan’s chronic disorganization, and the wrenching change of pace was even more profound. Jim found himself in the role Ethel had once played for
him: packing Ellan’s bags, keeping her on schedule, helping her get out the door.
Ellan liked to travel and she liked kids—she just didn’t like the official stuff. During one trip to Cambodia, when she accompanied Jim, she sneaked out of a meeting. She corralled her friend, UN photographer John Isaac, to go exploring with her. Enough of these “boring meetings,” she told him. “Let’s go.”
Isaac reluctantly joined her. “They freaked out, because she wasn’t there,” he recalls. “They didn’t know where she had gone. There was a search party. I said, ‘Ellan, you’re going to get me in trouble.’ She said, ‘Ah, come on.’ ”
“She was a riot,” adds Isaac.
This tectonic life shift came during what was probably the busiest, most fevered time in Jim Grant’s career, when everything he had worked for over the last nine years was nearing fruition, when the child survival revolution was reaching its crescendo, and when the plight of millions of dying, impoverished children was finally—for the first time ever—beginning to get the kind of decisive attention that could make a lasting difference for generations to come.
But that attention was fickle, fleeting—unless he could sustain it. He could not allow himself to be distracted. He had to make sure he was heard over a screeching din, as the 1989 news cycle spun at warp speed, spitting out one momentous story after the other: Iran’s Ayatollah Condemns Author Salman Rushdie to Death, Chinese Students Take Over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Oliver North Convicted in Iran Contra Scandal, George Herbert Walker Bush Inaugurated as President of the
United States, Ruptured
Exxon Valdez
Tanker Leaks Millions of Gallons of Oil into Prince William Sound, San Francisco Earthquake Kills More Than 60 People, Berlin Wall Comes Tumbling Down (Bringing the Cold War With It), US Invades Panama. Grant watched all of this, calculating how he could advance the cause of children at a time of constant tumult, how he could keep child survival at the top of political and social agendas when old orders were crumbling and new ones arising.
The World Summit for Children was the key. The summit could deliver a resounding rebuke to the centuries of apathy and indifference to the welfare of children. It could cement the movement for child survival in history, make the whole world pause and pay attention—a conspicuous milestone by which subsequent achievements and/or failures could be judged.
Though probably the most effective children’s advocate ever, Grant was not the first. In 1919—shortly after World War I and twenty-seven years before Ludwik Rajchman spurred the founding of UNICEF—a British woman named Eglantyne Jebb was arrested in London’s Trafalgar Square. She was protesting the Allied economic blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary, which persisted for eight months after the armistice, and carrying leaflets showing emaciated children and bearing the headline:
OUR BLOCKADE HAS CAUSED THIS—MILLIONS OF CHILDREN ARE STARVING TO DEATH
. A fierce defender of the concept that all children deserve protection—no matter where they live or who their parents are—Jebb frequently wielded a potent George Bernard Shaw quote: “I have no enemies under the age of seven.” She went on with her sister to found the Save
the Children Fund, one of the first international development and relief agencies.
Seventy years later, Grant was trying to make it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to reject or ignore Jebb’s—and now his—plea: save the children, save them all.
The notion of a global meeting focused on children had been thumping around in his head for a while. Peter Adamson thinks the idea may have jelled when he and Grant were flying back from a vacation with their families in Montserrat in late 1987. They were sitting on the left side of the plane, sunburned and refreshed from days of swimming and walking on the verdant Caribbean island. But Grant was itching to get back to work.
He had never really stopped working.
“Jim could not quite grasp the concept of a holiday,” says Adamson.
Over breakfast one morning, Grant had announced that, as long he was in Montserrat, he might as well meet with the head of state to see how many children were immunized. Adamson had been flummoxed.
This is a vacation
, he thought. Besides, Montserrat was tiny and “didn’t have any particularly great problems,” he says. This did not deter Grant, even when he learned that the head of state was away and that the only person available was the finance minister. Adamson accompanied him to the meeting, and Grant peppered the finance minister with question after question about child mortality and immunization. The minister sat there stiffly, repeatedly explaining that child health was not in his job purview—he simply did not have the answers. But Grant kept
volleying questions. “He clearly thought [Jim] was mad,” says Adamson, “and at that moment, I agreed with him.”
On the plane home, as they hurtled toward a connecting flight in Miami, Grant’s assiduous tempo only increased. How could UNICEF go even further, even faster? he asked. It wasn’t about the money or the technology—it was, Grant kept saying, about that ephemeral commodity that Jon Rohde had named six years ago: political will. It was about homing in on what was doable, and what was unconscionable not to do.
Then he floated the idea: “We could hold a summit for children …”