Authors: Adam Fifield
Grant made a straightforward appeal. He told Milošević that his influence in Bosnia and his backing would be critical to the week of tranquillity. He explained what he had in mind—the principle of “not firing first.”
“We want to help children get through the winter,” Grant said earnestly. “We need to get clothes and food to them.”
He made sure to clarify: “This is
all
children.”
Appealing to Milošević’s quietly fulminating ego, he lacquered on some flattery. He praised the Serbs for how they were
handling refugees from Bosnia. (“Most of the refugees were probably Serbian,” notes Court, “but that didn’t matter—the point was, they were refugees.”)
On behalf of the UN, he thanked the Serbs for taking care of refugees. Noting that the Serbs had integrated some refugees into towns and villages, rather than building big camps, he lauded their “excellent processing.” (Praising the Serb leaders must have put a knot in his gut; but Grant would say what he had to say.)
When Grant finished, Court recalls that Milošević may have nodded once—just once. He then said simply: “We will support this.”
Whether he could be trusted—whether his brusque assurance meant anything at all—was a big gamble.
Back at the hotel in Zagreb, Croatia, where they were all staying, Court went to Grant’s room around one in the morning. He needed to discuss travel plans—Grant was due in Geneva the next day. He knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Grant hollered. “I’m in the bathroom.”
Court made his way to the bathroom. Jim Grant was standing there in a T-shirt and boxers. He was washing his blue suit in a big, broad sink. Most people would probably have asked a guest to come back in a few minutes while they got dressed. But Jim Grant was not like most people.
He began to talk about his plans for the next day in Geneva. Grant had already secured support for the week of tranquillity
from all relevant leaders in the region, including the presidents of Croatia and Montenegro. Now he had two more people to convince: both of them high-level UN officials.
He asked Court to go with him to Geneva. He wanted all the help he could get.
“Well, how will I get back?” Court asked.
“We’ll figure that out.” Grant said.
At the Palais des Nations, the UN’s sprawling compound near Lake Geneva, Grant and Court strode the halls until they came to Sadako Ogata’s office. Ogata was the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. She was also a friend of Jim Grant’s. Without her, in fact, he may have never gotten his job. The soft-spoken Japanese diplomat and academic had chaired the UNICEF board when Grant’s nomination was up for consideration and helped break a political logjam that had stood in the way. They walked into Ogata’s office. Court recounts the series of events that followed.
“Sadako! How are you, my old friend?”
“Jim, so nice to see you!”
Grant sat down. “Sadako,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m trying to push for this week of tranquillity for the first of November, and I’m wondering if I can get your support.”
Ogata, wearing a green suit and pearl necklace, said she had already heard about it from her staff in Sarajevo. “It’s a good idea,” she said.
Grant must have known he already had her imprimatur in the bag. She didn’t take any convincing. Then he asked for a second favor.
“I’m going to see Cyrus now and present this to him … why don’t you come with me?”
Cyrus Vance was the secretary general’s special envoy to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The former US secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter, he had also served in the Kennedy administration at the same time Grant had.
“No,” Ogata said. “Jim, this is your idea. You go.”
“No, Sadako,” Grant quickly shot back. “I think it’s better if it’s
our
idea. Your people are doing such great work on the ground,” he continued. “It’s absolutely fabulous what your people are doing. You’re keeping the thing going completely for the UN. I think we should do this together.”
She demurred, but Grant wore her down. As Court recalls, he looked at her, his face at an angle—a slight, sidelong expression that conveyed a naked, heartfelt certainty and was somehow more potent than a straight-on stare.
“You must come, Sadako,” he said. “Let’s do this together.”
She gave in. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
They marched to Cyrus Vance’s office.
When they burst in, Vance was behind his desk, piles of paper all around him. His discerning eyes floated over the rim of his half-glasses, measuring the clutch of people in his doorway. His hair was white, and his ears stuck out as noticeably as Grant’s.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “What have you guys cooked up?”
Grant spoke first. “Sadako, why don’t you tell him?
“No, Jim,” she said quickly. “It’s your idea.”
“Sadako, you’re really behind this,” Grant lied. “You tell Cyrus. I’ll fill in later.”
Put completely on the spot, Ogata began to explain the concept of the week of tranquillity to Vance. Grant said nothing.
Vance leaned back and took off his glasses. “You know, you guys have got something cooked up here,” he said. “What can I do? I can only support you.”
Later, walking in the hallway, Court asked why Grant had let Ogata pitch Vance. “Why didn’t you do it?”
“You know,” Grant said. “We’re all good at trumpeting our own ideas, but it sounds so much better when other people do it for us.”
Ogata had helped provide a facade of consensus. If he had walked into Vance’s office alone, his idea would not have seemed as urgent or as good. How could Vance say no to both of them—especially when they both appeared so enthusiastic?
After days of meetings with politicians and murderers and diplomats, the week of tranquillity was a go.
One of the men Grant had been unable to meet—one of the worst killers of all—bumped into him in a corridor at the Palais des Nations. Radovan Karadžić, a burly, six-foot-four-inch behemoth with the girth of a walrus, greeted Grant with a wide smile.
But Grant was not smiling. In a photo of the encounter, Grant looks uncharacteristically stunned, stricken, as though he had found himself exchanging pleasantries with the mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer (Karadžić was way worse, judged by body count). The two men stood side by side, posing for the camera. Karadžić, in his vast, loose gray suit, was grinning over the swell
of his double chin. Grant’s face was clenched, as if saying,
Please, just take the damn picture already
.
Grant was usually careful not to disparage leaders he met, even those who were unquestionably brutal and corrupt. But he made an exception for Karadžić. He told Mary Cahill that he refused to shake the man’s hand (though, in one photo, Karadžić appears to be gripping Grant’s hand; it’s unclear if Grant is willingly reciprocating, but it’s also hard to imagine the UNICEF chief would risk alienating someone who could torpedo his “week of tranquillity”). Cahill also heard her boss openly express his disgust for Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, calling him a “bastard.” “We have to work with these bastards,” he said of Karadžić and other Serbian leaders, his voice taut with contempt. “We have to go above them, around them, or beneath them—but we have to work with them.”
The day before the week of tranquillity was set to begin, Serbian bombardment killed as many as twenty-nine people in Sarajevo and wounded as many as 119. Not a promising start. Bosnia would indeed be more daunting than El Salvador or Sudan.
Would the violence really cease within the next twenty-four hours? Could the Serbs be trusted to keep their word?
Not on the first day, no. As the deadline on Sunday, November 1, came and went, the sound of gunshots and shells delivered a mocking rebuke. The fighting flared unabated. Not only that—the convoy Grant was leading from Belgrade to Sarajevo
got lost. “They managed to get drivers who didn’t know the way to Sarajevo,” Court recalls. “They kept driving west. They would have driven straight into Croatia” if others hadn’t intervened and altered their course.
This was more of a PR debacle than a humanitarian headache. The convoy was largely symbolic—“the show part of it,” says Court. Most of the relief—clothes, blankets, vaccines, and medicines—was distributed separately. Once he arrived in Sarajevo, Grant opened a children’s art exhibit at a cultural center; during the event, gunshots rang out next door.
Grant was annoyed and disappointed. He complained to Court: “I thought we were going to stop this.”
“Patience, Jim,” Court said. “We will.”
And later that day, says Court, they did stop the shooting.
Another snafu snarled part of the delivery in Sarajevo: a minister from the Muslim-led government initially rejected the winter clothing because it was manufactured in Serbia. He said it was insensitive and insulting to hand out Serbian goods to Muslim children. In the end, the goods were accepted.
As for the next six days, Grant would later describe the period as “a week of relative tranquillity,” during which the death rate “dropped very sharply.” According to press accounts, the week was anything but tranquil. On Wednesday, November 4, United Press International reported that Serbian artillery struck a cable-bearing pylon in Sarajevo, causing a complete blackout across the city. On Friday, November 6, the newswire described “sporadic small-arms and anti-aircraft fire around the
city.” Still, the violence was likely far less severe than it would have been without the ceasefire.
Despite the setbacks, UNICEF was able to provide as many as 200,000 children with blankets, clothes, medicines, and vaccines during the first week of November 1992. The distribution efforts continued throughout the rest of the month, according to an internal UNICEF assessment, during which the number of beneficiaries nearly doubled. UNICEF also arranged for the evacuation of several severely injured children and their families from Sarajevo, flying them to France for treatment.
The fighting would grow ever more ferocious. The week of tranquillity was, at best, a mixed and fleeting success—an evanescent trace of light in a deepening chasm of darkness.
UNICEF and the UN’s refugee agency would go on delivering relief, under harrowing circumstances, and Grant would keep trying to coax and shame leaders into protecting children. After a mortar attack killed six children in Sarajevo in January 1994, according to the Associated Press, he would lament: “There is nothing to be gained militarily by the killing of babies.”
But no one seemed to be listening.
He was yellow. His skin was yellow. The whites of his eyes were yellow.
Jim Grant first noticed the jaundice when he and Ellan went on a ski trip to Colorado. It was early 1993, not too long after his annual, UN-mandated physical exam. UN medical staff had run a series of blood tests but had apparently given him no reason to worry. So what was this? Did they miss something? Why was he yellow?
As he would eventually discover, one of his test results had been highly unusual. Grant’s alkaline phosphatase levels were “out-of-this-world abnormal,” according to Jon Rohde, who learned about the results later. This can be a sign of liver disease—“a huge red flag,” he says. But for some reason, this information was evidently not brought to anyone’s immediate attention. Perhaps it was considered an aberration or a mistake.
So Jim kept working. Then he and Ellan went skiing. All the while, he lost precious time. Six weeks, maybe eight. Had he known sooner, “he could be alive today,” Rohde says.
After the ski trip, he got more tests—and an answer.
He returned from a doctor’s appointment one day and asked Mary Cahill to step inside his office. There were three doors to his office: one for the public, one that led to Mary’s office, and one to his speechwriter Mike Shower’s office. He closed all three.
“I’ve got bad news,” he said. “I’ve been diagnosed with cancer.”
Then he added: “It’s not a good one.”
He told Mary he had liver cancer.
Shocked and distraught, Mary did not know how to respond. She couldn’t even remember Grant ever taking a sick day. In the eyes of many, he was unstoppable. Invincible. How could
he
have cancer?
Grant tried to put her at ease. “But Mary, I’ve had a marvelous life.”
It was a rare moment of unvarnished honesty—he would tell other people that he was going to beat the cancer, or he would downplay it or simply not mention it at all. He publicly treated his illness as a nonissue—like a pesky auditor’s report. Cahill thinks he only made this comment to “make me feel less bad about it.”
The cancer, he soon learned, had started in a bile duct. It was called a cholangiocarcinoma, or a Klatskin’s tumor, and was “about the size of small walnut,” according to a scribbled note in one of Grant’s little steno pads. On May 4, 1993, doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan tried to remove the tumor. They took out a big part of his liver and got some of the tumor, but not all of it. They did manage
to release the obstruction to his bile duct. The jaundice faded, and he felt better.
On January 20, 1993, around the time of Grant’s UN checkup, Audrey Hepburn died. Grant had become intensely fond of her and had relied on her more and more. She had recently been operated on for colon cancer. She had pushed herself until the end, traveling to Somalia for UNICEF in September 1992; photos from the trip show a visibly gaunt Hepburn, who must have been in great discomfort (though she was not one to complain). She did not feel well after the visit and was diagnosed shortly thereafter. As the news of his own diagnosis seeped in, Grant may have wondered if her suffering was a preview of what he would face.
He did speak about his illness with his sons, Ellan, Jon Rohde, and his vociferous French stepmother, Denise. The former nurse had written him a slew of letters during his fourteen years at UNICEF, perhaps trying to fill a void left by the death of both his parents more than twenty years earlier (his father died in 1962, his mother in 1973). Her letters were frank, nosy, philosophical, and teeming with opinions—on how Christianity had hastened the collapse of imperial Rome, on whether Jim should sell the “roof house,” on why he should try a “peak mattress pad” for his back pain, on why one of his sons did not yet have a wife. They also provided a steady source of parental encouragement—she wrote often of how much she admired him and how he reminded her of his father. Her letters usually ended with the words “Carpe Diem!”