Authors: Adam Fifield
When Bill Clinton came to the podium, a few people in the audience noticed something unusual: he was wearing Jim Grant’s tie. It was a “Save the Children” tie with bright, smiling faces of cartoon children emblazoned across it. Grant was, in turn, wearing the president’s dark, muted tie. Before they had walked on stage, the president had remarked how much he liked Grant’s tie, according to several UNICEF staff members to whom Grant had described the encounter. Without hesitating, Grant said, “You can have it,” and began to remove his tie. He and the president quickly swapped ties.
The story is a favorite of many UNICEF people; it shows, they say, how quick Grant was on his feet, how he never passed up an opportunity to make a connection.
Mary Cahill agrees but notes that she had bought Jim Grant that tie as a personal gift. And she was in the audience at the White House, when it suddenly appeared on the president of the United States. She says with a chuckle: “That was my twenty-two dollars!”
The symptoms became harder to ignore, but Grant ignored them anyway. He developed ascites, a buildup of fluid in the
abdomen. His belly became bloated, and his feet and ankles started to swell. Fevers and chills sent him shuddering. Jaundice seeped back into his skin. His face grew gaunt and sunken—one staffer says he reminded her of photos from the Biafran famine in the late 1960s. But he kept going to work, even when many people were shocked at the sight of him and thought he should be in the hospital.
His eyes still sparkled with mirthful enthusiasm, especially when he sounded off on his favorite topics—immunization or iodine deficiency or the Green Revolution or, of course, the mid-decade goals. But his Teflon optimism took a concussive, cracking blow on April 8, 1994, when his longtime aide, speechwriter, and trusted confidant Mike Shower died. Shower, who was openly gay at a time when homophobia had much sharper teeth than it does now, had contracted AIDS and succumbed to it at the age of forty-four.
Thin, serious, and moody, he was at Grant’s side during most board meetings, whispering counsel in his ear. A former congressional assistant, he was a key liaison between Grant and US lawmakers in Washington and had been heavily involved in organizing the World Summit for Children. Like Nyi Nyi and Cahill and Rohde and Gautam, he had become intensely protective of his boss and unconditionally committed to him. The two men were gravely ill at the same time, both struggling with exhaustion, both withered and pale, both driving themselves to keep working—in that way, they shared a wholly unique camaraderie. Several staff say Grant had come to see both Jon Rohde and Mike Shower as his other sons. He held a special
“celebration of friendship” to honor Shower before his death, inviting Shower’s parents and a host of other people to a ceremony at UNICEF House; in one photo from the event, Shower is standing snugly between Jim and Ellan, smiling and looking noticeably emaciated. At his memorial service on May 10, Grant told those gathered that he and Shower had both been “dreamers aspiring to be doers.”
Not pausing, not allowing sadness or illness to get a grip, he barreled toward his next objective. He traveled incessantly. Over one two-week stretch in April (which included the day Shower died), he visited five countries—Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Switzerland, and France—and then returned to the States for a slew of meetings in Washington and New York.
In June came another jolt: Grant’s stepmother, Denise, died. She was his last living link to his father and had been a unique and nearly constant source of solace and forceful advice for most of Grant’s adult life. Over the following months, he neither slowed nor stopped; he met with more than forty leaders in his final year. Rohde, Jolly, Adamson, and Cahill begged him to slow down, but he didn’t listen.
On a trip to Mongolia in July, a Cessna airplane took Grant and then UNICEF China representative Farid Rahman to a remote area. They stepped out of the plane and got into a jeep for a bumpy ride into the countryside. Grant sat silently in his seat, his body hunched slightly forward. “He was in great pain,” says Rahman, “but he didn’t show it.” He didn’t ask for any help. Whenever the jeep stopped in a village and they greeted residents, Grant straightened his body and “put on his charm and his smile.”
A personal boost came on August 8 when President Clinton awarded Grant the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the country’s highest civilian honor. It wasn’t the Nobel Prize, but it was a nice moment of recognition. Cahill, who went with Grant to the ceremony, worried about her boss during the event. As he stood next to the president, who draped a medal around his neck, he was glaringly, unmistakably jaundiced.
There were several hospitalizations. Adamson accompanied him on one occasion when Grant tried to check into Sloan Kettering. On the ride to the hospital, he had drifted in and out of sleep. He had barely been able to get out of the car and could hardly stand. But in the lobby of Sloan Kettering he was made to wait for half an hour or more. There was some problem with his American Express credit card, and the receptionists at the front desk were looking into whether his last bill had been paid (he had checked out only a few days earlier). Adamson thinks that Grant may have been given a wheelchair, but he needed a bed—he was about to fall over.
The experience enraged the cordial, normally unruffled Briton. “When you’re more concerned about some past bill than an ill person standing in front of you who needs help, it’s wrong,” he says now. At that moment, standing there with his gravely sick boss, waiting for the credit card to clear, Adamson thought,
For all we grumble about our national health service in the UK, this would never happen
.
As Grant continually scurried to recover, to get back to work, a horrendous tragedy of unprecedented magnitude was unfurling across Rwanda, pitting the country’s two main
groups—Hutus and Tutsis—against one another. In April 1994, after a plane carrying the country’s Hutu president was shot down, Hutu extremists used the incident as a pretext to start slaughtering Tutsis. Over the next one hundred days, political leaders and elements of the Hutu-led government carried out a dizzyingly swift and coordinated campaign of genocide. As many as one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. The death toll included an estimated 300,000 children. Many of the killings were done with machetes. The speed and scale of the violence dwarfed even the horror of Bosnia. And as in Bosnia, the UN peacekeeping response was shameful. In January 1994, the UN’s peacekeeping commander, Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, had warned UN headquarters that Hutu forces might be planning massacres. But he was ignored. As the violence began, he begged for more troops. He was rebuffed and ordered to withdraw. Though many others left, Dallaire bravely disobeyed his orders. Remaining with a small, ill-equipped contingent of troops, he tried to save as many lives as possible. The United States was one of the strongest voices urging a pullout of peacekeeping troops; reeling from the recent “Black Hawk Down” episode in Somalia, it did not want to get involved. The world turned its back as the bodies precipitously piled up. The genocide ended in July, after the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated the Hutu militias and took control of the country. The international community’s stubborn indifference in the face of such monstrous butchery was an irredeemable disgrace—and one of the UN’s most spectacular failures.
But not every part of the UN abandoned Rwanda. Local UNICEF and World Food Program staff continued to provide relief during the genocide despite grave and constant risk. Though UNICEF was able to evacuate some of its staff, fourteen of its employees were killed—the highest number of UNICEF deaths at any one time. Many who survived suffered unspeakable losses. A UNICEF communications officer found out that all five of his children had been murdered. His wife had survived, but all the kids were gone, just like that. Astoundingly, instead of collapsing in grief, he went back to work. Maybe he could help other children who were still alive.
In the aftermath, UNICEF reestablished a full presence, providing a lifeline for survivors—clean water, vaccines, medical supplies, oral rehydration salts, high-protein biscuits, health kits, education kits, and cooking equipment. It eventually helped get 250,000 kids back into school (one pressing task was to make sure schools weren’t mined) and helped to restore Kigali’s electrical grid and water treatment plants. Perhaps its biggest challenge was caring for a sudden surge of unaccompanied children, who were wandering around alone, sometimes gathering in small groups on street corners and under trees. Attached to each one was a stark question: Was this child an orphan? Or was there a parent or aunt or uncle or grandparent somewhere out there? UNICEF staff developed what it called a “family tracing” program to answer that question and to connect children with surviving relatives (if there were any). They fanned out across the country, taking pictures of every kid they came across and assigning each one a reference number. The
photos and reference numbers were posted all over Rwanda on big billboards. As a result, tens of thousands of children would be reunited with family members. The program became a model for similar efforts over the next several decades, including in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
In September, two months after the end of the genocide, Grant decided to go to Rwanda. Several staff members pleaded with him not to make the trip. He ignored them. He wanted to see for himself what was going on and try to lift the spirits of a battered and traumatized staff. During the killing spree, he had publicly pleaded with the Hutu militias to “spare the children”—to no avail. He largely kept his views on the political situation to himself, avoiding criticizing the UN or any country that could be a donor. But he privately vented to UNICEF staffer Abdul Mohammed, telling him: “We let them down … we let them down.”
On the plane flying into the capital, Kigali, he breezily chatted with other passengers, including freelance photographer Betty Press. He mentioned that he had recently undergone an operation and, as a result, his body wasn’t working the way it used to. Then he joked: “So I might have gas.”
“He did it in such a lighthearted way,” Press recalls. “He was always conscious of the other people around him and very much thinking of other people, even in those situations.”
Also on the plane was Nigel Fisher, a slim, sanguine emergency operations guru, who looked a little like a bespectacled Scott Glenn. He had ably led UNICEF’s response to the Gulf
War, and Grant had tasked him with getting the Rwanda office up to speed. When Fisher had arrived in Kigali in late June 1994, “the smell of death was everywhere.” Bodies were strewn in fields and inside empty buildings. UNICEF had one jeep with sixty bullet holes in it, and the front door to the UNICEF office had been booby-trapped. Through a window, Fisher had glimpsed trip wires connected to grenades. Fortunately, he already knew it was a trap; General Dallaire had warned him, bluntly advising, “Don’t go there!” The enterprising Canadian quickly realized that he had to improvise. He headed over to the abandoned World Bank office, which did not seem to be booby-trapped. He smashed a window, climbed in, and quickly set up shop there. The World Bank didn’t seem to mind. “I called them and said, ‘I’ve just liberated your office—can I keep it?’ They said yes.” Fisher and his team had to remove a body from the basement before they started working. With permission from the mayor, he and a few other international staff took up residence in the vacated homes of French dignitaries (France had supported the Hutu-led government). Australian UNICEF staffer Ian MacLeod moved into the house of the French cultural attaché. It was weird, he says—there were still dirty dishes in the sink. The former occupants had obviously left in a hurry.
Fisher had sent a message to Grant—he needed a lot more resources if he was going to get this off the ground. He said that unless he received more people, supplies, and logistical support, he would have to close the whole thing down.
Grant responded quickly. “The next thing I knew, Jim just said, ‘Give Nigel what he wants now!’ ”
As Fisher built up and reassembled his staff, the atmosphere in the office became charged with tension and raw emotion. Many staff members were still in shock over losing loved ones and witnessing horrific acts of brutality. Fisher helped some locate the remains of relatives and arrange for proper burials. There were both Tutsis and Hutus in the office, and they were all bound by their commitment to UNICEF. But to remind them of that and make sure no animosity materialized, Fisher assembled everyone one day and told them: “When you walk through the doors of UNICEF every day, there is no Hutu, there is no Tutsi, there is no Rwandan, there is no foreigner. We are all UNICEF staff working for kids.”
When Grant arrived in Kigali on Friday, September 9, 1994, the office was bustling. Fisher told the ailing executive director that he had been asked by headquarters to treat Grant gently. And no wonder—Grant looked awful. He was pale, his hair was thinning, his body had shrunk, and his bones protruded through his clothes; his suit was loose and seemed way too big, as though hanging on a mannequin made of wire. Fisher showed him the ambitious itinerary for the next few days, which included visits to massacre sites and refugee camps, and suggested scaling it back a bit. Grant wouldn’t budge. “Nigel,” he said, “let’s go ahead.”
Grant spoke with staff members individually and asked how they were coping. “He was very gentle,” Fisher recalls. At a
staff meeting in the office conference room, packed with about eighty people, the UNICEF chief said that the work everyone was doing now was the best memorial for friends and family who had been lost.
“That’s our role at UNICEF,” Grant told the mix of Tutsis, Hutus, and foreigners. “To be there for kids, especially at times like this. I know you have suffered, but what you can do for those you have lost is help the kids who are still surviving to have a future.”
One of the first stops on the itinerary was the town of Nyamata on the outskirts of Kigali. During the helicopter ride, Grant took a catnap. “He was clearly really straining his resources,” says Fisher, “but just kept going.”