A Mighty Purpose

by Adam Fifield

  But the galvanic camaraderie also masked growing pockets of unease.

  There was a small group of Grant favorites known as “Jim’s boys”—usually men he considered brilliant and indispensable (and some of them truly were). An official committee at UNICEF handled all staff appointments and promotions based on a selected range of criteria. Everyone had to accept the committee’s rulings—everyone, that is, except a handful of people, mostly Jim’s boys, who were promoted according to Grant’s whim. This understandably rankled many hardworking people, who had played by the stated rules. But from Grant’s perspective, he wanted the best people possible in important positions—children’s lives literally depended on it. However fair, the bureaucracy was also arthritically rigid.

  After an executive staff meeting, Manou Assadi, the Iranian head of personnel, approached Grant in the hall. He wanted to warn him about the growing discontent over his ad hoc promotions and transfers.

  “Jim, do you know why the shah of Iran fell?”

  Grant didn’t answer.

  “Because people around him told him, ‘Your Majesty, everything is all right.’ ”

  He then added: “Jim, everything is not all right.”

  Grant listened to Assadi. But he did not say anything in response.

  When a senior official suggested checking the somewhat suspect background of someone Grant wanted to hire, he summarily batted the concern away. “When I have to fix a plumbing problem,” Grant remarked, “I don’t want to know the background of the plumber. I want the problem fixed.”

  He avoided contentious personnel matters, much as he dodged unpleasant financial concerns. This tendency would earn him a reputation as a bad manager, though this was not entirely fair—in some ways, he was a singularly stellar manager. But when it came to administrative, financial, or personnel issues, he simply wasn’t interested. He didn’t want to deal with it. One senior staff member recalls sitting in audit meetings with Grant. “As soon as something unpleasant came up, Grant would walk out of the door, and he would all of a sudden have something very important to do,” he says. “And we would be left with his deputy … and all of us would throw up our hands and say, ‘Here we go again.’ ”

  In December 1983, several years earlier, one of “Jim’s boys” had been caught allegedly embezzling and defrauding the UNICEF China office of as much as $144,000. When confronted with the news, Grant balked. Jim “could never accept that [he] was a crook,” says former China representative Joe Judd. “He blamed the two auditors, and he blamed me.”

  According to a memo from the deputy director of UNICEF’s Office of Internal Audit, the man “concealed and falsified official information and documents; committed systematic acts of fraud and embezzled or facilitated defalcation of UNICEF funds and committed [a] series of administrative wrongdoings.”

  Judd, who otherwise greatly admired Grant, says the UNICEF chief “sometimes lost perspective” and “let himself be fooled.” Grant “was of a mind, if somebody was doing something great and there was a little shady stuff going on on the side, you had to weigh the two,” adds Judd. “There may be justification for unintentional mismanagement, but there is no justification for fraud and intentional mismanagement.”

  Amazingly, Grant did not seem to consider the matter to be a big deal. He told another staff member that the man accused of filching as much as $144,000 was “the best program officer ever” and added, “I’m sorry that because of some small administrative problems, he had to be fired.” Notes the staff member: “the fellow had been steadily stealing … That was offensive.”

  Grant would, in fact, initially refuse to take action against several individuals accused of violations, according to several former senior staff members. Whether a sign of fierce loyalty or a troubling blind spot—or a combination of the two—the tendency would abrade many, even Grant’s loyal supporters. It would also undercut the immense goodwill he had engendered. Grant wanted to believe the best of everybody and hated firing people, even when it was starkly clear they should be dismissed.

  In the China fraud case, the man was let go and agreed to pay UNICEF back.

  There would be other cases like this over the next few years. Says Judd: “It is demoralizing to UNICEF staff around the world when they learn about these things.”

  Changing Jim Grant’s mind could take years. Allegra Morelli knows this as well as anyone. The sincere, dogged Italian woman, who held several positions at UNICEF and was close both to Ethel and to Grant’s stepmother Denise, “had many fights” with her boss.

  “I was always saying, ‘You cannot save a child with immunization and then let him die of poverty,’ ” recalls Morelli.

  Grant did not at all disagree with this. He viewed immunization as a political entry point—a host of other services could be delivered on the path blazed by vaccination teams. Morelli knew Grant was no one-trick pony—his vision of international development was vast and shifting. Still, getting him to focus on goals that fell outside his “doability” zone could be a Sisyphean endeavor.

  One of those goals was the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The proposed human rights treaty, then in working draft form, would afford children around the world basic rights and protection from abuse and exploitation. Grant thought it would divert momentum away from UCI, and that it didn’t stand a very good chance of being ratified anyway. Plus, he would point out, the UN already had the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which was adopted in 1959—in other words, we’ve been there, done that already (except that the declaration had no teeth, not even baby ones; it was a statement of principle, not a legally binding treaty). Many of Grant’s advisers agreed. For a long while, the “convention” was a no-go.

  But Morelli made it her personal quest to persuade Grant to support it. Because once Jim Grant threw his weight behind something, that something moved.

  “He was very much against it,” she says. “It took me five years to convince him.”

  Kimberly Gamble, who lobbied for the convention in Washington, DC, noted that the Reagan administration was an obstacle and that Grant didn’t think it was worth the political risk. “Jim said, ‘Why should we go up against Reagan on this?’ ”

  So how did Morelli sway him?

  By making the point that the convention was not an encumbrance—it was a tool. It was a giant cudgel that Grant could wield to deafening effect. It would give UCI and child survival a major boost by making the world pay more attention to the basic question of children’s welfare. Children were ignored in a lot of places. The convention would give them—and Grant—visibility.

  Grant would later say that it was Morelli’s “eloquent, emotional, forceful plea” that compelled him to back the convention. He had also insisted that a component specifically addressing child survival be added; Article 6, guaranteeing a child’s “right” to live, was included.

  In the late 1980s, Grant began speaking more and more vehemently about this “Magna Carta for Children.” Once on board, says Morelli, “he went full steam.”

  He would employ the same strategy he had used for UCI: play one country off another. He would tell UNICEF Bolivia representative Jim Mayrides that he needed Bolivia to ratify the convention in order to goad Brazil into doing the same. Mayrides recalls: “He said, ‘Look, if you can get the Bolivians to ratify it, and if you can get the Bolivians to do all these things in child survival, then I can go to the Brazilians and say, ‘Here are these poor indigenous people in the hills, and they’re doing this, and you guys down here in Brazil can’t get it done?’ ”

  With the convention teetering atop Grant’s Jenga-like to-do list, he hurtled ever faster toward 1990. No one was holding him back anymore—Ethel was not there to ask him to rest and take care of himself. All the while, a growing concern began nipping at him: How could he firm up these historic undertakings, how could he make sure they didn’t slip like loose sand through his fingers?

  He began talking about holding a big meeting—a meeting
the like of which the world had never seen before. Every head of state on earth would be invited. It would be the first global “summit” in history, and it would be focused on children.

  Surely another Grant fantasy, many assumed. But now everyone knew you could not write off Jim Grant’s ideas—no matter how wild or grandiose.

  He nurtured yet another aspiration, a soaring but mostly unspoken dream: winning the Nobel Prize. UNICEF had snared the lofty Norwegian honor in 1965. Recent accomplishments already far surpassed anything the agency had done almost twenty-five years earlier—but would the Nobel Committee agree? A second Nobel could give UNICEF supersonic momentum. Who could say no to Jim Grant then?

  As the biggest deadline of his life speedily ate through his calendar, something else would soon vie with UCI and the convention and fund-raising pressures for his disappearing slices of time. Something big. A roaring storm, a new emergency, was about to swallow Jim Grant. This time, he couldn’t pull himself out.

  Chapter 12

  LIFELINE

  The Sudanese general was sweating. He had opened the collar of his military uniform and now sat in the crowded, low-ceilinged, un-air-conditioned room, training his eyes on the floor. A large, Casablanca-style ceiling fan spun overhead, stirring the languid, hundred-degree air, but not doing much to cool it. Around an oblong conference table scattered with papers huddled about twenty people, Sudanese government ministers and UN agency officials, all of whom abided the tense silence. Across the table from the general, fixing him with hard, cold eyes, was Jim Grant.

  “We have been let down,” Grant said, his voice devoid of its usual buoyancy. “Someone has let us down.”

  In late May 1989, Grant was in Khartoum, Sudan, to oversee a critical emergency operation to avert mass starvation in the country’s southern regions. A vicious civil war, raging for the past six years, had obstructed relief efforts, exacerbated an already calamitous drought, and left as many as 250,000 people in dire need of food. The previous year, as had become clear in recent months, as many as 250,000 had already died. Now, in some small towns, dozens of people were dying every day, most of them very old or very young.

  In March, Grant had brokered a ceasefire of sorts, convincing the government and the rebels to hold their fire in several “corridors of tranquillity.” It was agreed by both sides that aid could be peaceably transported to these areas by plane, truck, barge, and train—but the train was the most important. With its forty-eight cars, it had the largest capacity. More than one hundred thousand tons of grain had to reach the south within weeks if widespread deaths were to be prevented. It now looked like the deal might be unraveling.

  The whole endeavor was dicey. A truck convoy had been ambushed a month earlier, and eight rebel escorts had been killed. The antiquated rail lines were sheathed by weeds, sections of track had warped, and bandits had stolen ties. UNICEF had worked with the Sudanese government to repair the rails, but the train had then been stalled for a month by other obstacles: a rail workers’ strike, mechanical problems, and government recalcitrance. Tens of thousands of lives depended on that train moving now.

  That morning, it finally moved. But it didn’t get very far before a band of one hundred armed thugs had hijacked it and kidnapped three relief workers (including the UN Development Program’s Khartoum chief, Brian Wannop), hauled them into the woods, confiscated their belongings, and threatened to kill them. The thugs had eventually been talked into letting their hostages go by some Sudanese rail workers, but the train—loaded with 1,500 tons of food—once again sat idle. The attack had occurred in an area controlled by a general who was also a government minister, and who happened to be sitting at the table that afternoon in Khartoum. The general had apparently earlier pledged that his clan of raiders would let the train pass.

  The attack had cast a sudden pall over an already troubled operation at a critical point. Richard Reid, the brisk, lean American who had worked for the Peace Corps and Save the Children and was then UNICEF’s regional director for North Africa and the Middle East, wrote an account of the Khartoum meeting in Jim Grant: UNICEF Visionary, the anthology about Grant published by UNICEF. He recalls the taut unease in the room. “The fact that we had already run into an impediment … made things seem both scary and imminent,” he says. “We were afraid that if more attacks on the train occurred, more intimidation, that the train line might not work, and it was going to, of course, carry the largest bulk of the supplies and food.”

  It was the only time Reid had ever seen his boss visibly angry—so angry his cheeks had flushed red. “Jim just turned to the guy … and just leveled him with a stare,” says Reid. “Jim had his eyes when he started, and then the general looked away.”

  Grant then scanned the room and returned his gaze to the general, a tall man who had become plump in his middle age.

  Silence suffused the room for several seconds. The general kept his eyes lowered, and everyone waited for Grant to speak.

  Finally, he said: “There was an attack on the train this morning by an armed militia.” A few people shifted in their seats. No one spoke.

  Grant described the event and then said: “I wonder how this happened?”

  No reply.

  “We’re here to save lives,” he continued. “Not endanger them. All of us.” Then he raised his voice and added: “Isn’t that right?”

  In some towns in southern Sudan, aid workers asked families how many children they had lost, and a woman or man would point to a sad little mound next to their hut, or two mounds, or three. The fighting and famine had uprooted and scattered up to two million people, who had fled to shantytowns in Ethiopia and throughout Sudan, many staggering into small, government-held towns near the border between the southern and northern regions of the country. Makeshift refugee camps grew around these towns. There was little food; some people ate worms. On October 13, 1988, the New York Times reported that eight thousand people had died in the border town of Abyei since June and that almost all the children under age two in the town were dead. Some had succumbed to starvation, many others to measles (proof of Grant’s exhortation that immunization was critical, even during a famine). Some people were too weak to bury the dead, and corpses lay next to their huts. Hyenas would come in the night and drag the bodies away.

  The war stemmed from a decades-long conflict between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south. Both sides had intentionally used food as a weapon of war, blocking aid agencies from reaching civilians. Starvation had been engineered. The government had closed off Abyei, a collection of mud-and-stick huts and a few tin-roofed government buildings, all rimmed by dense swampland. The residents were mostly members of the Dinka tribe, southern cattle herders who were a source of recruits for the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Militias loyal to the government savagely targeted the Dinkas, enslaving them and massacring noncombatants. Reports of regular, sickening atrocities filtered out of the south. In March 1987, in the village of al-Da’ien in Darfur province, a tribe armed by the government in Khartoum viciously murdered as many as a thousand Dinka children, women, and men, burning some of them alive.

  UNICEF was among the first to deliver assistance to Abyei, flying in emergency food on its Twin Otter plane. “It was an attempt to break the ice,” says Detlef Palm, a UNICEF logistics officer in Sudan at the time. “It was almost a provocation.” The children he saw were stick-thin and listless, their shoulder blades protruding like grotesque wings. “Not a single child looked okay,” says Palm. When he walked through the village, he met a resident priest who behaved strangely, running and hiding behind huts and then whispering and beckoning to Palm. Palm assumed the man had been driven insane by the enormity of what he had seen.

  In October 1988, the US government organized a multiday airlift of as much as ninety tons of grain for the residents of Abyei. UNICEF helped facilitate the operation and also provided medical supplies. There was a question as to how much aid was actually going to the residents and
how much was being taken by government soldiers (indeed, during the previous trip to Abyei, Palm had noticed that some food had been placed “under lock and key” by nearby soldiers—even though children were dying in plain sight). Refugees kept straggling in. The aid was stopgap, patchwork—not even remotely enough. Humanitarian agencies, NGOs, and donor countries knew a major disaster was looming. Many people believed it was already too late.

  A key moment came during a phone call between Grant and Palm’s boss, UNICEF Sudan representative Cole Dodge. Assertive, erudite, and coolly confident, the American anthropologist was a Peace Corps veteran and a “Jim’s boy.” Probably one of Grant’s most daring field representatives, he was a humanitarian virtuoso who had helped broker a ceasefire in Uganda and who was willing to assume a startling amount of personal risk. Dodge was in the UNICEF Twin Otter plane when missiles were fired at it on two separate occasions. On one of them, in January 1988, the warheads exploded in view of Dodge’s window. “It was quite spectacularly beautiful,” he says.

  The experience was alarming, but Dodge had been through worse. “I don’t remember it as a threatening circumstance in the same way as having a gun right to your head.” Dodge had had a gun put right to his head, and a knife to his throat—both while working in Uganda.

  It was in the cockpit of the Twin Otter that Dodge called Jim Grant. He used the plane’s radio. Placing the call here meant a better connection than landlines would allow. Once he got Grant on the line, the boss told him that while on a flight from Paris to New York, he had opened a newspaper and had seen a grisly and shocking photo. It had shown tiny children standing next to the corpses of people who had starved to death in the town of El Meiram. “We’ve got to do something,” Grant told Dodge. “Even if there’s no way to do it officially.”