A Mighty Purpose

by Adam Fifield

  In a series of negotiations preceding Grant’s trip, UNICEF staff had persuaded Hutu authorities to free and “demobilize” the children and allow them to be transferred to UNICEF-supported centers, where they could resume their schooling and receive psychological counseling. It was decided that Grant would preside over a ceremony in which the adolescent and prepubescent fighters would remove their military jackets and symbolically cast off their association with war. Afterward, they and the other children would essentially be transferred into the custody of UNICEF.

  Early on the morning of the ceremony, UNICEF’s Abdul Mohammed went to Grant’s Kigali hotel room to check on him. Knowing how ill he was, he wanted to make sure he was awake and had time to get ready. When he approached the door, he noticed it was already open. And he could hear a voice, ostensibly reciting something, perhaps ticking off items on a mental checklist. When Mohammed entered the room, he found Grant standing at a sink, washing his underwear and talking to himself. He was rattling off the day’s itinerary, seemingly psyching himself up for what he had to do.

  When they reached the camp, it was hot and dusty and bright, and the shadows were long and deep. Men with guns glared at them. Mohammed walked with Grant and stuck close to his side. He did not like the way the men were looking at him. “It was one of the scariest moments for me,” says the mustachioed, professorial Ethiopian. “They thought I was a Tutsi.”

  He feared the Hutu soldiers might seize him and haul him away. There was nothing or no one to stop them—except Jim Grant. “I just hung to him,” he says.

  Grant noticed the stares, Mohammed says. He made sure to keep Mohammed at his side and to keep a car running nearby—in case they needed to get out of there.

  As Grant and Mohammed and a few others walked to the site of the planned ceremony, where some five hundred children were gathered, Grant had some trouble, says Mohammed. He stumbled once but did not fall. Several people helped him along.

  They arrived at the designated spot—a wide dirt clearing—and the children were waiting. A few dozen girls, some in brightly colored dresses, sat in rows on the red dirt at his feet. Beyond them radiated a rustling crowd of older kids, mostly boys, many in olive green military fatigues. Some were singing, Mohammed recalls, and a festive mood was percolating. In the distance, beyond the fidgeting assembly, a rusted tin roof glinted. Above it, on a bare ridge, stood a line of spindly, raggedy trees. The sun lacquered everything in viscous, pasty heat.

  Grant wore a striped white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up. His chest pocket bulged, perhaps stuffed with ORS packets and his tiny steno notebooks. He looked at his audience. Some were twelve and older; others looked about five, six, seven years old. A woman stood nearby ready to translate his words into Kinyarwanda. His voice was faint and thin, but he still spoke clearly and forcefully. Mohammed remembers a brief, potent pep talk: “You are children, and you don’t belong here. You don’t belong in war … War is bad … war should be avoided. War is not natural … War is not for children.”

  Then, says Mohammed, Grant told them that it was time to move forward. It was time for them to go back to being children, to go back to school. UNICEF, he explained, would help them do that. Grant may have asked how many of them did not know where their parents were. A flock of hands likely shot up. He then may have said that UNICEF would try to connect them with their families. Right now, he needed to ask them to do something very important, both physically and symbolically. He announced that he had brought them some new clothes. But first, before he handed them out, he needed them to give up their military uniforms.

  The next part was planned in advance, yet it became something more than what was scripted. Whether the kids had been told beforehand what was expected of them is unclear. But they indeed began to remove their olive green coats. The interpreter was enthusiastically yelling “Throw out your clothes! Throw out your clothes!” Coats became airborne, sailing into the bright white afternoon. The kids were howling, smiling, and whooping—and Grant was egging them on. He started throwing up his arms like an orchestra conductor, cheering and scooping the air with big sweeping motions, as more and more kids ripped off their uniforms and tossed them into the sky. The mood became that of a rollicking celebration, a rite of passage, a stark sort of graduation ceremony—a graduation from death and fear and the enforced thirst for blood.

  Grant then made his way into the crowd of hopping, jostling kids. They were dancing now. They treated the frail UNICEF chief like a rock star who had just jumped off the stage. They hugged him, reached out for him, looked at him in stunned awe. He greeted them and began collecting their old clothes, clutching bundles of grubby coats and handing them off to staff members. A huge pile of coats and shirts steadily grew on the edge of the clearing.

  Betty Press was snapping away, trying to capture the magnetic feeling that eddied around Grant. “It was the most incredible scene,” she says.

  Grant’s face exuded complete, unalloyed elation. Says Mohammed: “He no more looked like a sick man.”

  After the festivities had subsided, and after Grant and his staff members had handed out hundreds of sets of new clothes and shoes, Mohammed was standing next to his boss.

  “That makes your day,” he said.

  Grant looked at him. Then he replied, “You betcha!”

  Chapter 17

  A BIGGER MISSION

  If you needed to spend money you didn’t have, hire emergency staff at a moment’s notice, buy a fleet of Land Rovers to help forestall a famine, play hopscotch with your budget lines, break a rule or ignore one—Jim Grant had your back.

  If it could save a kid, he would tell you, then do it. Let him worry about the bureaucrats in New York. No matter how high the stakes, everyone knew that results trumped risks. The bigger picture also eclipsed the smaller one. Grant would advise: “Don’t bend down to pick up paper clips.”

  For the most part, this empowering, permissive strategy returned breathtaking dividends, saved countless lives, and strengthened UNICEF’s field operations.

  It may also have helped spawn the biggest financial scandal in the organization’s history. In November 1994, as Jim Grant’s health precipitously eroded, UNICEF auditors uncovered serious irregularities in the Kenya office—and it was more than a few scattered paper clips.

  As news of the shenanigans in Nairobi trickled out, questions swirled: Was this a result of Jim Grant–inspired risk-taking? Was it the honest product of staff breaking rules to save kids and reach the mid-decade goals? Or was it deliberate malfeasance and abuse? Or a mix of both? How bad was it, and who was responsible?

  The debacle’s full scale—which wasn’t officially revealed until after Grant’s death—was potentially disastrous. Auditors would eventually determine that a total of $1 million had been lost to outright fraud, and another $9 million misused due to “alleged gross mismanagement.” A total of twenty-four employees were involved, including several senior officials. According to the auditors’ findings, there were payments to fictitious companies, falsified expense reports and medical insurance claims, and personal bills paid with UNICEF funds. The internal audit report determined that “inadequate oversight and supervision contributed to the late discovery of the irregularities.” A report by the UN Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions concluded that “obvious indicators of irregularities were ignored or not effectively followed up by UNICEF headquarters.”

  The feared fallout, in terms of damage to UNICEF’s fund-raising ability, was a nauseating prospect.

  Grant couldn’t be held responsible for policing all 144 country operations. Budgetary problems routinely bobbed up in country offices all over the world—how could he be expected to tend to them all? Other people were supposed to do that for him. As for the crisis in Kenya, someone was clearly not minding the store there closely enough.

  Still, some senior staffers felt Grant should have paid more attention to the initial signs of trouble in Kenya—this case was one of
real malfeasance involving a lot of money. A few of them confronted him during a meeting when the irregularities first emerged, according to a staff member who was present. They told Grant this matter demanded his personal attention. This time, he needed to be directly involved.

  Grant listened. Then, according to the staff member, he demurred. He said, “There is a bigger mission I’m concerned about.”

  Grant wasn’t saying he would hinder the investigation or stand in its way or hush it up. Two of his deputy executive directors, Richard Jolly and Karin Sham Poo, insist he cooperated fully with auditors and that he wanted them to get to the bottom of it. He simply didn’t want to deal with it himself. Many of the mid-decade goals hung tantalizingly close, and, as his time rapidly melted away, he simply wouldn’t pay attention to much else. In his mind, the choice may have seemed as stark as it had always been: save lives or push paper—though one might argue that, in a case like Kenya, neglect of the latter could seriously crimp the former. Had he focused more on Kenya, would the outcome have been different? Could some of the damage have been checked? Maybe.

  What really happened in Nairobi is still debated. Some former staffers believe it was not as clear or as damning as the auditors indicated. A major repercussion, some felt, was that the scandal gave Grant’s successor, Carol Bellamy, a pretext to fundamentally alter UNICEF’s management structure, placing an excessive emphasis on budgets and administration and undermining its decentralized way of operating. In fairness to Bellamy, Kenya could have done even more harm to UNICEF’s reputation had she not contained it. Inheriting the mess from Grant, she ultimately restored a sense of confidence in UNICEF’s management procedures that had clearly eroded.

  Press accounts of the Kenya scandal, which came out several months after Grant’s death, emphasized the shocking loss of $10 million, money that should have gone to help children. But the figure was somewhat misleading, says Richard Jolly. He acknowledges that up to $1 million “had been used totally corruptly, totally inappropriately.” But the much larger balance—$9 million—was not stolen. These funds, Jolly explains, “had been used for buying pharmaceuticals without three competitive bids.” If so, “gross mismanagement” may have been an overstatement. Still, $1 million in filched funds was a deeply troubling fumble.

  Whatever happened in Kenya, the episode draped UNICEF in an acrid haze. It was one of “a series of shocks”—as one staff member put it—that afflicted Grant in his final days. Another one he knew was coming: a “management study” conducted by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. The UNICEF board had requested the study, and Grant had balked. “He was dragging his feet,” says Fouad Kronfol.

  But eventually, the UNICEF chief gave in and pledged his cooperation. He had no choice.

  The results, based on a survey of seven hundred and fifty staff members (and interviews with three hundred and fifty) were shared with Grant and others as early as October and formally released in December. While lauding UNICEF for its considerable achievements, the three-hundred-page report noted a “value system that staff renounce” and “personnel processes that have lost credibility.” It cited complaints about global goals, concerns about accountability, and a perceived lack of transparency in financial management. It also concluded that the organization “does not have substantial experience” with important issues central to its mission, including child abuse and exploitation. Also pointing out “unusual hostilities” between the board and UNICEF leadership, Booz Allen called for major reforms.

  Several Grant loyalists dismiss the Booz Allen report as a vindictive move by some board members to rein in a man they could never really control or understand—one whose unrivaled triumphs had stirred pungent feelings of jealousy and resentment. The study amounted to a betrayal, says Gourisankar Ghosh, whom Grant had recruited from the government of India to run UNICEF’s water programs. “It was very unfair to him … I felt very, very sad the way he was treated toward the end.”

  Others see value in some of Booz Allen’s recommendations, which included appointing a special “associate executive director” to handle day-to-day management issues that Grant clearly eschewed. Some of the problems cited in the report were valid criticisms, and they certainly needed to be addressed. Grant had pushed staff members past their limits, ignored unpleasant realities, blatantly favored some field operatives, hired and promoted people according to his own close-to-the-vest set of criteria, and upset an established system of career advancement. All of that was true. But Booz Allen did not seem to appreciate the context in which much of this had happened or the momentous change that had accompanied it. The firm did not seem to get who Jim Grant was or what he and UNICEF had done.

  The tensions cited by the consulting company stemmed, in part, from friction between Grant and wealthy donor countries represented on the board, especially European ones. Some felt the UNICEF chief cared too much about child survival to the detriment of other issues and that he did not listen enough to UNICEF’s principal funders. Grant’s primary support on the board—and the reason he had been able to weather all the criticism for so long—came from the developing countries. They had always been in his corner, because he had always been in theirs. He had grown up in a developing country, after all, and his sympathies were far more attuned to the plight of the poor than most “first world” UN officials. The child survival revolution had focused on children in the poorest countries (where the most were dying) and directed a current of resources to their governments. Grant and Richard Jolly had openly challenged the World Bank and IMF for structural adjustment policies that unduly punished developing countries. Grant also repeatedly championed debt relief for strapped governments of poorer nations. And he often pointed out that, in terms of according priority to children, some developing countries had done a better job than their richer peers; immunization rates in some cities in the developing world, he would joyfully note, were higher than in New York City and Washington, DC. As the well-being of children improved during the 1980s in some of the world’s poorest pockets, the situation of children in Grant’s own country, the United States, deteriorated—this sad truth, he would say, was “my greatest disappointment.”

  “Jim became a hero to the developing countries,” says Joe Judd, an American who worked for UNICEF in Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In return, he adds, they “were not going to let Jim sink.”

  But at the very end, he was sinking a little bit anyway. Over the course of fifteen years, he had defied every doubter in the most extraordinary way. He had tapped the potential of the UN as no one else ever had. He had unlocked a whole new realm of possibility in health and international development. He had shown that poor children did not have to die in mass numbers. He had mobilized the entire world to take better care of its young citizens. Now, after all that, his tenure was ending on a stubbornly sour note.

  As Grant’s condition worsened, a small circle of friends, family, and staff kept gently pushing a harsh, unvarnished piece of advice: quit. For his sake, and for UNICEF’s, it would be best, they told him, for him to step down now.

  But he wouldn’t. If he resigned, he was done—invisible, insignificant, denuded of power. He was going to keep moving until he dropped.

  Though he mentioned it to almost no one, Grant had been struggling for some time with the prospect of a post–Jim Grant UNICEF and a post-UNICEF Jim Grant. At some point within his last six months, likely before he became gravely ill, he had asked his senior adviser Jim Sherry to meet him at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC, to discuss his future and his options. Charming, raspy-voiced, and politically astute (he was the former chief of staff for Congressman Sandy Levin), Sherry was an American doctor who had become part of Grant’s inner circle.

  He met Grant in the evening at the genteel private social club housed in a Beaux Arts mansion near Dupont Circle. Grant had been a member of both the Cosmos Club and Metropolitan Club for decades. The stately, stuffy bastions of male power in Washington had stirred contr
oversy in the 1960s for denying membership to women and minorities. Though this had changed by 1994, they were still exclusive and reeked of elitism. As unfussy as he was, Grant still seemed to relish some trappings of prestige. But the main reason he belonged to the clubs, according to his son Bill, was that “they were the right places to meet the right people.”

  As Sherry listened, Grant talked about Halfdan Mahler, the legendary former WHO director general who had been both his adversary and his collaborator. Grant was fixated on what happened to him after he left WHO in 1988.

  “It was as if he disappeared from the scene,” Grant told Sherry.

  They talked for a long time, but Sherry knew that Grant had another appointment—a very important one. He was supposed to see his eldest son John’s family, including his grandsons. They lived nearby. And he was late.

  “Jim, you gotta get going,” Sherry said.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Grant said. He seemed distracted.

  At some point, Grant’s son John called him (likely on a Cosmos Club phone) and asked him where he was.

  “Okay, yeah, I’ll get out of here right away,” Grant said. “I’m a little delayed.”