A Mighty Purpose

by Adam Fifield

  But Grant wanted to keep talking to Sherry. Sherry reluctantly agreed. He says now: “When he had an issue, he didn’t let it go.”

  Jim Grant loved his family deeply. His sons Bill and Jamie say he was an excellent, caring, attentive father, husband, and grandfather (John Grant died of a stroke in 2000 at the age of forty-eight). But as several staff members have suggested, the children of the world came first—before anyone or anything else. The mission of child survival had progressively possessed Jim Grant, pervaded his soul—now perhaps more than ever.

  He had not always been like this. His now near mythic persona had evolved, and he had evolved with it. “He wasn’t ‘Jim Grant’ when he started at UNICEF,” Sherry notes. “He was ‘Jim Grant’ when he left UNICEF.”

  And, as his days dwindled, his mission only grew more urgent.

  On November 11, 1994, he gave what would be his last speech. Several people advised him not to appear, to skip this one. He was in “terrible shape,” says Mary Cahill. “It looked like he could expire at any moment.”

  His jaundice was full-blown. His voice was light and wheezy and breathless. He was haggard and bony and short of breath. His discomfort was total. Sitting down for long periods tortured him—at least the speech would give him a chance to stand up and move around.

  He spoke at the Third Committee of the Forty-ninth General Assembly of the United Nations. Though nominally about “child rights,” this address covered a host of issues—his final laundry list of asks for the governments of the world. He plugged the Convention on the Rights of the Child and mid-decade goals. He urged the UN member states to keep children where he had put them—at the “very center of development strategy.” He argued for a ban on land mines, a crackdown on child labor and child trafficking, greater protection for children trapped by war, and the humanizing of economic sanctions to make them less harmful to children.

  As though anticipating that the unprecedented concern for children shown in recent years might evaporate as soon as he stepped away from the podium for the last time, he made a bald plea: “A child has only one chance to develop, and the protection of that one chance therefore demands the kind of commitment that will not be superseded by other priorities. There will always be something more immediate; there will never be anything more important.”

  Shortly after this speech—Mary Cahill thinks it was later that same afternoon—he left UNICEF House for the last time. Word zipped through the corridors that this might be the final chance to see the “Mad American,” and a throng of people massed in the lobby and spilled onto the narrow Manhattan street outside. Traffic stopped. Grant carefully made his way through the lobby and past the UNICEF card and gift shop. The crowd parted, allowing him a path of about six feet. He did not rush, but he was determined to make it out. People reached out to try to touch him, shake his hand, and he greeted them. He stopped to hug them and to thank them. “He was saying goodbye with his eyes,” says Judd. “Those eyes could communicate so much.”

  Staff members were crying and cheering and applauding for him as he walked by. Many could not believe the man who had made UNICEF what it was, who in some cases had made them who they were, who had galvanized the entire world, was now slowly shuffling off the stage. A palpable feeling of dread spread from the lobby through the crowd on Forty-fourth Street. How could UNICEF possibly go on without him?

  “Everyone was really shell-shocked,” recalls Judd. “It was an incredible spontaneous outpouring … He went out like the true showman he was.”

  A few days later, he slipped into a coma and was hospitalized again. Dr. Brennan performed another procedure, this one purely palliative. It was far too late to stop the cancer—that tumor had taken over most of his liver by now. But the surgeon was able to allow his bile to drain better and alleviate the jaundice and the bloating.

  Cole Dodge remembers visiting him in his hospital room. Dodge, then the regional director for eastern and southern Africa, was in New York at Grant’s request. Before he left Nairobi, he had bumped into the film director and UNICEF ambassador Richard Attenborough, who had given him four tickets for the New York premiere of his new film, a remake of Miracle on 34th Street (Attenborough was starring in it). The premiere was at Radio City Music Hall on November 15, the day of Grant’s surgery.

  When Grant found out Dodge had the tickets, he insisted that Dodge round up Ellan and Jon Rohde and take them to the premiere with him. “I don’t want anybody around this hospital room,” Grant instructed. “You just do it.”

  Dodge did as he was instructed.

  A knotty question grew more cumbersome with each passing day: Who would succeed Grant after he died? Another question was tied to it: Would Jim Grant have a say in the matter?

  He knew whom he wanted as his successor: his friend Dr. Bill Foege. A figurative and literal giant at six feet seven, Foege approached NBA altitude. His influence was even bigger. A former director of the US Centers for Disease Control, he had played a pivotal role in the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s. He was well known and well liked by virtually everyone in the universe of global health. As the chair of the Atlanta-based Child Survival Taskforce—a consensus-building group formed in the wake of the launching of GOBI—Foege had deftly sewn together cooperation from many disparate actors (including WHO, the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, and the Rockefeller Foundation). Deliberate and unflappable, he had been able to soothe egos Grant had trodden upon.

  Foege understood and wholeheartedly supported Grant’s child survival revolution and was trusted by many at UNICEF. And more importantly, he shared Grant’s zeal. To ensure that zeal—or some variety of it anyway—continued, there was simply no better choice than Bill Foege. Rohde and many others agreed.

  The UN secretary general appoints the executive director of UNICEF, but there is always a secretive, behind-the-scenes tussle that sways the decision. The Europeans would undoubtedly front a candidate or two. Pressure was also building to appoint a woman to lead UNICEF. There was no guarantee that Grant’s wish would be honored.

  But Jon Rohde believed that, given Grant’s near epic stature, there was no one who could say no to him—as long as he was still alive. Grant would have a much better chance of getting Foege installed, Rohde felt, if he stepped down now and made a forceful case for the transition.

  Rohde wrote his friend a letter urging him to do just that. “I felt I owed it to him,” the blunt pediatrician says. “He didn’t have long.”

  No one can ignore you, Rohde wrote. No one will deny you your wish, your pick for the next executive director, as long as you are still breathing. But you have to resign in enough time to make it happen.

  Grant disregarded the letter.

  “He did not come to grips with his own mortality very well,” says Rohde. He describes Grant’s attitude: “I’ve got too much to do to die.”

  His denial edged into delusion. Instead of focusing on his successor and other important matters, Grant was concerned about getting his carpet cleaned. He wanted to get his apartment ready so he could entertain guests once he was better. He bought tickets for him and Ellan for a cruise along the Alaskan Inside Passage that he would never be able to use. Even when it was clear his cancer was inoperable and that his days were preciously finite, part of him never accepted it. He somehow believed he was going to resume his life and his mission. He was determined to “bulldoze reality,” says Cahill.

  Yet he made some concessions to reality. During his last few weeks, he called Foege numerous times. “He would call me at ten or eleven at night with an idea,” Foege recalls, “and he would say, ‘I just don’t want this idea to be ignored.’ ”

  Rohde and Adamson made an in-person appeal to urge Grant to devote his remaining energy to the matter of his successor. They went up to Ellan Young’s house on Croton-on-Hudson, known as Camp Young, where Grant was living and receiving hospice care. He worked there as well. They sat in wicker chairs on a deck overlooking a pond. Grant faced th
e pond and Rohde and Adamson faced Grant. It was an unusually warm winter day. Grant was wrapped in a blanket. He needed to sleep a lot and had just woken up from a nap.

  In all fairness, it was, of course, not in Grant’s control to name his successor. Adamson and Rohde knew that. But they believed, recalls Adamson, “that if he put his mind to it, he’d find some way of end-running this one, too.”

  They also knew that Grant had become ever more determined to meet the mid-decade goals, and nothing—not Kenya, not Booz Allen, not his successor—was going to shunt his attention away from them.

  But that’s exactly what they were asking him to do.

  Whatever capacity and energy and time and imagination and vision you have to change things in this world, they told him, all of it is now best directed at ensuring the right person succeeds you, a person who will carry on all that you are trying to do.

  Grant’s face registered a familiar expression, tight-lipped, stubborn, and slightly closed off. It was a look Adamson instantly recognized—it meant Grant didn’t want to have this conversation. “He had the same reaction to a number of topics that he had some aversion to,” says Adamson. “He never wanted to talk about AIDS, he never wanted to talk about contraception.”

  And so he turned them down.

  Not only did he refuse to think about resigning, his term was extended into 1995, though it was wretchedly clear he would never complete it (part of this may have grown out of the UN secretary general’s delay in appointing a successor).

  Grant’s personal notebooks from around this time show a blizzard of musings—medical concerns, his thoughts on executive board meetings, personal issues, immunization figures. His handwriting was tiny, a frenzied cursive, each word marching headlong into the next. On several pages, under the heading “Castles in the Sky,” he seemed to have listed some of his many accomplishments, dating back to his college years. Stuck throughout the pads were layer upon layer of Post-it notes, adhered in stacks of ten and twenty. One of the notes tracked his temperature and medications over the last several months. Another contained a dense flurry of stats about Ethiopia’s progress on a host of issues.

  On December 19, he wrote a “New Year’s memo” to staff and noted that he was “thankful for the two extensions I’ve been given—one by the secretary general and another by my doctor.” He then used the occasion of New Year’s to nudge his staff to work harder. “My number one new year’s resolution this year is to go all out, to give my best energies, for achievement of the goals,” he wrote. “I sincerely hope that this will be at the top of your action agenda, too.” And he layered on an exhortation that must have seemed like overkill: “We owe it to the 2.5 million additional children whose lives will be saved if the goals are reached.”

  About a week later, Grant drifted into another coma for about eighteen hours and nearly died. Shortly afterward, he started working again. He also resumed an extended interview session being conducted at his bedside by Jon Rohde, Richard Jolly, and his son Jamie; they were attempting to assemble his oral history. They asked him about his philosophy, his influences, and his upbringing, and he answered, at times, lucidly and at length. His interviewers pushed him on several topics but not too hard, distinctly aware of how weak he was. It was a frenzied, valiant, yet incomplete effort that probably should have taken place much earlier—but Grant never would have offered them the time.

  He officially resigned on Monday, January 23. He was seventy-two. After another bout of unconsciousness, he was hospitalized again. His small room at the Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, New York, became filled with letters and expressions of gratitude from leaders all over the world. A huge, four-foot-tall card signed by hundreds of people from UNICEF was propped at the foot of his bed. Friends from numerous countries had sent him various miracle cures and homeopathic remedies, including an envelope of ginger roots from China. He had tried them all. His son Jamie, who was a teacher of Transcendental Meditation and who had his father’s open, earnest face, thought meditation could help. Grant tried that, too. (He had, in fact, been meditating for over a year and had had some “excellent experiences,” Jamie recalls.)

  There was a small button he could press with his thumb to give himself a dose of morphine. When Adamson was visiting, he held up the morphine button and boasted, “I’ve hardly used any of this.” On another occasion, when Rohde was in the room, Grant excitedly proclaimed: “You see this button? I can give myself a shot!” Rohde recalls that the nurses took away the intravenous morphine because Grant had been using it too much. They came in and asked him if he was in a lot of pain, and he said no.

  “Well, you’ve been pressing this button quite a lot,” one nurse said, adding, “You’re supposed to press it when you have pain.”

  “Oh,” Grant said. “It makes me feel really good.”

  He never stopped working. He even used one of the letters that had arrived in his room as a final and powerful point of leverage. It was a short note from President Clinton, thanking Grant for everything he had done for the children of the world. He received it on Thursday, January 26. Grant knew the letter gave him a fleeting opportunity born out of his impending death. On Friday, he insisted a response be sent to Clinton. He wanted to ask the president to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United States was, embarrassingly, one of the few holdouts to not endorse the landmark treaty guaranteeing children’s basic rights. And Grant wanted the president to know that this was his last official act—his final request. How could the president of the United States refuse a dying man? Mary Cahill faxed the letter to the White House on Friday afternoon.

  On Saturday morning, a nurse came into Grant’s room and asked how he was doing. Gaunt, weak, wheezy, barely able to speak, Grant answered: “Full of enthusiasm!” He then raised his frail, sinewy fist in the air and said, “Fight, fight, fight!”

  And on his last day, he proceeded to do just that. Adamson wrote in the anthology about Grant published by UNICEF: “It sounds like an over-dramatic figure of speech to say someone fights for a cause until the last breath in his body. In Jim’s case, it was quite literally true.”

  Mary Cahill was alone with him on Saturday for about forty-five minutes. She had arranged for him to make a few calls to friends and staff members, a few last goodbyes. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he murmured how important it was for UNICEF to continue its policies. She told him that, in his absence, Richard Jolly (who was the acting executive director) had said during meetings that everyone must go on pursuing Jim’s vision and work. He muttered, “Good, good, good.” He then added that both Kul Gautam and Nyi Nyi were also key people in keeping the cause alive.

  At some point, he asked her to pass him his razor and a handheld mirror. As he shaved in his bed, he said to her: “Today is a very important day for me, Mary.”

  Then he looked toward the window to the left of his bed, as if something had suddenly drawn his attention.

  “The light coming in the window is bright, isn’t it?” he said.

  Cahill peered at the window. She did not see a bright light. It was a dull, gray, January day outside. But she agreed: “Oh, yes, it is bright.”

  His sons Jamie and John were soon at his bedside; Grant’s youngest son Bill was en route, in a plane. In case he didn’t arrive in time, he called the hospital room and was able to speak to his father over the phone. Ellan was not there.

  Grant was semiconscious and hallucinating. He seemed to think that he was in a UNICEF board meeting, and that he was addressing his directors. At one point, as his son John later recalled, he blurted out: “And I wrote it myself!”

  Within the last forty-eight hours, he had told Jamie that he still thought he could conquer the cancer. “There has to be a way I can beat this,” he had insisted in his now whistle-high voice. “There is always a solution.”

  Grant was determined to “end-run” his own death.

  As his life separated itself from him, as he sank deeper into
unconsciousness, his last moments seemed fixed not on his family or his wife or Ethel or his childhood or the epic sweep of his own time on this earth—but on UNICEF, on the cause, on the children whose fight he never surrendered.

  Grant told those in the room he wanted his death to be an inspiration to others at UNICEF to meet the mid-decade and year 2000 goals. With faint, slurred speech, he asked them to carry on his work for children and to continue to improve the United Nations.

  He died quietly in his sleep at around one in the afternoon of January 28, 1995.

  On that day, in jungle hamlets and mountain villages, in cacophonous slums and sprawling refugee camps, on worn concrete floors and under roofs thatched of rice straw and banana leaves, in clay brick homes, on rutted, red dirt roads, and on scorching swaths of sand, children cried and screamed and sang and giggled and toddled and ran and fell and got back up and climbed on their mothers’ laps and pulled their siblings’ hair and gazed out in wonder at the big, bright world that swirled around them. Millions of boys and girls whose lives were reclaimed, whose stories were allowed to continue, who were not mourned or grieved or buried, but instead were loved and held and fretted over and scolded and prepared for the challenges of living, of surviving, all because of a man they had never met and whose name they would likely never know.

  They filed in from the cold, in heavy coats and gloves and scarves, stepping into the cavernous, resonant, Gothic Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in northern Manhattan. They hugged each other briefly, shook hands, and quickly found their seats. A neat procession led by white-robed priests wended past the tall, intricately carved marble pulpit, as organ music blared against the soaring stone pillars and blue stained-glass windows. In the procession were Grant’s family, friends, top advisers (including Adamson and Jolly), and at the end, a special guest, first lady Hillary Clinton. On February 10, 1995, about 2,500 people—dignitaries, celebrities, politicians, UN staff—had come to honor a man who, in many cases, had wooed them and challenged them and pestered them to take up his fight.