A Mighty Purpose (16 page)

Before one of Grant’s early meetings with the prince, Assadi, who is from Iran, gave his boss some pointers on interacting with Arab leaders. He told him, for instance, that in Arab countries, it is customary to offer senior leaders the seat farthest from the door. “Jim Grant was very informal,” says Assadi. “Things like that, he had no clue.”

Grant once made a faux pas when meeting with a Muslim official in Indonesia, according to Assadi, who had heard about the encounter from a UNICEF regional director. Whipping out his packet of ORS, Grant reportedly told the government minister that not only was the solution effective for saving kids’ lives, it was also a great cure for a hangover. It apparently had not occurred to Grant that his devout Muslim host did not drink.

Prince Talal became a vocal UNICEF booster and persuaded several other Arab countries to start a fund-raising consortium called the Arab Gulf Fund, or Agfund, that would support various UN causes. According to a 1981
Newsweek
profile, Saddam Hussein, then president of Iraq, handed Talal a blank check in response to his fund-raising drive.

As the churn of fund-raising and travel and meetings suctioned away more and more time from Grant’s already taxed and battered schedule, his personal life was diced into smaller and smaller pieces. He protected morsels of time with Ethel, and he corresponded with his sons and stepmother. On June 8, 1984,
he welcomed his first grandchild, a girl named Joy, the daughter of his middle son, Jamie.

At some point later that year or in early 1985, Peter Adamson and Ethel persuaded Jim to go to a movie—to take him away from his work just for a few hours. They went to see
A Passage to India
, David Lean’s film based on E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel about British colonial India (a time and place Grant had, of course, experienced firsthand). Grant sat with his wife and his friend, but he did not seem the least bit interested in the movie. “He didn’t really understand the film at all,” recalls Adamson. “He wasn’t really there.”

Many people who encountered Grant, says Adamson, were “taken aback by the strength of his commitment and dedication … at the expense of all other aspects of life.”

It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke: “I met the president of El Salvador at a cocktail party last night.”

Agop Kayayan was sitting at his cluttered desk in Guatemala City at around nine in the morning when the phone rang. It was Mary Cahill, Jim Grant’s executive assistant, who quickly put her boss on the phone. Grant’s voice was unusually charged, and he sounded very excited about something. Kayayan grew instantly nervous. The executive director of UNICEF doesn’t just call you out of the blue to say he met a head of state at a cocktail party in New York.

So Kayayan, a jovial, chain-smoking Armenian-Lebanese man who was UNICEF’s representative for Central America, replied simply, “Yes, Mr. Grant.”

The conversation that followed, according to Kayayan, would change his life and set in motion an extraordinary series of events.

Grant continued his story about the president of El Salvador: “I asked him if we would have 80 percent immunization in El Salvador. He said, ‘Mr. Grant, don’t you understand, I have a war in my country?’ ”

Kayayan grew more anxious as he listened to the story and tried to anticipate where Grant was going with this—and what part in it Kayayan was supposed to play.

Grant went on: “I told him, ‘Why don’t we try to stop the war?’ ”

Then Kayayan knew what was coming, and the panic in him welled up.

“Then, the president says, ‘It’s not so easy—the Catholic Church has been trying many times.’ Then I said, ‘Can we try?’ The president said, ‘You are welcome.’ ”

Finally, Grant wound up his story. “Agoop,” he said, adding an extra
o
to Kayayan’s first name. “I want you to see how we can arrange a truce in El Salvador.”

As his mind whirred, Kayayan joked: “Mr. Grant, you are saying this to the next representative … you’ll have to find a new representative to do this.”

“I know you’re joking,” Grant said. “And I know you’re going to do it.”

Kayayan was apprehensive, but he was also excited. “I like things that are out of the common. I like challenges,” he says now.

He accepted Grant’s challenge. He immediately called El Salvador’s minister of health. Kayayan relayed what Grant had told him, but the minister did not seem at all surprised. He had
received a similar call from the president. The men agreed they had to do something. The question that then clawed its way into their conversation was a gargantuan one: How?

El Salvador’s vicious civil war, which began in 1980, would eventually claim more than 75,000 lives and unleash some of the most hideous violence in recent Latin American history—much of it perpetrated by US-backed, right-wing paramilitary death squads. The assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romeo by a sniper as he said Mass in San Salvador on March 24, 1980, was the opening chapter in thirteen years of terror. Romero was a forceful champion of the poor, who spoke out against the abuses committed by both the left and the right—but it was the right who felt most threatened by him. The horror quickly escalated. Romero’s funeral was bombed, and attendees were sprayed with machine gun fire; as many as forty mourners were killed in the ensuing panic. Later that year, four American churchwomen were raped and murdered by members of the El Salvador National Guard; their bodies were interred in shallow graves along the side of a road. More bodies would appear, dumped above ground, in plain view, with arms missing or eyes gouged out—each one a warning from the death squads to keep quiet, each one a reminder of the vise of fear that clamped down on the country.

The most shocking atrocity occurred in December 1980, when members of the US-trained Atlacatl Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion massacred as many as one thousand civilians—including many children—near the remote village
of El Mozote. The violence was stupefying. According to Mark Danner’s blow-by-blow account, published in the
New Yorker
thirteen years later, the soldiers started with the men, gunning them down and then beheading them with machetes. Next, they set about raping, torturing, and killing the women and girls, some as young as twelve. They saved the little children for last, hacking them with machetes or crushing their skulls with rifle butts.

When reports of the massacre were first published in the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
, the governments of both El Salvador and the United States staunchly denied them. The Reagan administration considered El Salvador a critical front in the Cold War and funneled billions of dollars in aid to the government. Even the merciless mass killing of children by government military units was apparently not going to stand in the way of that. The impunity of the death squads therefore seemed impenetrable.

The president of El Salvador at the time, José Napoleón Duarte, had dismissed accounts of the El Mozote slaughter as a “guerrilla trick.” A civil engineer and former mayor of San Salvador, who was once beaten and forced into exile after opposing the right-wing theft of an election, Duarte was actually considered a moderate. He was first appointed to the presidency in 1980 after joining a civilian-military junta that had pledged reforms after five decades of military dictatorship. He served until 1982 and reclaimed the office in 1984 by winning a national election. Duarte, the country’s first freely elected president in fifty years, vowed to crack down on the death squads (though it became clear some were beyond his control). The man Duarte had defeated, Roberto D’Aubuisson, was a graduate of the US
Army’s infamous School of the Americas and the founder of El Salvador’s ultraconservative Arena party. D’Aubuisson also happened to be deranged and murderous, but this did not prevent Senator Jesse Helms and other US Republicans from staunchly supporting him. The UN Truth Commission for El Salvador later deemed D’Aubuisson guilty of ordering Archbishop Romero’s murder. Next to him, almost anyone seemed palatable. Duarte was a cofounder of the country’s Christian Democratic Party and a political survivor who hewed close to the political center. The stocky and beleaguered man, who sometimes wore bulbous glasses and reportedly nursed a messiah complex, had himself received death threats from both sides.

Jim Grant would, no doubt, have approached whoever was in power. El Salvador presented an unrivaled PR opportunity—if the child survival revolution could take root in a place racked by war and death and constant terror, then it could take root anywhere. He could hold the example up to any country that resisted a large immunization campaign. “If it was a success, you could tell the rest of the world, ‘Look, don’t give me silly arguments about why you can’t do something when a country completely destroyed by war is doing it right now,’ ” says Kayayan. “That was Grant’s major interest, and he mentioned it very, very often—too often for my taste.”

But it was not his only interest. Grant would include the following stark fact in nearly every speech and press conference on El Salvador: the number of children in the country dying from vaccine-preventable diseases (an estimated twenty thousand a year) far exceeded those killed by bullets. He would call on all
Salvadorans to fight the “common enemies” of measles, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough. But in a country so riven by carnage, would anyone buy it?

The first person that had to be convinced, of course, was Duarte. But before approaching the president, Grant had consulted the US ambassador to El Salvador, Tom Pickering. A tested diplomat who had served in Nigeria and Jordan, Pickering had come to his post in El Salvador in 1983. Grant knew him from his days in Washington. A strong supporter of Duarte, Pickering had himself drawn the ire of the death squads—a right-wing plot to assassinate him was reported in the
New York Times
in June 1984. He lived in San Salvador’s wealthy San Benito neighborhood, in a house guarded by Marines and surrounded by “a very high tennis court fence for rocket protection.” On his backyard patio, next to a swimming pool, the tall, bald, businesslike ambassador would host guests for breakfast.

In the fall of 1984, according to correspondence, one of those guests was Jim Grant. He and Pickering spoke several times. During one of those conversations, Grant asked his old Washington friend what he thought about UNICEF spearheading a mass immunization campaign in El Salvador.

“He was discussing the importance of getting these kids vaccinations and inoculations,” Pickering recalls.

The ambassador listened to Grant and then tossed out an idea: “Why don’t we try for a ceasefire?”

Grant immediately glommed on to the concept. During moments like this—when a new, transformative idea bobbed up—Grant’s eyes would often sparkle with childlike mirth.

“Do you think that would work?” Grant asked.

Pickering said he thought it would, because the guerrillas had already agreed to limited ceasefires on other occasions (though nothing as grand and complicated as this would entail). Duarte had also initiated talks with the guerrillas about a peace process.

The two men then discussed logistics. Pickering asked how long it would take. Grant guessed a week. Was he ready to mobilize? Could he get all the training and resources in order? Without hesitating, Grant said yes, he could take care of it.

“It was the usual Jim thing,” Pickering says. “He was never in any doubt.”

Brokering a ceasefire in the midst of national civil war for the purpose of immunizing kids would be a first—at least on this scale. Nils Thedin, a Swedish elder statesman on the UNICEF board, had articulated a vision several years earlier of children as “a zone of peace.” In the late 1960s, before Jim Grant’s time, UNICEF and the Red Cross had delivered aid to both sides during the Nigerian civil war. During the Vietnam War, UNICEF provided relief to children in both North and South Vietnam. But a national military truce to aid children? That was novel. It struck some as truly zany. Would either side really go for that? Wouldn’t it be seen as sign of weakness? The paranoia in El Salvador had become calcified—not even Jim Grant could chisel through it.

Adamson recalls one meeting at UNICEF headquarters when Grant mentioned the ceasefire idea. The suggestion was met with a pause and “an almost audible gasp.”

The plan invited a label of extreme naïveté. Military conflicts can’t just be stopped—it almost sounded like the fanciful musing of a tie-dyed couch surfer whose only experience with armed combat was watching
Apocalypse Now
. But Jim Grant knew war intimately. As a lieutenant in the US Army during World War II, he had helped hold off the Japanese siege of the Burmese town of Myitkyina and would later win a Bronze Star.

Once while flying in a two-seat plane to interrogate some Japanese prisoners, Grant and his pilot had taken a detour to throw grenades at Japanese positions. The plane was hit with a bullet from below, and they were forced to land on a sandbar on the banks of the Irrawaddy River. They scrambled to fix the plane and, as they were doing so, a Japanese boat began speeding toward them. The boat had a gun, and it started firing. The plane was hit two or three times as the pilot furiously tinkered with the engine. Finally he got the plane working again, and he and Grant took off just in time, skimming over the water and narrowly escaping capture by the Japanese.

Toward the end of the war, Grant had worked under the command of General Joseph Stilwell and had later been tasked with helping General George Marshall negotiate an ultimately failed truce during China’s civil war. He had remained in China after World War II to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), helping deliver aid to the Communists (the jeep he drove had sixteen bullet holes in it from various excursions).

Grant knew what he was proposing in El Salvador would not be easy. But Pickering did not see it as quixotic. “To me, it was a ‘crazy like a fox idea,’ ” he says. “I said, ‘Geez, let’s try this … we could get people to start thinking about ceasefires and ending this conflict.’ From my point of view, it had a lot of political possibilities.” He adds, “I had to really depend on Jim to sell it, but he was willing to sell it.”