A Mighty Purpose (21 page)

The last day of a Grant field visit usually ended with a marathon session of thank-you note writing. Jon Rohde had moved to India in 1986 and worked as a consultant for a global health
nonprofit and also for UNICEF. Rolf Carriere remembers staying up until dawn on several occasions with Grant and others at Rohde’s house in New Delhi, drinking wine and writing thank-you letters to members of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s government. “[Grant] would have to be at the airport at six a.m. to fly on to the next place,” says Carriere, who then ran UNICEF’s health and nutrition programs in India. “He would work throughout the night, and we would all be there with him.”

This letter-writing all-nighter became standard practice. The letters had to be written before Grant left, so he could sign them. They were not brief notes. Each one summarized what had been discussed and reminded a minister or bureaucrat or even a head of state what he or she had agreed to and what, in Jim Grant’s opinion, would be needed to make it happen. Written in the most deferential diplomatic tone, they were nonetheless pointed reminders:
you promised to do this for your country’s children, and I’m going to hold you to it
. For those staying up until an ungodly hour to help compose the notes, it was hard to complain when your boss was staying up, too.

After an eighteen-hour day of meetings in Ankara, Turkey, Grant and several staffers, including Steve Woodhouse, returned to their guesthouse late in the evening. Most were exhausted and probably ready to collapse. But, as Woodhouse recalled, the day was not over yet. “C’mon,” said Grant effervescently. “We’ll have a meeting in my room to discuss next steps.” He then bounded up a long flight of about forty stairs, the first one to reach the top. Everybody else was younger than Grant but struggled to scramble up after him. On another occasion, when one staffer
complained that Grant was driving people too hard and asked how they were all supposed to cope, Grant’s reply was “I think you all need to sleep faster!”

One high-level staff meeting in a Bangkok hotel conference room dragged on into the early morning, as Grant grilled country representatives one by one about their immunization programs, like an instructor administering a withering oral exam.
Why is your coverage so low? What are your biggest obstacles? Who do you need to speak with to get things moving? What can you as the representative do?
If you hadn’t done your homework, or didn’t have adequate answers, you were exposed and embarrassed in front of all your colleagues.

Finally, at one a.m., India representative Eimi Watanabe raised her hand, like a tentative kid at the back of the classroom.

Grant pointed to her.

“Can we continue this in the morning?” she asked.

Grant looked at her. “No,” he said.

The meeting went on.

He would refuse many such pleas—whether it was to end a meeting or reconsider an eleventh-hour staff posting. Several UNICEF veterans have stories of getting a call from Grant, often in the wee hours, when he would share the surprise of a new job halfway around the world—in some cases with only a few days’ notice. According to his executive assistant Mary Cahill, one woman protested Grant’s decision to send her to Saudi Arabia—a country known for its harsh and brazenly unequal treatment of women.

“What if men ask me to have sex with them?” she asked.

“Simple,” he replied. “You tell them no.”

In another instance, immediately after Steve Woodhouse had moved his family to New York at Grant’s request, Grant called and said he now wanted Woodhouse to go to Senegal. It would be a short-term assignment to help with the immunization campaign. Woodhouse pointed out that he had just relocated his whole family to a new city. Then he tried another argument.

“I can’t speak French!” he pleaded.

Grant was unmoved. “Neither can I,” he said. “That doesn’t matter.”

Woodhouse went to Senegal.

It was not just the late nights or last-minute global reassignments that grated on people. Grant was completely altering the way UNICEF worked in the field. Before him, many country representatives did not meet with heads of state and did not personally lobby them. They were supposed to get along with those in power, not challenge them. And immunization was the government’s job—how can a UNICEF field operative be held responsible for something the government is supposed to do? Grant’s response, according to former assistant Carl Tinstman: “Yes, it’s the government’s job, but not all governments are doing it as well as they should, so it’s
your
job as the UNICEF representative to make sure the government does it.”

Some representatives protested that they feared trying to force their governments to do things would get them thrown out of the country. Plus, it was not always easy to get a meeting with a minister, much less a president. Tinstman remembers
one senior representative raising his hand during a meeting and making a plaintive plea: “Mr. Grant, you want me to meet with the president? I’ve never done that. I’ve never met with any president.”

“Well, you will now,” Grant said. “If you’re having difficulty, I’m going to visit your country, and you and I are going to see the head of state together.”

This modus operandi pried open unparalleled channels of influence with world leaders. “The access really increased—it was absolutely extraordinary,” says longtime staffer Fouad Kronfol. More than anyone else ever had, he asserts, Grant managed to “prick the imagination of all the heads of state and convince them to do more for their children.”

Tinstman, a versatile American who rapidly adapted to new situations, traveled with Grant on numerous occasions. His job was to help his boss prepare for meetings and get him from here to there. It was also, as he puts it, to be “a donkey.” “You have to carry a computer, you have to carry papers. You have to carry all kinds of stuff.”

And you had to keep up with Jim Grant. Making this even more difficult was Grant’s penchant for traveling with only one carry-on. Which meant that “you’re bloody well only [bringing] a carry-on suitcase also,” Tinstman says.

Grant had no time for laundry or dry cleaners either. He packed everything in his carry-on, washed his clothes in the hotel bathroom sink, and hung them around the room to dry. He wore a special, wash-and-wear, wrinkle-free Brooks Brothers suit that he would clean himself. To get the wrinkles out of it,
apparently all he had to do was hang the suit in the bathroom, run the shower hot, and fill the room with steam.

Fancy accommodations were not required. The most important consideration was staying wherever the government had recommended. In one case, in Uganda, this was a dilapidated old hotel, in a room with no toilet seat and a door that didn’t fully shut. Grant didn’t complain.

He sometimes traveled solo. Many people who met Grant at the airport were surprised that he did not have a big entourage, and, in this respect, the contrast with other UN leaders was striking. “I would sometimes be at the airport when other UN agency heads would come in,” says Richard Reid, the American logistical dynamo who had overseen the Turkish immunization campaign. “And one of them had three different people carrying his bags. He was like a British viceroy arriving in Afghanistan with two hundred and sixty-two camels. Just astonishing how simple Jim was and, at the same time, so able to make the waves part.” Nonetheless, all of this irritated Ethel, who believed that Jim did not take proper care of himself. It also spawned a trend in UNICEF: the “cult of no-suitcase.”

Joe Judd, who worked in a number of UNICEF country offices, recalls one of his supervisors fretting about whether to check a suitcase while on a trip with Grant. “My boss said, ‘I can’t take a big suitcase. Jim Grant will think I’m not with it,’ ” says Judd. “It became absolutely ridiculous … I think the sales of wash-and-wear shirts went up in the world.”

The spartan carry-on tradition was born out of sheer, unvarnished practicality—make every minute count. With so many
connections packed into such short periods of time, the potential for losing a checked bag rose exponentially. There was also a tint of bravado. “When you got off that plane, you were right in the thick of things,” says Judd. “There was going to be no pause, no slowdown, no surrender to waiting for a suitcase.”

The refusal to pause or rest caught up with Grant sometimes. At an airport in Swaziland, he was racing down the plane’s stairway during a rainstorm. An airport shuttle was parked about three feet away. To avoid the rain—and presumably to save a few seconds—Grant leaped from the stairs to the shuttle. Badly misjudging the distance, he collided with the top of the shuttle door and crumpled to the ground. Tinstman, on his first trip with Grant, was mortified. “I thought, ‘Oh my God … now we’ve lost him.’ ” He and several other passengers helped Grant up. Tinstman could see a lump growing on his boss’s forehead. Dazed, Grant sank into a seat and rested his head on the seat in front of him. “Are you all right?” Tinstman asked. “Do you need a doctor?”

“No,” Grant mumbled. “I’m all right. I’m just a little stunned.”

While meeting with the prime minister of Japan, after a full day without sleep, he dozed off as his host was speaking. As he later recounted to several staff members, the prime minister tapped him on the shoulder.

“Mr. Grant?” the prime minister said. “Perhaps you would like to use my bathroom to freshen up?”

He fought his fatigue fiercely. “His tiredness was defiance,” says Adamson. “I could see him wanting to sleep … Whereas other people would give in to it, you would see him bringing himself around.”

To chip away at his burgeoning sleep deficit, Grant would take catnaps—twenty- or thirty-minute snatches of slumber. In the car, plane, train—he could conk out anywhere. Former UNICEF Rwanda and Somalia staffer Ian MacLeod remembers traveling with Grant in a mammoth Hercules military plane as it flew into or out of Somalia. There were little metal benches in the back of the plane. Grant took off his suit jacket, curled up on a bench and was out instantly. MacLeod was amazed. “There’s infernal noise in the back of a Hercules,” he says. A half hour later, Grant popped back up, slipped on his coat, and adjusted his tie. “He woke up and looked like he’d slept for twelve hours,” marvels MacLeod.

When Grant started suffering bouts of stabbing back pain from a slipped disc, he did not slow down or adjust his schedule. If his back gave him trouble, no matter where he was, he would lie on the floor for some temporary relief. Reportedly, this sometimes meant lying in the aisle of a plane, midflight. He would conduct meetings flat on his back in the middle of the floor, as everyone gathered around and peered down at their executive director.

During a trip to New Delhi, Alan Court (who had helped lead UNICEF’s response to the 1984 Ethiopian famine) heard a knock at the door of his hotel room. It was 11:30 p.m. He opened the door to see Richard Jolly, who said Grant wanted to see Court. “But try to make it quick,” Jolly cautioned. “Jim’s not well.” Court put on some pants and a shirt and walked down to Jim’s room. Ethel answered the door and invited him to sit down in the common area. “You know Jim has a back problem,” she
said before going into the bedroom to fetch her husband. Jim hobbled out, in obvious pain, and gingerly lowered himself onto the floor beneath Court. He lay flat and looked up at his guest.

“What would you say if I were to offer you the position of representative in Chad?” Grant said.

Court was stunned. Here was his boss lying on his back on the floor, offering him a job. Court sat on the edge of his chair hovering over Grant. He said yes.

Court was with Jim and Ethel on another trip when they experienced a brief moment of respite. In Kathmandu, Nepal, in November 1986, while meeting with the king, Jim had overrun the clock by forty-five minutes. He and Ethel missed their flight. Court, then a program officer in Nepal, booked a later one. Suddenly, they had some time to kill. They decided to visit the nearby Boudhanath Tibetan Buddhist temple. Ethel put her arm in Jim’s, and they walked along the paths below the ancient stupa that loomed in the night. They strolled in the glow of oil lamps as the chanting of monks drifted on a gentle breeze. The rest of the group hung back—a moment like this was rare.

By the end of 1986, the chorus of naysayers and critics dwindled as Grant’s child survival revolution gained momentum in every corner of the developing world. Nearly one hundred countries and more than four hundred nongovernmental organizations had joined the campaign for universal child immunization. Donors and millions of volunteers from all sectors of society across the globe—priests, imams, monks, rabbis, teachers,
students, police officers, soldiers, artists, nurses, doctors, athletes, mothers and fathers—had united to create what Grant would call “a grand alliance for children.”

UNICEF spent $57 million on immunization activities in 1986, providing 500 million doses of vaccine—a 24 percent increase over the previous year. Global immunization coverage had more than doubled since 1980, now reaching over 40 percent in all categories. The supply of oral rehydration salts—the other “twin engine” of child survival, as Grant dubbed it—had grown by six times over the past four years, in large part due to UNICEF’s advocacy. These two interventions were now saving an estimated 1.5 million lives every year, according to UNICEF.

The man who had sparked it all liked to keep the spotlight off himself or, at the very least, pull others into its gleam with him. Grant liberally doled out credit for these achievements, making a particular effort to lather praise on his erstwhile adversary, WHO. “Make sure WHO looks good,” he frequently instructed. This was not about being nice. Grant knew he could not prevail without WHO or without the International Committee for the Red Cross or without USAID, among many others. He continued to recruit allies and funders for his “grand alliance”—the more diverse his coalition and the broader the base of support, the more quickly obstacles would fall. Though he tried to remain in the background, though he was exceedingly modest, Grant’s quiet fervor was sustained by a “great sense of self,” says Cahill. “He had a great belief in himself and a great belief in the cause.”