A Mighty Purpose (22 page)

Packed between his constant trips abroad were dense batches of meetings in New York, Washington, and Atlanta—with
donors, staff, the UNICEF board, the Child Survival Taskforce, congressional committees, various UN committees and bodies. And many mornings at the Grants’ “roof house” were working breakfasts, catered by Ethel (as one staffer recalls: “there was poor Ethel, making bacon and eggs, while Jim carried on”). He rarely watched TV or movies and never took in any sports; he once remarked to one of his sons: “I can’t believe how much time I save by not watching sports!” Often the only time UNICEF’s head of personnel, Manou Assadi, could find with Grant was in the limo on the way to JFK Airport; after Grant got out, Assadi would ride back to UNICEF headquarters by himself.

An agitator, a pest, an irritant extraordinaire, Grant took every opportunity—clambered upon any podium, pedestal, or bully pulpit available—to plead the case of the world’s poor and dying children. On television news shows and on college campuses, in the halls of the UN and the corridors of power in Washington, he continued to decry the “obscenity” of the preventable deaths of millions of children. On the eve of UNICEF’s fortieth anniversary on December 11, 1986, when the annual
State of the World’s Children
report was released, he told the
New York Times
that “the most shameful fact of the late 20th century is that every week, over a quarter of a million of the world’s children are being killed, largely needlessly.” He frequently used a quote he attributed to writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: “When we know how to relieve torment and do not, then we join the tormentors.”

Because he knew statistics failed to convey the true horror of mass child deaths—and because those deaths were mostly
ignored by the mainstream media—Grant deployed simple, blunt metaphors. The number of children dying each day, he said, “is the equivalent of having two hundred jumbo jets packed with children crash every day with half killed and half crippled for life.” Or he invoked an event that had been covered in the news: the number of Indian children dying each day from vaccine-preventable diseases was higher than the total death toll of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal. His analogies didn’t always fly. Speaking of the shift in global attitudes toward children, he once described UNICEF as “the yeast of this historic change.” However apt the analogy, it’s hard to get inspired by yeast.

As his movement grew, emergencies both “loud” and “silent” flared up in dozens of countries. UNICEF constantly struggled to respond. The agency’s regular programs—those not included in Grant’s revolution—also had to keep operating. Many staff members felt that Grant gave short shrift to a host of other issues: water and sanitation, child protection, women’s empowerment, the fight against HIV—anything not blinking brightly on his radar screen.

UNICEF’s resources were growing markedly at the time, but the pie was still only so big; under Grant, child survival would always get the biggest slice. Without survival, of course, not much else matters. A blunt sentiment expressed by several staffers:
You can’t educate a child if he’s dead
. (Though education was an issue Grant had long valued and was, of course, tightly intertwined with survival. Before GOBI, he had, in fact, initially considered making primary education the focus of his “quantum leap.”)

Ultimately, the child survival revolution and Grant’s single-mindedness were as strategic as they were moral. His
first priority was to figure out how to help as many children as possible: What could be done to save the most young lives? The next step was finding a “doable” solution. Part of it was the science: vaccines and ORS were both cheap and effective and ready to be put to widespread use. But it was also about marketability—could he sell it to donors? If something was abstract, or required a long time to explain, its “doability” would diminish. GOBI lent itself to a quick elevator pitch. And what many of his critics failed to realize was that child survival was only phase one, or as Rohde put it, “a foot in the door.” If GOBI did succeed, Grant planned to use it as a launch pad for progress in other areas (water, education, primary health care, etc.). But first he needed that walloping, seismic success.

This is not to say that he should come out completely unscathed for skirting difficult topics, such as the fight against HIV and AIDS. The burgeoning epidemic in the mid-to-late 1980s seemed messy and uncomfortable (Grant was squeamish on issues related to sex), and delving into it risked drawing the ire of the Catholic Church—plus, there was no magic bullet, no vaccine, no ORS packet. He would eventually give HIV more than token treatment, but many felt it was too little and too late.

His attention was also divvied up among regions of the world, and one onto which he heaped copious amounts was Africa. Fouad Kronfol, then UNICEF’s Africa section chief, had encouraged Grant to place more emphasis on Africa, and several board members had asked him why UNICEF’s presence was so paltry in some African countries. Grant set out to remedy that, expanding and upgrading dozens of offices across
the continent and launching a major fund-raising appeal for Africa in 1986. Noting that the “tidal wave of human suffering” that racked parts of Africa in 1984 and 1985 had receded, Grant reminded donors that progress was “deceptive” and that millions of lives were still at risk. Between 1980 and 1994, UNICEF’s spending in Africa more than quintupled, going from $54.5 million per year to $303.5 million.

“Mr. Grant was one of the key UN leaders that made the UN relevant to Africa,” says Abdul Mohammed, a former UNICEF staffer and currently the chief of staff of the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan and South Sudan. “He was very committed to Africa. He felt the UN and agencies like UNICEF could make a difference. He also felt that some of the international humanitarian roles crafted in the aftermath of the Second World War must be adjusted to take Africa’s reality into account.”

To help keep the world’s eyes on Africa, Grant teamed up with former Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof to launch Sport Aid, a follow-up to Geldof’s Live Aid concert. Though Ethel found Geldof’s manners horrid—during a visit to the Grant’s roof house for breakfast, he reportedly swore up a storm and put his feet on the furniture—Grant knew the scruffy rock star had a knack for generating publicity. They hoped Sport Aid would equal or beat Live Aid, which had raised more than $100 million. Though it drew some twenty million runners from around the world for a “Race Against Time,” it fell well short. According to UNICEF, the event brought in more than $30 million to be split between the children’s agency and Geldof’s charity. One reason
for the fund-raising deficit: Sport Aid clashed with Hands-Across-America, an American fund-raiser which focused on helping the poor in the United States. Many US news outlets, it seemed, virtually ignored Sport Aid in favor of the American event. Responding to reports of aid fatigue surrounding both events, Grant wrote a letter to the
New York Times
, hailing the achievements of each and noting “the people of the world are not ‘aided’ out … They wait for their governments to catch up with them.”

By now, Grant’s relationship with the UNICEF board and with UN bureaucrats was smoother. As his successes mounted, they questioned him less. But some sizable bumps in the road still cropped up, some arguably a result of the head-spinning, ends-justify-means sense of exigency he had unleashed.

The UN’s Board of Auditors dinged him and UNICEF in an August 1986 report that noted numerous financial errors and irregularities. Among the findings: UNICEF had purchased two office buildings at a cost of $424,367, “although no appropriations had been provided in either the original or revised budget estimates”; payments had been made to UNICEF staff for relocation expenses “in the absence of an appropriate evidence of relocation”; and UNICEF had failed to submit revised budget estimates for the purchase of additional computers, instead transferring money from one budget line to another to cover the expense.

Though he may not have been aware of these particulars, Grant had given some field operatives carte blanche to move money around—or spend funds before they had them
in hand—in order to meet urgent needs that couldn’t wait for bureaucratic approval. These were generally not grave violations, but in the ossified bureaucracy of the UN, such activity hoisted red flags. Some field staff may have gone too far. But Grant did not want to know about any financial fallout. He preferred to skip UN committee meetings where budgetary matters were discussed, according to former comptroller, and later deputy executive director, Karin Sham Poo.

A year earlier, a few months after starting at UNICEF herself, Sham Poo had discovered a serious cash flow problem—a result, in part, of Grant’s rapid acceleration of activities. He had been unaware of it, because, says Sham Poo, “nobody had the guts to tell him that UNICEF was spending more than they had.”

Sham Poo had steeled herself, made an appointment to see him, and disclosed the bad news. “He did not look happy,” she says. She remembers that his face was still, stern, unmoving, but out of it gleamed his penetrating, metallic blue eyes. “His eyes were
so
blue,” she says. Those eyes could stop you, freeze you where you stood. Grant asked her what this all meant. She explained that UNICEF would have to rein in expenses, halt the paying of some bills, and lay off temporary staff. He relaxed, his face loosened. He got up, walked around, and sat down again. Then he said, “Do what you think is necessary. I’ll support it.”

When the alarming report on the audit came out in 1986, Sham Poo was on a UNICEF visit to Mali. Her boss, Deputy Executive Director Karl Eric Knutsson, sent her an urgent Telex:
Cancel your trip. Come back immediately. The Board of Auditors is not qualifying UNICEF’s audit
.

“Jim Grant was extremely upset,” she recalls, “because to get a nonqualified audit report could be a big hamper on fund-raising.” He did not yell or scream or curse, at least when Sham Poo spoke to him. He was simply stone-faced, much as he had been when she told him of the cash flow problem. This is when you knew he was upset.

Sham Poo felt the findings were unfair—“a lot of garbage,” in her words. There were some errors and technicalities, but it wasn’t purposeful mismanagement. No one had pocketed any money. Though he did not want to, Grant attended a meeting at the UN and issued a statement. It was eventually resolved, but the stain it created lingered for years.

Grant shook off distractions as he drove UNICEF more and more relentlessly. But one crisis became very hard for him to ignore. It was one of the darkest moments of his tenure and could have happened regardless of who sat in his chair.

In March 1987, police in Belgium busted a huge international child pornography ring that included a volunteer on UNICEF’s Belgian national committee. The volunteer, Michel Felu, had allegedly been using the basement of the UNICEF Belgium office to sexually abuse children and produce and store more than a thousand child porn images.

The revelation was sickening and shattering. The pedophile porn ring also included a former minister of the Belgian government, as well as parents who were charged with renting their children out to be abused. Felu and thirteen others were eventually convicted by a Belgian court, according to the Associated Press. The conviction of the former head of UNICEF Belgium,
Jozef Verbeeck—who was accused of knowing about the activities and doing nothing to stop them—was later overturned on appeal. He was acquitted.

When the news first hit, UNICEF was at the center of a maelstrom. “UNICEF has always stood for the love of children—an image now grotesquely defiled,” wrote
Newsweek
. In one respect, this statement was true, but it was also unfair. No one at UNICEF headquarters, including Jim Grant, apparently knew anything about this until the ring was discovered by police. They were as horrified as everybody else. The Belgian UNICEF committee—like the dozens of other national committees around the world—operated independently of UNICEF headquarters and had its own governing board. Felu was not a UNICEF employee. Still, he was a member of the UNICEF family.

UNICEF issued a statement expressing its shock and reaffirming its commitment to protect children from acts of exploitation. The statement also alluded to what was perhaps Grant’s greatest fear: a potentially grave injury to UNICEF’s reputation and fund-raising ability. “The first to suffer from the discredit which would unjustly fall on this organization as a result of this affair would evidently be the children of the third world,” the statement warned in part.

The chairman of the Belgian national committee board, Gilbert Jaeger, who was not implicated in the case, wrote to Grant in August informing him that he would be stepping down. In response, Grant wrote on September 4: “I share your hope that the judicial proceedings will clear away the dark clouds which
have hung over the entire organization since the unsavoury events of the recent past occurred and the trial will exonerate UNICEF and the Committee which serves it.” He added that the public’s trust in UNICEF “is our most valuable asset and we should protect and nurture it as well as we can.” He then pledged to “prepare guidelines” to “reduce, if not eliminate, the likelihood of potential ‘black sheep’ entering the fold again.”

The trial eventually yielded Grant’s wish: it became clear that UNICEF was not in any way complicit, and that Felu was indeed a “black sheep” who had exploited his position with the Belgian committee.

Throughout the entire affair, Grant did not want to talk about the case, according to several staff members. Certainly his concern about fund-raising was a valid one—the children UNICEF served could have been affected by a drop in donations. In that sense, speaking publicly about Belgium was a risk.

There may have also been a strategic consideration. The issue of child abuse fell outside the periphery of child survival. If he had made a big proclamation, it could have drawn attention away from GOBI.

But what about the children who were actually abused in Belgium? Didn’t he also have an obligation to them and to other victims of abuse? Grant had become the most visible and powerful children’s advocate the world had ever seen.