A Mighty Purpose (26 page)

Grant did not see it this way, according to several former staff members. Meeting UCI was all or nothing, a conquest to be won essentially at any cost. Grant couldn’t really afford to be anything but absolutist about it—if anyone detected in him the slightest hint of hesitation or complacency or willingness to accept anything less than a total victory, the whole thing could start rattling and wobbling and falling apart.

The actual goal was not 100 percent immunization coverage. In 1977, the World Health Assembly (WHO’s governing body) had proposed immunizing “every child in the world” by 1990. But Grant believed the global target should be more achievable and suggested it be fixed at 80 percent. Though not “universal,” it would hopefully approach “herd immunity”—the point at which a critical mass of people is immunized, making it much harder for an outbreak to occur and offering a degree of protection even to those who haven’t been covered. That was not the only factor, says Ralph Henderson, who then ran WHO’s immunization programs. Grant wanted the 80 percent goal, he says, because he “could sell it credibly to national leaders.” In Africa, the target was set at 75 percent—in recognition of the unrivaled challenges facing the continent.

Keeping track of all the numbers and of each country’s performance was Dr. Nyi Nyi. The short, intense, no-nonsense Burmese man was then the director of UNICEF’s program division. Known as Grant’s “enforcer,” he donned a beret and often wore a completely inscrutable expression. An unquenchable
reader—described variously as a “flipping genius” and a “bulldog”—Nyi Nyi could keep a swirling constellation of facts in his head, much like Grant himself. The former Burmese government minister was a formidable and widely feared taskmaster. If you were a UNICEF country representative, and Nyi Nyi began scrutinizing your performance, you had better be ready to defend yourself. He would probably know your country’s statistics better than you did. He was withering when he needed to be. And everyone knew he acted at Grant’s command.

Nyi Nyi’s office at UNICEF headquarters was known as “the torture room on the thirteenth floor.” Files and papers were piled so high on his desk that when you first walked into his office, you could not tell if he was sitting there or not. And when he needed to find a particular document amongst the dense towers of paper, he knew exactly where it was—he could retrieve it in seconds. He was in the office at 6:30 every morning, and he would stay until at least seven at night. He estimates now that he spent about five months of the year traveling, a month or two less than his boss.

His loyalty to Grant was total. In describing him years later, Nyi Nyi says unreservedly: “When you met him, you fell in love with him.”

Nyi Nyi’s ruthless devotion, if off-putting to some, was also crucial—without someone like him prodding UNICEF representatives to prod their governments, it is unlikely such considerable strides would have been made.

Some people felt the frenzied push for UCI—and in particular Dr. Nyi Nyi’s relentless browbeating—was so extreme
that it bordered on abuse. Many representatives were throttled by panic. Some complained to their colleagues: What was being asked of them was unreasonable; they were being judged by a brutally unfair standard; how could they work in conditions like this?

Nyi Nyi says his interrogations were simply to get information. “If I don’t grill [them], I won’t get the information,” he says now. “If I don’t have the information, I won’t be able to help them … Like performing a diagnostic test on a patient—you have to find out what’s wrong.” His main purpose, he says, was to help the representative come up with a solution to overcome whatever was in the way.

But the unyielding pressure to meet the targets—and Nyi Nyi was not the only source—may have spawned some ugly offshoots. According to several former staff members, some countries fudged their immunization coverage numbers to make it look as if they were doing better than they actually were. Some UNICEF staff members may have even been complicit in “cooking the books”—perhaps because they were terrified of giving Grant or Nyi Nyi bad news. How much Grant knew about this is unclear. While he did not expressly ask for false figures nor tell people to manipulate information, he doesn’t seem to have actively discouraged it either. Several staff members suggest that he viewed the matter as another pesky distraction he simply chose not to deal with.

Rohde got into bitter arguments with Dr. Nyi Nyi over this issue. He believed that Nyi Nyi was pressing people too hard, and as a result they were coughing up false figures. At one point,
says Rohde, “Nyi Nyi said, ‘I don’t care how you reach 80 percent, but we’ve got to reach it.’ ” Rohde raised the issue with Grant, who replied that Nyi Nyi knew what he was doing. “I think [Grant] dodged the issue to the point that it was uncomfortable,” Rohde says now.

Nyi Nyi claims he never pressured anyone to alter immunization numbers and, in fact, vigorously guarded against it. If he suspected numbers had been changed, he would order another round of evaluation to ferret out the real figures. “I would not allow fudging,” he says.

One of Grant’s most dynamic field operatives, an American named Richard Reid, was involved in several big immunization campaigns and says concerted efforts were made to ensure the accuracy of the data. “I think we were extremely strict and did all kinds of follow-up and house-to-house surveys,” he says.

Nyi Nyi, a meticulously spoken Buddhist, notes that his religion forbids him to lie. Beyond that, he adds, duplicity is impractical. His mother once imparted advice that he says he has followed his whole life: if you make a habit of telling lies, you won’t remember what lie you told to whom. Fudging immunization stats is a form of lying, he says, and he would never have tolerated this or encouraged anyone to do it. He says his famous interrogation sessions were, in part, designed to expose dishonesty. He would then insist upon using the correct figures, though he would make a point to never publicly shame anyone—“you want to preserve their enthusiasm.”

But as 1990 drew closer and some UNICEF representatives grew more frantic, the reliability of immunization numbers
became a vexing, stubbornly lodged thorn in UNICEF’s hide—no matter how much Grant wanted to ignore it.

Bearing the brunt of Grant’s mania on a daily basis—probably more than anyone else—was Mary Cahill. A sharp-witted, keenly observant Irish woman with uncommon multitasking abilities, Cahill ran Grant’s office and served as his de facto chief of staff (there was no actual “chief of staff” at that point). She had to match his energy and his hours—Grant performed the jobs of three or four people, and hence so did Cahill. She often trekked into the office on Saturdays, at Grant’s insistence. The work was ceaseless, demanding, and largely thankless.

“Mary worked probably eighteen hours a day, and she was always behind the scenes,” says Doreen Lobo, the former assistant to Grant’s speechwriter Mike Shower.

Cahill’s devotion to Grant rivaled Nyi Nyi’s, and Grant needed her perhaps as much. She started in June 1982, and it took her close to a year to understand and appreciate her manic boss. At first, she says, “I thought he was a lunatic.”

She got used to his fanatical pace. Though perennially late and always rushing, he would still listen to whoever came to see him—even if they spoke at excruciating length about something peripheral or irrelevant (there are a lot of “talkers” at UNICEF). Grant might have stopped listening during such conversations, but he would never brush anyone off, according to Cahill. “He never made anyone feel stupid,” she says. “He never said to a person, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ ”

Though he often quietly disregarded what people told him. And in some meetings, his behavior could be perplexing. He would sometimes lean back in his chair and close his eyes. And keep them closed for a half minute or longer. “You’d think,
Jeepers, he’s gone to sleep
,” says Cahill.

But then, after a thick, thoroughly uncomfortable span of silence, he would abruptly snap back up and say, “Three things.” Then he would fire three incisive questions at his guest, who would be scrambling to keep up.

Cahill tried to relieve the surging stress for other staff members, particularly visiting regional directors, who often arrived in New York and were immediately swept up in a gale of meetings. “It was all work and no play,” she says.

So she organized some fun. At her urging, Grant and his three deputies agreed to buy the visiting regional directors tickets for a Broadway show like
Les Misérables
. Mary and Mike Shower planned a special dinner: Mike made meatballs, and Mary brought salmon, salad, wine, and homemade chocolate mousse. Cahill, Grant, and his deputies would join their guests for a potluck feast in the office, and then they would all head out for a night at the theater. “It became a tradition,” she says.

Cahill also made a tradition out of Grant’s birthday, May 12, which usually fell right after a laborious, two-week board meeting. “I used to do silly things,” she says.

She once stayed up until four in the morning making a papier-mâché replica of Jim Grant. She fashioned the figure out of newspaper, glue, and wire, and painted on a navy blue suit. She made a tiny papier-mâché packet of ORS and stuck it in the
doll’s hand. An avid equestrian (in her scant free time), Cahill clipped some of her horse’s gray hair and glued it on the doll’s head. She even made a miniature bookshelf with tiny copies of
The State of the World’s Children
reports, created by reducing photocopies over and over again.

After Ethel’s death, Cahill was a vital source of support. She often heard Grant mumbling to himself about things he needed to do—things Ethel might have taken care of before. “His focus on work helped him overcome the void,” she says.

Cahill knew better than anyone how demanding Grant could be. She ultimately never resented it, because she knew that he worked harder than anybody. And she, of course, knew what was at stake. Many staff members recognized that the difficulty and the exasperation and the long hours came with an immeasurable reward. UNICEF was now a changed place. Grant had instilled in its people a newfound belief in themselves and their organization. They were altering history, redefining the boundaries of global health and children’s advocacy. Many would later realize that working for someone like Grant, someone who gave them the chance to truly change the world, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

But the galvanic camaraderie also masked growing pockets of unease.

There was a small group of Grant favorites known as “Jim’s boys”—usually men he considered brilliant and indispensable (and some of them truly were). An official committee at UNICEF handled all staff appointments and promotions based on a selected range of criteria. Everyone had to accept the committee’s rulings—everyone, that is, except a handful
of people, mostly Jim’s boys, who were promoted according to Grant’s whim. This understandably rankled many hardworking people, who had played by the stated rules. But from Grant’s perspective, he wanted the best people possible in important positions—children’s lives literally depended on it. However fair, the bureaucracy was also arthritically rigid.

After an executive staff meeting, Manou Assadi, the Iranian head of personnel, approached Grant in the hall. He wanted to warn him about the growing discontent over his ad hoc promotions and transfers.

“Jim, do you know why the shah of Iran fell?”

Grant didn’t answer.

“Because people around him told him, ‘Your Majesty, everything is all right.’ ”

He then added: “Jim, everything is not all right.”

Grant listened to Assadi. But he did not say anything in response.

When a senior official suggested checking the somewhat suspect background of someone Grant wanted to hire, he summarily batted the concern away. “When I have to fix a plumbing problem,” Grant remarked, “I don’t want to know the background of the plumber. I want the problem fixed.”

He avoided contentious personnel matters, much as he dodged unpleasant financial concerns. This tendency would earn him a reputation as a bad manager, though this was not entirely fair—in some ways, he was a singularly stellar manager. But when it came to administrative, financial, or personnel issues, he simply wasn’t interested. He didn’t want to deal with
it. One senior staff member recalls sitting in audit meetings with Grant. “As soon as something unpleasant came up, Grant would walk out of the door, and he would all of a sudden have something very important to do,” he says. “And we would be left with his deputy … and all of us would throw up our hands and say, ‘Here we go again.’ ”

In December 1983, several years earlier, one of “Jim’s boys” had been caught allegedly embezzling and defrauding the UNICEF China office of as much as $144,000. When confronted with the news, Grant balked. Jim “could never accept that [he] was a crook,” says former China representative Joe Judd. “He blamed the two auditors, and he blamed me.”

According to a memo from the deputy director of UNICEF’s Office of Internal Audit, the man “concealed and falsified official information and documents; committed systematic acts of fraud and embezzled or facilitated defalcation of UNICEF funds and committed [a] series of administrative wrongdoings.”

Judd, who otherwise greatly admired Grant, says the UNICEF chief “sometimes lost perspective” and “let himself be fooled.” Grant “was of a mind, if somebody was doing something great and there was a little shady stuff going on on the side, you had to weigh the two,” adds Judd. “There may be justification for unintentional mismanagement, but there is no justification for fraud and intentional mismanagement.”

Amazingly, Grant did not seem to consider the matter to be a big deal. He told another staff member that the man accused of filching as much as $144,000 was “the best program officer ever” and added, “I’m sorry that because of some small administrative
problems, he had to be fired.” Notes the staff member: “the fellow had been steadily stealing … That was offensive.”

Grant would, in fact, initially refuse to take action against several individuals accused of violations, according to several former senior staff members. Whether a sign of fierce loyalty or a troubling blind spot—or a combination of the two—the tendency would abrade many, even Grant’s loyal supporters. It would also undercut the immense goodwill he had engendered. Grant wanted to believe the best of everybody and hated firing people, even when it was starkly clear they should be dismissed.