A Mighty Purpose (3 page)

The American made them uneasy.

In a venerated international organization with a gravely important purpose, his enthusiasm was a little too incandescent, his banter a little too bold, his back slaps a little too brisk. Didn’t he have any idea where he was? What this was all about? That this was not some think tank or law firm? That the decisions made here could mean the difference between life and death for millions of children? It was not a place for recklessness or bravado—mistakes and missteps could simply not be afforded. Was he naive? Clueless? Out of his depth? Or just bullheaded?

James Pineo Grant took over as the executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund on January 1, 1980, its third leader since the organization’s founding in 1946. He was not a total stranger to UNICEF—he had represented the United States on the organization’s board for two years, and his kinetic ambition was well known. He had, in fact, had his eye on the job and had lobbied hard for it. Nonetheless, his appointment
arched many an eyebrow among UNICEF staff and others at the UN.
Jim Grant? Really? That American think tank guy?

The man he was replacing, a respected diplomat and statesman named Henry Labouisse Jr., was also an American. (UNICEF has never had a non-American at the helm—tacit recognition of the fact that the US government has long been a major financial contributor.) But Labouisse was a cultured, genteel Southerner from New Orleans. He spoke French. He kept a neatly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit. He was understated in almost every respect and was essentially considered an honorary European. The word most often used by former UNICEF staff to describe him is “patrician.” He was married to Eve Curie, the daughter of Nobel Prize–winning French scientists Marie and Pierre Curie. Labouisse himself had accepted the Nobel Prize on UNICEF’s behalf in 1965.

In contrast, Jim Grant was a “cowboy”—a blunt, buoyant, sometimes uncouth, very “American” American. He was a World War II veteran who employed frequent military analogies, drank black coffee out of Styrofoam cups, whistled while strolling into his office, jogged in place to psych himself up for meetings, used words like “yesable” and “doable” and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches his wife had packed for him.

Ostensibly lacking any pretense, he at first seemed devoid of another quality: finesse. Some Europeans on the board and staff “felt he was not right for the position,” recalls Mary Racelis, UNICEF’s former regional director for eastern and southern Africa. “There was a feeling that he is too much of a maverick … that he doesn’t know how to operate as a UN diplomat
in these rarefied circles.” It didn’t help that Grant told some people that President Jimmy Carter had “appointed” him to the job. Carter had nominated him, but it was UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim who had officially appointed him (though everyone knew that the American president’s choice would likely not be disregarded, which made Grant’s phrasing all the more impolitic). He often invoked Carter’s instruction to him that his job was not only to make UNICEF run well, but to improve the image of the UN as a whole within the United States. “He kept making references to the mandate he had from the president of the United States, over and over and over again,” says Margaret Catley-Carlson, who represented Canada on the UNICEF board and who was later recruited by Grant to work for UNICEF. “There are several of us who said, ‘Jim, you’re working for an international organization.’ ”

Many staff members bristled at his frequent references to Carter and his old employer, USAID, where he had led several foreign missions. R. Padmini, an Indian woman who served as UNICEF’s Ethiopia representative, recalls some reactions by staff: “ ‘Does he think he’s an agent of the US Government?’ … ‘He thinks he’s still in USAID!’ … ‘This is the United Nations, not the United States!’ ” (In a testament to the smallness of the international development world, Henry Labouisse had previously run the International Cooperation Administration, the predecessor to USAID, in 1961, and had been Grant’s boss.)

One rumor that would eventually leak into the corridors: Grant worked for the CIA. While this carried the sharp whiff of delusional paranoia, he had, decades earlier, briefly worked for
an American college student group that would later be exposed as a notorious CIA front organization. According to his résumé, from August to October 1950—after enrolling in Harvard Law School—Grant conducted surveys of student movements in Southeast Asia for the National Student Association “for the purpose of initiating program[s] to offset increasing Communist domination of SEA student movements.” Grant may well not have been aware of any possible links with the CIA at the time, though “offsetting Communist domination” does not sound like a typical extracurricular activity.

Despite the taint of his Americanness, everyone at UNICEF would soon learn that Grant was far more sophisticated and worldly than he first seemed. His idealism was matched by his shrewdness, and in some ways he knew the peaks and pitfalls of international aid better than anyone else in the building. Still, the label of “American Dilettante” clung to him like old gum to a shoe.

His deeply lined face—a filigree of grooves earned from a life packed with intense and harrowing experiences—suggested an age beyond his fifty-seven years. So did his occasional tendency to stoop slightly, as though ducking under a low doorframe.

But what struck people more than anything else was that he was in a hurry. The jaunty lawyer moved fast and never let up on the gas. Except, that is, when he locked his gaze on you—his luminous blue eyes fixing you like tractor beams. In that moment, something in those eyes told you that the rest of the world did
not matter. It was just you and him. “He really did burn with this fierce light,” Catley-Carlson says. To fire up staff, he would sometimes cheerfully exult, “Onwards and upwards!” Or he would wish someone well by hollering, “Godspeed!” (though he was not religious). People would learn that it was only when you challenged him or shunted away from something he wanted to discuss that those iridescent eyes could dim or go glassy.

He insisted everyone call him “Jim,” and, in a place of rigid hierarchy, gave little, if any, regard to rank or station. He stopped to talk to everyone, from secretaries to doormen to janitors to drivers to mail room employees. Unlike many other high-ranking UN officials, he did not seem to care about pomp or protocol. On visits to countries where UNICEF worked, he eschewed government limos; he’d rather ride in a van packed with his staff members. He traveled with only one small bag, a carry-on, and washed his own clothes in the hotel bathroom sink. He scribbled copious notes on tiny steno pads, napkins, envelopes, Post-its, and scraps of paper, and his swollen wallet, by one estimate, was more than three inches thick. He collected Chinese cookie fortunes (affixing them to his notebooks with Scotch tape) and had a fondness for historical quotes and inspirational aphorisms. One of his favorites: “The greatest pleasure in life is doing what other people say you cannot do.”

Personal space, it seemed, was not a concept he understood or appreciated. Like a gregarious grandpa at a family gathering, he gripped wrists, pecked cheeks, wrapped his arms around shoulders. He behaved this way with everyone, from staff
members to heads of state. His rapturous energy became a topic of water cooler speculation: Where did it come from? How can it not run out? And what is he going to do with it?

In his first communiqué to staff, Grant wrote of the need to accelerate UNICEF’s work, equating the preventable deaths of as many as fourteen million children each year to “more than 100 Hiroshimas annually.” He exhorted, “if more of us care” and “if more of us start acting now,” the deadliest aspects of poverty could be defeated. You can excuse UNICEF staff for rolling their eyes a little after reading this. They were certainly aware of the dire odds facing impoverished children, and there was no doubt that they cared. Even so, could they do more and do it faster? Grant was priming them for something big.

If he annoyed or irked or simply confused staff members, Grant also disarmed them. Part of it was his anomalous even temper—many people said he was simply incapable of becoming upset, even in maddening circumstances. On one of his first field visits, to Pakistan, his humorous reaction to a freakish incident stunned the man who considered himself responsible.

Steve Woodhouse, a chipper Briton who was then a program officer in UNICEF’s Pakistan office, took Grant to slums in Karachi to see some “soak pits”—big, sandy holes excavated to collect sewage from nearby homes. In a place where plumbing was nonexistent and drinking water could become contaminated with open sewage (“It was like Boston around 1650,” says Woodhouse), the pits were critical to halting the spread of deadly waterborne diseases. Grant walked up to inspect one of the fifteen-foot-deep holes, and Woodhouse began to describe
the program. Then, suddenly the edge of the pit gave way, crumbling down. It was the exact spot where Jim Grant stood. He tumbled in and fell, by Woodhouse’s estimation, at least ten feet. “If he’d fallen any more, he would have been buried in the sand,” he says.

Fortunately, the pit was not yet in use. Woodhouse and others quickly leaned over the side and reached down to pull him out. Coated with sand, Grant grabbed their hands and clambered back to the surface. Relieved his boss was alive and apparently uninjured, Woodhouse braced himself for a lashing. But he did not get one. Grant dusted himself off and remarked, “That was an interesting experience.” Then he quipped, “Did you plan that, Steve?”

Reflecting later, Woodhouse still marvels at the reaction. “Any normal person would have been shaken up and angry,” he says. “But he wasn’t. He took it as a joke.”

What also surprised Woodhouse during that same trip was Grant’s rapport with children. In the slums of Karachi, Grant stooped down to pick up children and tried to get a laugh or giggle out of them. Most were malnourished and wearing tattered clothes or rags. “A lot of kids picked up by strangers would cry,” says Woodhouse. “But I didn’t see that happen with Jim. He felt very much at home with the kids, and the kids understood that, so they didn’t cry … He was absolutely brilliant with children.”

Former American UNICEF staffer Carl Tinstman witnessed Grant’s soft spot for kids on numerous field visits in Africa. “Suddenly, you’re looking around for the executive
director, and there he is, surrounded by forty or fifty children.” The father of three would wade into throngs of children and squat down to reach their level. If a child carried a notebook or a schoolbook—often his or her most prized possession—Grant would ask to see it. Then he would crack it open and inquire about the contents. “He had this sparkle in his eye,” says Tinstman. And the kids could see it. They crowded around him as if he was Santa Claus.

Maybe it was because Grant was, in many ways, like a kid himself—giddy, hyper, implausibly hopeful. That youthful exuberance would serve him well in his first year, as he encountered his biggest test yet: the calamitous aftermath of Cambodia’s Killing Fields.

Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had murdered as many as two million people in a countrywide paroxysm of brutality. UNICEF and other aid agencies had been kicked out when the ultra-Maoist regime took over in April 1975. They completely sealed off Cambodia from the outside world, emptied cities, forced most of the country into spartan work collectives, and unleashed a reign of terror that lasted for nearly four years. They employed a particularly vicious, primitive form of oppression, beating captives with clubs, pulling out fingernails, cutting off fingers, slashing throats with serrated palm tree branches, impaling victims on bamboo stakes, smashing babies against trees. They forced children to kill their own parents and then turned them into child soldiers. They made family members watch as loved
ones were raped and hacked to death and forbade witnesses to show emotion.

The genocide finally ended in January 1979, shortly after Vietnam invaded Cambodia. During the Vietnam War and before, the North Vietnamese had supported the Khmer Rouge, their fellow Communist insurgents. But after the deranged Cambodian Maoists decided to launch military incursions against their former patron, Vietnam responded with a full-scale offensive in December 1978. It quickly toppled Pol Pot’s regime and began occupying the country. The nightmare was over, but its nasty residue stubbornly clung to the country. Much of the landscape was ravaged and desolate. Sick, starving and frail, survivors searched desperately for food and for lost family members. Children wandered alone through decimated villages, looking for their parents or siblings or aunts or uncles—or anybody they knew. To escape ongoing fighting, hundreds of thousands fled toward Thailand. Some were barely alive as they staggered across the border. They had already beaten death once, and UNICEF and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were trying to make sure death did not get a second chance. One unsettling reality: mingled with the victims were many of the killers. Khmer Rouge cadres joined the groups of refugees spilling over the border. Some Khmer Rouge leaders would eventually, in essence, run their own refugee camps. Their presence would become a monstrous quandary.

The international relief effort, which began before Grant took office, had become one of the biggest humanitarian operations in the world and the most complex one UNICEF had ever
undertaken. Because of its mandate (to help all children regardless of politics) and reputation for neutrality during times of conflict, UNICEF had been designated the lead UN agency in 1979. This responsibility required circumnavigating treacherous political hazards.

Cambodia had become a pawn in a tortuous Cold War rivalry. Since it was still reeling from the Vietnam War, the United States had supported the enemy of its enemy: the Khmer Rouge. Not only had America failed to stop the mass killers, it actively backed the pernicious group after it had been routed by the Vietnamese. In 1979, the Carter administration voted in favor of a Khmer Rouge bid to represent Cambodia at the UN General Assembly. This was a kick to the stomach for Khmer Rouge victims—the murderers, it seemed, were being rewarded for their crimes.