A Mighty Purpose (30 page)

Adamson wasn’t sold.

“Outside the UN, people think of these things as talk shops,” he told Grant. He added that such meetings had been held in the past—with government ministers or first ladies—and not much had come of them.

Then Adamson cast out a secondary argument, an off-the-cuff afterthought: “It would be a different thing,” he said, “if you could actually get heads of state to come together, not health ministers or first ladies, but heads of government.”

His tone conveyed another point:
But of course, that’s not possible
.

As in earlier conversations, his attempt to dissuade Grant had the exact opposite effect. Adamson doesn’t remember Grant’s exact words, but he recalls the essence of his reaction:
Well then, that’s exactly what we’ll do
.

There had never been a global summit before, not on this scale. To get all of the heads of state from around the world in
one room at the same time to talk about anything was a pipe dream, in the eyes of many. And to get them to talk about children—who would sign on for that? You might as well ask them to come together for a round of trust exercises and a group hug.

The idea of a global event highlighting children’s welfare did have one precedent, of a sort: the International Year of the Child in 1979 (before Grant came to UNICEF). Championed by NGOs, the UN-backed occasion had raised a new level of awareness for children’s issues. But its pizzazz quickly fizzled (though it did lend some impetus to creating what would become the Convention on the Rights of the Child).

What Grant was proposing was of an entirely different order of magnitude, and he knew the suggestion would be ridiculed—at first. He told Mary Cahill: “I’ll be laughed out of town.”

While representatives from several developing countries applauded the idea, wealthier countries were wary that it would become a “cheque-book conference,” according to UNICEF historian Maggie Black’s book
Children First: The Story of UNICEF
. Recalcitrance accrued.

Bangladeshi statesman Anwarul Chowdhury, who had chaired UNICEF’s board in 1985 and 1986 (and who would later become president of the UN Security Council), loved Grant’s proposal. He put out feelers to see what others at the UN thought about it and was surprised by the harsh reaction.

“Many told me that it was Jim’s crazy idea—it will never happen,” Chowdhury recalls. “The UN structure does not allow that to happen … They used to say Jim Grant can hype anything and get carried away by himself.”

One day, Grant returned to UNICEF headquarters after a tense lunchtime meeting on the summit with some junior members of the UNICEF board—and he was visibly, uncharacteristically miffed. Jim Grant hardly ever got mad, so something must have really ticked him off. His face was tight, his lips pursed, his blue eyes burning fiercely. He walked up to a woman who was sitting at her desk and put his hand on her shoulder. “We will have our summit,” he told her gruffly, “despite those damned idiots!”

The first big obstacle had been very basic: UNICEF did not have the authority to convene a global summit. It would have to be called by heads of state themselves. And so Grant courted six countries—Canada, Egypt, Mali, Mexico, Pakistan, and Sweden—and persuaded them to take ownership of the summit. Representing both the industrialized and developing worlds, they became the “initiators group” and were able to work outside the suffocating thicket of UN bureaucracy.

Grant and the initiators went about slowly amassing consensus for the global meeting, mortaring in support in one corner and then in the next. By now, he had an unmatched rapport with dozens of heads of state. It was not the executive director of UNICEF who was begging them for a favor—it was their friend Jim.

When he got a no, he would simply try again. Like a persistent teenage boy determined to score a date, he would not be chastened by numerous rejections. He would shamelessly chisel away, until the reluctance became thinner, weaker, and more likely to crumble.

“Jim knew how to move step by step,” says Chowdhury. “He would not be disappointed by the first no. Not the second no. Not even the third no. Not even ten noes. With each no, he would advance one bit more.”

As he hammered noes into maybes and maybes into yeses, other critical fronts demanded more and more of his energy—the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the education summit being organized by Dr. Nyi Nyi, and, of course, the campaign for universal childhood immunization. He did not let up on any of them. He saw each one as a make-or-break chance to shred the aura of inevitability that shrouded lethal poverty.

One of Grant’s favorite lines around this time was a moral jab, courtesy of Peter Adamson: “Morality must march with capacity.” In other words, if we can save children and don’t—if we have the vaccines and medicines but choose not to use them—we are morally accountable.

Another, which Grant attributed to British historian Arnold Toynbee, was dropped into dozens of speeches and articles: “Our age is the first generation since the dawn of history in which mankind dared to believe it practical to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race.” The Toynbee citation (a fairly close paraphrase of the actual quote) probably summed up Grant’s personal philosophy more aptly than anything he ever said or wrote himself. He used it so much that it sometimes sent eyes rolling.

Though he was nudging the whole world to pick up its pace, two countries were far more important than any others: China and India. Without these behemoths, universal childhood
immunization could simply not be achieved. And so Grant inundated them with copious praise and attention.

During a visit to India, he told several staff members that he wasn’t as worried about China achieving the goal. He knew China would reach the target—it was, after all, an autocratic, one-party state. But India was a democracy—and a messy one at that—and India would have to try harder. And so would all UNICEF India staff.

But by 1988 India was trailing badly. According to WHO estimates, coverage for the third dose of the diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine (DPT3) was 40 percent. The other vaccines were even worse: 37 percent for the polio, 32 percent for measles, and 23 percent for tuberculosis. The numbers were low, but just a few years earlier, they had been a lot lower; in 1980 India’s immunization coverage was 6 percent for DPT3 and 2 percent for polio (it had not even provided vaccines for measles or tuberculosis). The vast country had come a long way but was still woefully off target.

Another nail-biter was India’s neighbor Bangladesh, which had made only minimal progress. The country’s DPT3 estimate had clambered from no coverage at all in 1980 to just 16 percent in 1988 (polio and measles rates were similar). The tuberculosis figure was slightly better, going from no coverage in 1980 to 26 percent in 1988. Overall, the results were dispiriting. For Bangladesh to reach 80 percent in any of the four categories would take a miracle. Hardly anyone expected that to happen. But Bangladesh would soon surprise everybody.

China’s progress, as of 1988, was simply epic, according to WHO estimates. The mammoth Communist nation had, in fact,
already exceeded the 80 percent universal childhood immunization target in all categories. Two years before the deadline, it had reached an astonishing 95 percent coverage for the DPT3, 96 percent for polio, 98 percent for tuberculosis, and 95 percent for measles. Even more extraordinary: in 1980, there was no coverage for any of the vaccines. Clearly, the notoriously repressive state had done something right. It had all begun with a prod from China’s pushy native son, Jim Grant.

“China had the commitment to do it, not because they want to please UNICEF, but because they are proud,” says Dr. Nyi Nyi. “What you do is you play up that ego. Both Jim and I, whenever we see Chinese leaders, we always say, ‘You are the largest country in the world. And you have to show the way’ … The Chinese, you don’t have to tell them how to achieve it, they will achieve it, by hook or by crook.”

China’s smashing immunization success coincided with perhaps the country’s greatest crisis in a generation. On June 4, 1989—while Grant was consumed by Operation Lifeline Sudan—the country was engulfed in chaos. After months of protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Premier Li Peng ordered a ruthless military crackdown on unarmed civilians. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed. For many, it became the dividing line in modern Chinese history—everything was then “before” or “after” Tiananmen Square, despite the government’s subsequent efforts to scrub the event out of memory and history books.

As for Grant, who considered China his “home country” and even occasionally referred to himself as Chinese, the event
was a conundrum. How you do promote a country’s immunization gains when its government is being roundly condemned for murdering its own citizens?

And so, as much of the rest of the world watched in horror and denounced the vicious actions of China’s government, Grant kept quiet. Tiananmen Square was the news of the summer of 1989, bandied by lips across the globe—but not by his. Several staff members who worked in the UNICEF China office say that—whatever his views on the matter—he simply did not discuss it.

But what else could he do? If he joined the chorus of outrage—if he spoke about Tiananmen Square in even the vaguest way—he would alienate China’s government. During the final crucial lap in the global immunization crusade, UNICEF’s biggest success story so far would be clouded by violence. He also didn’t want China to stop cooperating and stop immunizing—not that it necessarily would have done so. But the government’s vindictive reputation was clear.

Tiananmen wasn’t the only instance when he avoided criticizing China. In fact, he once offered effusive praise for the country’s brutal “one-child” policy, which was adopted in 1979 and led to forced abortions, sterilizations, and female infanticides. In 1976, while president of the Overseas Development Council, Grant had written a letter to Chinese officials lauding several figures, including Mao Zedong—one of the twentieth century’s biggest mass murderers—as “outstanding leaders.”

He waited for the Tiananmen furor to subside. In October 1989, four months after the massacre, he flew to Beijing and met
with several Chinese officials. He had traveled to China frequently over the last decade, including to visit his second grandchild, a girl named Divindy, who was born in Beijing at the same hospital where he himself had been born in 1922. (Divindy’s father and Grant’s middle son, Jamie, was then teaching in Beijing as a Fulbright scholar.) Every time he visited, he got the redcarpet treatment.

China’s state-run news service, Xinhua, covered his October 1989 visit as though he were a head of state. During a reception held by UNICEF, according to the Xinhua account, Grant noted that his grandfather had come to China as a missionary exactly one hundred years ago, adding, “At this moment, I have a feeling of returning to my homeland.” He then heralded China’s immunization gains, noting that the country’s vaccination coverage was now better than Western Europe’s and North America’s.

In late 1989 and early 1990, Grant and the tenacious Dr. Nyi Nyi carefully watched immunization results from around the world, looking for bright spots and signs of trouble. Globally, the overall coverage level had by now reached about 70 percent—a staggering figure, when you consider that in 1980 it had ranged between 16 and 21 percent. The number of kids getting immunized had more than tripled, but the gap was still wide. They would need a lot of speed and faith to vault across it. Nyi Nyi began to lean on UNICEF country representatives even harder.

The pressure was crushing. No one wanted to be singled out for not making the target—a fear that may have led to overoptimistic projections. Buzzing around the reports from various
countries was a persnickety question: Could the numbers be trusted? If they made it, did they really make it?

As the deadline barreled at him, Grant never betrayed any nervousness or worry—at least not publicly. “He never had any doubt,” says Nyi Nyi. “He never wavered.”

In front of a wall of iconic green marble, flanked by two giant television screens, Jim Grant stood in the spot that had been occupied by the greatest and most reviled leaders in recent history—a grand pulpit for despots and freedom fighters, peacemakers and warmongers—and gazed somberly into the vast, vertiginous, domed cathedral of the UN General Assembly. Radiating out before him in curved row upon curved row of seats were the most powerful people in the world, fixing their attention on the earnest, amiable man in the blue suit, all waiting to hear what he would say. Many of them were here today because he had asked them to be, because this was one person they simply could not turn down. It was the pinnacle of Jim Grant’s life—a moment many decades in the making, a personal and professional crossroads. Here, at the largest gathering of world leaders ever held, was an unrivaled opportunity to plead his case.

At the helm of UNICEF for ten years now, he had aged. The toll of the last decade had deepened the lines on his face.
Small liver spots dotted his forehead. He was thinner, ever more slightly stooped. Bags the size of large garlic cloves bulged under his bright, narrow, almond-shaped eyes. Still, those eyes gleamed like urgent beacons, searching, imploring, defying. As he took in the scene before him, the rustling panoply of influence and prestige, the sixty-eight-year-old lawyer prepared to deliver the most important opening statement and/or closing argument he would ever make.

After nearly two years of planning, arm-twisting, and behind-the-scenes tussling, he had pulled it off: the World Summit for Children had finally materialized. In February 1990, UN secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar had sent out invitations to all heads of state represented in the General Assembly (since the apartheid government of South Africa was not a member state, it was not invited). Speculation about attendance swirled—would anyone actually show up? If so, how many? Would it be a pathetic handful? Would any of the big countries show up? To tamp down the anxiety, Grant started a one-dollar office betting pool. He proffered the boldest guess, predicting fifty-three world leaders would come. All other bets were far lower. When the final tally came in, even Grant’s expectations were shattered. A total of seventy-one heads of state had accepted, in addition to eighty-eight high-level representatives from other countries.