A Mighty Purpose (40 page)

Yet he made some concessions to reality. During his last few weeks, he called Foege numerous times. “He would call me at ten or eleven at night with an idea,” Foege recalls, “and he would say, ‘I just don’t want this idea to be ignored.’ ”

Rohde and Adamson made an in-person appeal to urge Grant to devote his remaining energy to the matter of his successor. They went up to Ellan Young’s house on Croton-on-Hudson, known as Camp Young, where Grant was living and receiving hospice care. He worked there as well. They sat in wicker chairs on a deck overlooking a pond. Grant faced the pond and Rohde and Adamson faced Grant. It was an unusually
warm winter day. Grant was wrapped in a blanket. He needed to sleep a lot and had just woken up from a nap.

In all fairness, it was, of course, not in Grant’s control to name his successor. Adamson and Rohde knew that. But they believed, recalls Adamson, “that if he put his mind to it, he’d find some way of end-running this one, too.”

They also knew that Grant had become ever more determined to meet the mid-decade goals, and nothing—not Kenya, not Booz Allen, not his successor—was going to shunt his attention away from them.

But that’s exactly what they were asking him to do.

Whatever capacity and energy and time and imagination and vision you have to change things in this world, they told him, all of it is now best directed at ensuring the right person succeeds you, a person who will carry on all that you are trying to do.

Grant’s face registered a familiar expression, tight-lipped, stubborn, and slightly closed off. It was a look Adamson instantly recognized—it meant Grant didn’t want to have this conversation. “He had the same reaction to a number of topics that he had some aversion to,” says Adamson. “He never wanted to talk about AIDS, he never wanted to talk about contraception.”

And so he turned them down.

Not only did he refuse to think about resigning, his term was extended into 1995, though it was wretchedly clear he would never complete it (part of this may have grown out of the UN secretary general’s delay in appointing a successor).

Grant’s personal notebooks from around this time show a blizzard of musings—medical concerns, his thoughts on
executive board meetings, personal issues, immunization figures. His handwriting was tiny, a frenzied cursive, each word marching headlong into the next. On several pages, under the heading “Castles in the Sky,” he seemed to have listed some of his many accomplishments, dating back to his college years. Stuck throughout the pads were layer upon layer of Post-it notes, adhered in stacks of ten and twenty. One of the notes tracked his temperature and medications over the last several months. Another contained a dense flurry of stats about Ethiopia’s progress on a host of issues.

On December 19, he wrote a “New Year’s memo” to staff and noted that he was “thankful for the two extensions I’ve been given—one by the secretary general and another by my doctor.” He then used the occasion of New Year’s to nudge his staff to work harder. “My number one new year’s resolution this year is to go all out, to give my best energies, for achievement of the goals,” he wrote. “I sincerely hope that this will be at the top of your action agenda, too.” And he layered on an exhortation that must have seemed like overkill: “We owe it to the 2.5 million additional children whose lives will be saved if the goals are reached.”

About a week later, Grant drifted into another coma for about eighteen hours and nearly died. Shortly afterward, he started working again. He also resumed an extended interview session being conducted at his bedside by Jon Rohde, Richard Jolly, and his son Jamie; they were attempting to assemble his oral history. They asked him about his philosophy, his influences, and his upbringing, and he answered, at times, lucidly and at length. His
interviewers pushed him on several topics but not too hard, distinctly aware of how weak he was. It was a frenzied, valiant, yet incomplete effort that probably should have taken place much earlier—but Grant never would have offered them the time.

He officially resigned on Monday, January 23. He was seventy-two. After another bout of unconsciousness, he was hospitalized again. His small room at the Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, New York, became filled with letters and expressions of gratitude from leaders all over the world. A huge, four-foot-tall card signed by hundreds of people from UNICEF was propped at the foot of his bed. Friends from numerous countries had sent him various miracle cures and homeopathic remedies, including an envelope of ginger roots from China. He had tried them all. His son Jamie, who was a teacher of Transcendental Meditation and who had his father’s open, earnest face, thought meditation could help. Grant tried that, too. (He had, in fact, been meditating for over a year and had had some “excellent experiences,” Jamie recalls.)

There was a small button he could press with his thumb to give himself a dose of morphine. When Adamson was visiting, he held up the morphine button and boasted, “I’ve hardly used any of this.” On another occasion, when Rohde was in the room, Grant excitedly proclaimed: “You see this button? I can give myself a shot!” Rohde recalls that the nurses took away the intravenous morphine because Grant had been using it too much. They came in and asked him if he was in a lot of pain, and he said no.

“Well, you’ve been pressing this button quite a lot,” one nurse said, adding, “You’re supposed to press it when you have pain.”

“Oh,” Grant said. “It makes me feel really good.”

He never stopped working. He even used one of the letters that had arrived in his room as a final and powerful point of leverage. It was a short note from President Clinton, thanking Grant for everything he had done for the children of the world. He received it on Thursday, January 26. Grant knew the letter gave him a fleeting opportunity born out of his impending death. On Friday, he insisted a response be sent to Clinton. He wanted to ask the president to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United States was, embarrassingly, one of the few holdouts to not endorse the landmark treaty guaranteeing children’s basic rights. And Grant wanted the president to know that this was his last official act—his final request. How could the president of the United States refuse a dying man? Mary Cahill faxed the letter to the White House on Friday afternoon.

On Saturday morning, a nurse came into Grant’s room and asked how he was doing. Gaunt, weak, wheezy, barely able to speak, Grant answered: “Full of enthusiasm!” He then raised his frail, sinewy fist in the air and said, “Fight, fight, fight!”

And on his last day, he proceeded to do just that. Adamson wrote in the anthology about Grant published by UNICEF: “It sounds like an over-dramatic figure of speech to say someone fights for a cause until the last breath in his body. In Jim’s case, it was quite literally true.”

Mary Cahill was alone with him on Saturday for about forty-five minutes. She had arranged for him to make a few calls to friends and staff members, a few last goodbyes. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he murmured how important it was for UNICEF to continue its policies. She told him that, in his absence, Richard Jolly (who was the acting executive director) had said during meetings that everyone must go on pursuing Jim’s vision and work. He muttered, “Good, good, good.” He then added that both Kul Gautam and Nyi Nyi were also key people in keeping the cause alive.

At some point, he asked her to pass him his razor and a handheld mirror. As he shaved in his bed, he said to her: “Today is a very important day for me, Mary.”

Then he looked toward the window to the left of his bed, as if something had suddenly drawn his attention.

“The light coming in the window is bright, isn’t it?” he said.

Cahill peered at the window. She did not see a bright light. It was a dull, gray, January day outside. But she agreed: “Oh, yes, it is bright.”

His sons Jamie and John were soon at his bedside; Grant’s youngest son Bill was en route, in a plane. In case he didn’t arrive in time, he called the hospital room and was able to speak to his father over the phone. Ellan was not there.

Grant was semiconscious and hallucinating. He seemed to think that he was in a UNICEF board meeting, and that he was addressing his directors. At one point, as his son John later recalled, he blurted out: “And I wrote it myself!”

Within the last forty-eight hours, he had told Jamie that he still thought he could conquer the cancer. “There has to be a way I can beat this,” he had insisted in his now whistle-high voice. “There is always a solution.”

Grant was determined to “end-run” his own death.

As his life separated itself from him, as he sank deeper into unconsciousness, his last moments seemed fixed not on his family or his wife or Ethel or his childhood or the epic sweep of his own time on this earth—but on UNICEF, on the cause, on the children whose fight he never surrendered.

Grant told those in the room he wanted his death to be an inspiration to others at UNICEF to meet the mid-decade and year 2000 goals. With faint, slurred speech, he asked them to carry on his work for children and to continue to improve the United Nations.

He died quietly in his sleep at around one in the afternoon of January 28, 1995.

On that day, in jungle hamlets and mountain villages, in cacophonous slums and sprawling refugee camps, on worn concrete floors and under roofs thatched of rice straw and banana leaves, in clay brick homes, on rutted, red dirt roads, and on scorching swaths of sand, children cried and screamed and sang and giggled and toddled and ran and fell and got back up and climbed on their mothers’ laps and pulled their siblings’ hair and gazed out in wonder at the big, bright world that swirled around them. Millions of boys and girls whose lives were reclaimed, whose stories were allowed to continue, who were not mourned
or grieved or buried, but instead were loved and held and fretted over and scolded and prepared for the challenges of living, of surviving, all because of a man they had never met and whose name they would likely never know.

They filed in from the cold, in heavy coats and gloves and scarves, stepping into the cavernous, resonant, Gothic Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in northern Manhattan. They hugged each other briefly, shook hands, and quickly found their seats. A neat procession led by white-robed priests wended past the tall, intricately carved marble pulpit, as organ music blared against the soaring stone pillars and blue stained-glass windows. In the procession were Grant’s family, friends, top advisers (including Adamson and Jolly), and at the end, a special guest, first lady Hillary Clinton. On February 10, 1995, about 2,500 people—dignitaries, celebrities, politicians, UN staff—had come to honor a man who, in many cases, had wooed them and challenged them and pestered them to take up his fight.

His death had drawn tributes and condolences from ambassadors and leaders the world over—Nelson Mandela, Li Peng, Jimmy Carter, Queen Noor, Jacques Chirac, Yoweri Museveni, and many, many others—but the upbeat lawyer in the wash-and-wear blue suit who had made the world care for its children as never before was unknown to most people. He had never won the level of recognition he had sought—the Nobel Peace Prize had eluded him (to the great disappointment of many UNICEF
staff, one of whom grumbled that Grant deserved the award far more than the 2001 Nobel laureate, UN secretary general Kofi Annan). Grant’s passing registered a few faint blips on the American media’s radar. One of his admirers, activist and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, penned a column noting that Grant’s obituary in the
New York Times
was short and buried deep in the paper; a few days later, the
Times
devoted a major front-page story and editorial to the passing of playwright George Abbott (Abbot’s obituary was 2,427 words long; Grant’s was 497 words). Wrote Nader: “The message from
The New York Times
in late January was: if you wish to be commemorated for a productive life, be a famous writer, producer and director of plays and not a person who is most responsible for saving the lives of 3 million children in the world every year.” Nader also mentioned that major television networks, then in the thrall of the O. J. Simpson trial, “couldn’t spare one minute for this great man’s work.” One network, NBC, did actually devote a few minutes for a special tribute by news anchor Tom Brokaw, who noted that Grant was survived by “his wife, Ellan, three children of his own, and millions of children around the world.”

Grant’s work was celebrated at quiet, candlelit memorial services in dozens of developing countries—from Bhutan to Ethiopia to the Philippines—and inside the immense stone sanctuary in New York City. One of the speakers at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was Grant’s longtime friend and confidant, Father Ted Hesburgh. The avuncular priest and president of Notre Dame University, clad in long red robes with his white hair swept to the right, told the crowd: “I always
had the impression that he was my conscience when justice was needed in this great unjust world of ours.” Hesburgh recounted how, sixteen years earlier, Grant had strong-armed him into raising awareness and funds to help those suffering in the wake of the Cambodian genocide. He claimed this effort saved the lives of one million people, adding that it “would not have happened without” Grant. “He got all of us to do things we didn’t really want to do, because we were too busy or because the problem was too complicated or because we didn’t have his enormous energy.”

After UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s remarks, Hilary Clinton ascended the pulpit (the Secret Service had inspected the venue and had required everyone in the first several rows to obtain a special pass). Clinton was wearing a dark dress, earrings, and a sparkling broach, and her long hair was pulled back with a headband. “I consider Jim Grant to be one of the great Americans of this century,” she said into the microphone, her voice echoing in the immense, murky space. She recounted how when she first met the UNICEF chief, he had pulled out a packet “that looked like this.” She held up a small, white packet of oral rehydration salts, as camera flashes popped around her. Grant had berated her about how easily and cheaply this packet could save lives.