by Adam Fifield
Grant asked al-Bashir for his commitment to Operation Lifeline Sudan.
Reid says now: “I think he was absorbing the meaning of it … He was used to barking things … he must have sensed that he was not in a barking circumstance with Mr. Grant.”
Sudan’s new president then told Grant that UNICEF was welcome to continue its work.
Operation Lifeline Sudan went on. By September, 110,000 tons of food had been delivered to the worst-hit areas, halting a gruesome famine many believed was inexorable. UNICEF later conducted a mortality survey in the south and found that the death rate had not increased at all. “It was a success,” says Reid. If it hadn’t succeeded, he adds, “it would have been a population extinction.”
Less than a month after winning al-Bashir’s cooperation in Sudan, Jim Grant prepared to make another proposition. The circumstances and setting were a little bit different. He stood in his suit on a pool patio in front of giant sunflowers in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. As his sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren watched, he asked Ellan Young, Ethel’s longtime friend, to be his wife.
Chapter 13
WE WILL HAVE OUR SUMMIT
Ellan Grant Young missed her shot.
Jim Grant’s new wife had accompanied him on a field visit to Nepal, and they were flying in a UN plane past the immense, jagged, crumpled brow of Mount Everest. Ellan was a professional photographer, and she was furiously snapping pictures through the window as the great peak bobbed by on the left. As the mountain receded into the distance, she swiveled in her seat toward Jim.
“Jim, I missed a really nice shot,” she said. “Do you think we could go back?”
Asking a UN pilot on an official mission to turn a plane around so you could take a personal photograph was cheeky—even though Ellan probably intended no offense. If you were on the ground, rolling past an ancient ruin in a UNICEF Land Cruiser, stopping for a picture was not that big of a deal (except if it was dark; UNICEF drivers kept off the roads at night).
Ellan Grant Young apparently thought nothing of it.
Grant considered his wife’s awkward request.
“Hmm,” he said. “Let me see.”
According to Kul Gautam, who was then UNICEF’s director of planning and coordination and was part of the delegation, Grant got up and made his way toward the front of the small plane. He spoke with the pilot and asked if they could make another pass by Everest. His wife would like to take a picture, he said. Soon the plane began to turn around, and she finally got her shot.
He had known Ellan for nearly fifty years. She had gone to UC Berkeley with Jim and Ethel and had become Ethel’s lifelong friend. Her first marriage had ended in divorce; she was the mother of three grown children. She was personable and capricious and could be a lot of fun—a “free spirit” in Jim’s words. Her tousled hair was cropped short, and her youthful face would shine with a winsome, slightly mischievous grin.
Many UNICEF staffers were surprised at how quickly it had happened—she and Jim were married a little over a year after Ethel’s death. It was almost as though Grant were trying to fill a crucial staff position as quickly as possible, one that was too important to be vacant for long.
But Ellan was not interested in being the “first lady” of UNICEF.
Ethel’s dedication to Jim and UNICEF had been virtually unqualified and had meant countless early mornings, long nights, and routine personal sacrifice. She had entertained a litany of luminaries, diplomats, and staff and hosted 6:30 a.m. working breakfasts. She had packed Jim’s bags (or rather bag) as he rushed to get to the airport. She had also immersed herself in the issues that engrossed her husband and could speak fluently on any of them. She was his liaison, sounding board, barometer, and center of gravity.
“She was his partner in all of this, without whom he might not have succeeded,” says UN veteran Mehr Khan Williams, who then served as UNICEF’s director of communications. “It was as much her project as it was his.”
In Ethel’s jarring absence, he became unmoored and disoriented.
Maybe that was why he so quickly set his sights on his wife’s good friend. Maybe he could infect her with his cause, sweep her up in his churning crusade.
Except that he couldn’t.
In fairness to Ellan, this was an outsized expectation. It’s a lot to ask someone to marry you and your job—especially when that job is a high-stakes, full-tilt race every single day. It was unlikely Jim Grant would ever find another partner like Ethel, who would so completely and selflessly embrace his mission. Such a relationship had also been obviously freighted by traditional gender stereotypes that were becoming less acceptable. And so he adapted.
His new wife helped him relax a bit more, and he would remark that she was “the most positive person I have ever met.” The newlyweds were very much alike in one respect: they were both perennially late. Add to that Ellan’s chronic disorganization, and the wrenching change of pace was even more profound. Jim found himself in the role Ethel had once played for him: packing Ellan’s bags, keeping her on schedule, helping her get out the door.
Ellan liked to travel and she liked kids—she just didn’t like the official stuff. During one trip to Cambodia, when she accompanied Jim, she sneaked out of a meeting. She corralled her friend, UN photographer John Isaac, to go exploring with her. Enough of these “boring meetings,” she told him. “Let’s go.”
Isaac reluctantly joined her. “They freaked out, because she wasn’t there,” he recalls. “They didn’t know where she had gone. There was a search party. I said, ‘Ellan, you’re going to get me in trouble.’ She said, ‘Ah, come on.’ ”
“She was a riot,” adds Isaac.
This tectonic life shift came during what was probably the busiest, most fevered time in Jim Grant’s career, when everything he had worked for over the last nine years was nearing fruition, when the child survival revolution was reaching its crescendo, and when the plight of millions of dying, impoverished children was finally—for the first time ever—beginning to get the kind of decisive attention that could make a lasting difference for generations to come.
But that attention was fickle, fleeting—unless he could sustain it. He could not allow himself to be distracted. He had to make sure he was heard over a screeching din, as the 1989 news cycle spun at warp speed, spitting out one momentous story after the other: Iran’s Ayatollah Condemns Author Salman Rushdie to Death, Chinese Students Take Over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Oliver North Convicted in Iran Contra Scandal, George Herbert Walker Bush Inaugurated as President of the United States, Ruptured Exxon Valdez Tanker Leaks Millions of Gallons of Oil into Prince William Sound, San Francisco Earthquake Kills More Than 60 People, Berlin Wall Comes Tumbling Down (Bringing the Cold War With It), US Invades Panama. Grant watched all of this, calculating how he could advance the cause of children at a time of constant tumult, how he could keep child survival at the top of political and social agendas when old orders were crumbling and new ones arising.
The World Summit for Children was the key. The summit could deliver a resounding rebuke to the centuries of apathy and indifference to the welfare of children. It could cement the movement for child survival in history, make the whole world pause and pay attention—a conspicuous milestone by which subsequent achievements and/or failures could be judged.
Though probably the most effective children’s advocate ever, Grant was not the first. In 1919—shortly after World War I and twenty-seven years before Ludwik Rajchman spurred the founding of UNICEF—a British woman named Eglantyne Jebb was arrested in London’s Trafalgar Square. She was protesting the Allied economic blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary, which persisted for eight months after the armistice, and carrying leaflets showing emaciated children and bearing the headline: OUR BLOCKADE HAS CAUSED THIS—MILLIONS OF CHILDREN ARE STARVING TO DEATH. A fierce defender of the concept that all children deserve protection—no matter where they live or who their parents are—Jebb frequently wielded a potent George Be
rnard Shaw quote: “I have no enemies under the age of seven.” She went on with her sister to found the Save the Children Fund, one of the first international development and relief agencies.
Seventy years later, Grant was trying to make it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to reject or ignore Jebb’s—and now his—plea: save the children, save them all.
The notion of a global meeting focused on children had been thumping around in his head for a while. Peter Adamson thinks the idea may have jelled when he and Grant were flying back from a vacation with their families in Montserrat in late 1987. They were sitting on the left side of the plane, sunburned and refreshed from days of swimming and walking on the verdant Caribbean island. But Grant was itching to get back to work.
He had never really stopped working.
“Jim could not quite grasp the concept of a holiday,” says Adamson.
Over breakfast one morning, Grant had announced that, as long he was in Montserrat, he might as well meet with the head of state to see how many children were immunized. Adamson had been flummoxed. This is a vacation, he thought. Besides, Montserrat was tiny and “didn’t have any particularly great problems,” he says. This did not deter Grant, even when he learned that the head of state was away and that the only person available was the finance minister. Adamson accompanied him to the meeting, and Grant peppered the finance minister with question after question about child mortality and immunization. The minister sat there stiffly, repeatedly explaining that child health was not in his job purview—he simply did not have the answers. But Grant kept volleying questions. “He clearly thought [Jim] was mad,” says Adamson, “and at that moment, I agreed with him.”
On the plane home, as they hurtled toward a connecting flight in Miami, Grant’s assiduous tempo only increased. How could UNICEF go even further, even faster? he asked. It wasn’t about the money or the technology—it was, Grant kept saying, about that ephemeral commodity that Jon Rohde had named six years ago: political will. It was about homing in on what was doable, and what was unconscionable not to do.
Then he floated the idea: “We could hold a summit for children …”
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.”
