A Mighty Purpose Read Free

was quite cool. He knew we were going to make that airplane … But it was insane. I was sure we were going to be killed.” Even more shocking than the ride itself, adds Joseph, was Grant’s “inability to accept the rest of the physical world around him.”
    In September 1994, then noticeably wasted and withered by cancer, Grant asked for a private meeting with Pakistan’sprime minister Benazir Bhutto. He had been invited to a high-level education conference at Bhutto’s residence with other UN agency leaders and major donors, and she had agreed to see him ten minutes before the meeting started. The glamorous forty-one-year-old heir to a political dynasty and the first woman elected to lead a Muslim nation, Bhutto had already acceded to many of Grant’s wishes on child survival. But there were a few outstanding issues, according to former UNICEF Pakistan representative Jim Mayrides. Grant may have wanted Pakistan to improve on immunization gains it had already achieved and may have asked that it iodize its salt (iodine deficiency disorders were then the leading global cause of preventable mental impairment in children). In Bhutto’s home office, Grant sat on one end of a long sofa and she sat on the other. Mayrides sat in a side chair. An armed guard hovered nearby.
    Grant began his pitch, and as he spoke, started sliding across the couch closer to Bhutto. Like a magician, he began pulling items out of his pocket—a polio dropper, a packet of oral rehydration salts, an iodized salt testing dropper—and waving them at her. She smiled politely and nodded. Ten minutes became twenty, then thirty, then forty-five. Through her interior windows, Bhutto could see the shadows of her other guests, milling around in the hall. At this point, Grant had scooted a full two yards down the couch, like a prom date moving in for the kiss. He was now sitting right next to Bhutto. The armed guard was looking anxious. Sitting nearby, Mayrides nervously thought,
Jim, don’t get too close
. Out of Grant’s sunken, gaunt, wizened face, his eyes sparkled and pleaded.Bhutto said she would consider his requests. Then she tried to end the meeting.
    “I think it’s time now,” she said firmly. “You said ten minutes, and it’s been more than double that. It’s been charming.” She then reached for an intercom button to tell the other guests to come in. But before her finger touched the button, Grant reached out and grabbed her hand.
    “Madame Prime Minister,” Grant said. “I have one more thing.”
    He told her that her presence at a major, yet controversial, population meeting in Cairo in a few days would be critical to the meeting’s success; Grant believed that slowing population growth would advance child survival (and vice versa). Bhutto had already indicated she might not attend. Another UN official had asked Grant to try to convince her, says Mayrides. “You would make a stunning presentation,” Grant told her, smiling brightly.
    Bhutto laughed. “Everybody says if I go to the conference, they’re going to kill me, they’ll assassinate me,” she said. This was not an idle concern; Bhutto had received death threats and would be assassinated thirteen years later. She told Grant, “I will consider what you say, my dear James.”
    A few days later, Prime Minister Bhutto attended the meeting with Grant.
    Many of his former staff wondered aloud what kind of a businessman Grant would have been, had he chosen a career in the private sector. He was a masterful salesman. In his office at UNICEF headquarters, he kept a carefully filed collection ofmore than two hundred packets of oral rehydration salts, the “miracle” mixture of salts and sugars that he had dissolved in water and given out at the Somali refugee camp. Each packet had been manufactured in a different part of the world. The salts were central to Grant’s crusade, and he carried packets with him everywhere; when visiting a village, he would often stop mothers