A Mighty Purpose Read Free Page A

and health workers on the street so he could show them how to use the solution. The packets were also a key marketing tool.
    When an Italian official visited Grant in his office, recalls Sir Richard Jolly, Grant produced a packet of oral rehydration salts. “Do you realize that for ten cents, one can save a child’s life if we have enough oral rehydration salts?” Grant said. He selected one of the packets from his collection, held it up, and said, “This is the packet.” He then tossed it on his meeting table, but made sure that it landed upside down, so that its manufacturing location label was visible. Grant had chosen this particular packet because it had been made in Italy. The Italian aid minister picked up the packet, looked at it, and chuckled. “Do you realize, Mr. Grant, this packet is actually manufactured in a town ten miles from where I live?” At this point, says Jolly, Grant suddenly wore a look of surprise—as if to exclaim,
You don’t say?
    If official channels were not available or accommodating, he would use unofficial ones. He had been doing these so-called end runs throughout his lifelong career in international development. In the mid-1960s, as the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Turkey, Grant nurtured the Green Revolution, helping provide farmers withhigh-yield wheat seeds developed by American agronomist Norman Borlaug—seeds that would eventually help to avert starvation for up to one billion people worldwide. But the Turkish agricultural research establishment didn’t want the high-yield seeds brought in, because they feared they might make their own work irrelevant, according to environmental analyst Lester Brown, who then worked for the US Department of Agriculture. So Grant collaborated with a group, including Brown, to secretly smuggle the seeds into the country. “We did get the high-yielding wheat [seeds] in,” says Brown. The Turkish Green Revolution went on, and wheat production went up.
    A decade earlier, at the age of thirty-five, Grant had led the American aid mission in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) when floods paralyzed the country, stranding scores of people without food, water, or medicine. In the wee hours, he secured the help of a US military helicopter squadron, stationed on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. But they would not deliver the aid without an invitation from the Sri Lankan government. Instead of waiting for the sun to rise and following proper protocol—according to a close friend to whom Grant had relayed the story—Grant went to the prime minister’s home in the middle of the night. He threw stones at his window. He roused his wife first, and she woke the prime minister, who gave Grant the emergency approval he needed. The helicopters apparently arrived shortly thereafter.
    An obsessive quality fed his determination. During his rare vacations, he loved to snorkel. His senior communications adviser, Peter Adamson, remembers snorkeling with Grant inthe waters off Montserrat when Grant noticed an old fishing trap on the sea floor. Several fish were stuck inside, and Grant decided he would free them. The trap was about twenty feet deep—“deeper than I could go,” Adamson said. Grant dove down but could not release the fish. Eventually, after several attempts that left him gasping for air, he was able to let them out. “He could not stand the thought of these beautiful fish caught in this trap,” says Adamson.
    Despite his optimism and his cheerful exhortations and luminous smiles, “there was something lonesome about Jim,” says Joseph. “There were times you would sense he had this crushing weight on him.” Whatever success he had, it would never be enough. The more he pushed, the more children would live. With that knowledge, how could he rest?

Chapter 1
THE AMERICAN IS CRAZY
    The American made them uneasy.
    In a venerated international organization with a gravely important purpose, his