A Mighty Purpose Read Free Page B

enthusiasm was a little too incandescent, his banter a little too bold, his back slaps a little too brisk. Didn’t he have any idea where he was? What this was all about? That this was not some think tank or law firm? That the decisions made here could mean the difference between life and death for millions of children? It was not a place for recklessness or bravado—mistakes and missteps could simply not be afforded. Was he naive? Clueless? Out of his depth? Or just bullheaded?
    James Pineo Grant took over as the executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund on January 1, 1980, its third leader since the organization’s founding in 1946. He was not a total stranger to UNICEF—he had represented the United States on the organization’s board for two years, and his kinetic ambition was well known. He had, in fact, had his eye on the job and had lobbied hard for it. Nonetheless, his appointmentarched many an eyebrow among UNICEF staff and others at the UN.
Jim Grant? Really? That American think tank guy?
    The man he was replacing, a respected diplomat and statesman named Henry Labouisse Jr., was also an American. (UNICEF has never had a non-American at the helm—tacit recognition of the fact that the US government has long been a major financial contributor.) But Labouisse was a cultured, genteel Southerner from New Orleans. He spoke French. He kept a neatly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit. He was understated in almost every respect and was essentially considered an honorary European. The word most often used by former UNICEF staff to describe him is “patrician.” He was married to Eve Curie, the daughter of Nobel Prize–winning French scientists Marie and Pierre Curie. Labouisse himself had accepted the Nobel Prize on UNICEF’s behalf in 1965.
    In contrast, Jim Grant was a “cowboy”—a blunt, buoyant, sometimes uncouth, very “American” American. He was a World War II veteran who employed frequent military analogies, drank black coffee out of Styrofoam cups, whistled while strolling into his office, jogged in place to psych himself up for meetings, used words like “yesable” and “doable” and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches his wife had packed for him.
    Ostensibly lacking any pretense, he at first seemed devoid of another quality: finesse. Some Europeans on the board and staff “felt he was not right for the position,” recalls Mary Racelis, UNICEF’s former regional director for eastern and southern Africa. “There was a feeling that he is too much of a maverick … that he doesn’t know how to operate as a UN diplomatin these rarefied circles.” It didn’t help that Grant told some people that President Jimmy Carter had “appointed” him to the job. Carter had nominated him, but it was UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim who had officially appointed him (though everyone knew that the American president’s choice would likely not be disregarded, which made Grant’s phrasing all the more impolitic). He often invoked Carter’s instruction to him that his job was not only to make UNICEF run well, but to improve the image of the UN as a whole within the United States. “He kept making references to the mandate he had from the president of the United States, over and over and over again,” says Margaret Catley-Carlson, who represented Canada on the UNICEF board and who was later recruited by Grant to work for UNICEF. “There are several of us who said, ‘Jim, you’re working for an international organization.’ ”
    Many staff members bristled at his frequent references to Carter and his old employer, USAID, where he had led several foreign missions. R. Padmini, an Indian woman who served as UNICEF’s Ethiopia representative, recalls some reactions by staff: “ ‘Does he think he’s an agent of the US Government?’ … ‘He thinks he’s still in USAID!’ … ‘This is the United Nations, not the United States!’ ” (In a testament