London. -- A journalist once asked James Grant, the executive director of UNICEF who died two weeks ago, why the agency had spent eight times its allotted budget on the 1990 summit of world leaders that launched the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Mr. Grant began his reply, "You have children, I have children, we all have children."
It was this single-mindedness -- detractors called it tunnel vision -- which, combined with extravagant goals and plain hard work, made UNICEF in many ways the most successful of all U.N. agencies.
Shortly after Mr. Grant started at UNICEF, I inquired of one of the U.N.'s under secretaries how the appointment was rated. "A lot of smoke but not much fire."
For those who didn't know how he used to lay his kindling, it probably looked that way. Combustion in Jim Grant's working life was deliberately slow -- and he talked the same way, with painfully pregnant pauses between the words -- but, once the fire was fully ignited, the heat could be blistering.
James Grant's UNICEF can fairly claim to be the moving force behind the quite dramatic fall, worldwide, in infant-mortality rates, and the increase of immunization levels from 20 percent of all children in 1980 to near 80 percent today.
His messianic drive tamed the greatest child killer of all, diarrheal diseases, by persuading hundreds of millions of mothers to use UNICEF's simple mixture of salt and sugar to rehydrate their sick babies.
And he relentlessly pursued the opening of "corridors of peace," negotiating with the belligerents in war zones for temporary cease-fires to allow children to be immunized and food and medicine to be distributed.
In our last conversation in August, Mr. Grant, quite ill with cancer, lamented today's fashionable pessimism.
"The world is unrecognizable from how it used to be," he said. "Only a short 70 years ago child-death rates were universally higher than the average for Africa today. In 1990, UNICEF's World Summit for Children set a target for reducing child-death rates to 70 per 1,000 births in all countries by the end of the century. Spain and Italy didn't achieve that target until the 1960s, but well over half the developing countries, only three years into this timetable, have already reached it. In the 1960s the under-five mortality rate in Europe was higher than it is in most of South America today."
Mr. Grant's strengths were also his weaknesses. So consumed was he on particular goals -- lately to achieve by the end of this year the complete ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would make it the first human-rights treaty to win universal acceptance -- that he ignored problems he just didn't have time to deal with.
After 15 years of his leadership, UNICEF, like other U.N. agencies has too many over-dressed officials in over-manned offices. Three years ago, in Bamako, Mali, a group of journalists arranged with the local UNICEF director, a white man in a dark three-piece suit and polished black shoes, to visit a UNICEF-supported program aiding street children. But despite a number of visits, all we could find were the offices and staff, never any children.
But if Jim Grant didn't run a tight ship, his was unstoppable energy and driving commitment that moved the most obdurate civil servants and the most intractable presidents. He was, as I was told by one stridently anti-American African, "a good American."
But he died frustrated with his own country. The U.S. is only one of 14 countries that has neither signed nor ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In the memory of this "good American," the Congress should ratify it in the course of 1995.
Jonathan Power writes a column on the Third World.