A Mighty Purpose by Adam Fifield

Author:Adam Fifield [Fifield, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-604-1
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2015-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

The last year or so had ushered in more milestones, as the child survival revolution—officially known as the child survival and development revolution—hopscotched from one country to another. In October 1987, to accommodate the organization’s rapid growth, UNICEF moved its headquarters into a more spacious building on Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan, called UNICEF House. Grant collected more allies, and immunization rates continued to climb. Screen legend Audrey Hepburn infused new dynamism when she was appointed as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in March 1988.

Grant had initially been opposed to appointing Hepburn. The idea was first broached by Victor Soler-Sala, a cultured, carefully spoken Spaniard who had worked for UNICEF since 1957 and was then in charge of celebrity relations. The UNICEF chief quickly shot down the suggestion, quipping, “Isn’t she a has-been?” When Soler-Sala left Grant’s office, Grant told Cahill, “You’ve got to screen a little better and save me from these crazy ideas.”

Cahill and Soler-Sala conspired to change his mind, and eventually they succeeded. Audrey Hepburn would become UNICEF’s most famous and effective celebrity ambassador, generating a level of attention and interest in the fight for child survival that, in some ways, surpassed even what Grant could muster. She had a special affinity for UNICEF; as a teenager in Holland at the end of World War II, she had been one of the millions to receive aid from UNICEF’s predecessor and Grant’s former employer, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. After meeting Hepburn, Grant quickly realized his mistake and—like many men at UNICEF—developed a crush on the thoroughly unpretentious and magnetic Hollywood darling.

“She just adored Jim,” says John Isaac, a UN photographer who became Hepburn’s friend. “She told me how much she admired him.”

With a note to Grant in November 1989, Hepburn included a photo of herself surrounded by giggling children in Bangladesh. “Dearest Jim,” she wrote. “Just to say THANK YOU for your warm, so encouraging cable, and thank you for sending me to Bangladesh … I wanted dearly to go … Now I know why. See you in New York on the 20th of November.” It was signed “Love Audrey,” with a little heart drawn above her name.

He had wrestled with other decisions in the past year (though the Hepburn one should have been a no-brainer) and had further bolstered UNICEF’s stature as an advocate and thought leader. After much internal debate and last-minute tinkering, he helped conceive and launch the controversial Bamako Initiative—an attempt to revitalize health care in African countries and to make it more locally driven by providing quality medicines at a low cost and by requiring patients to pay fees for those medicines and other services (the fees were intended to promote sustainability but drew heavy criticism; some people simply could not afford them). In 1987 he released two provocative reports, the first of which accused the apartheid government of South Africa of causing mass child deaths by fomenting civil conflict and economic destabilization in nine neighboring countries, including the former Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique.

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