Free A Mighty Purpose by Adam Fifield

says. “He might have knocked over most of the hurdles, but he could go back and put them up later, whereas everybody else was running a normal race.”
    Had Grant taken the advice to hold off and solicit more feedback, the child survival revolution might never have gotten off the ground, suggests Stephen Joseph. “Jim wasn’t so stupid,” he says. “Here, he was dealing with the UN bureaucracy … Imagine if he had called all UNICEF together, with representatives from the UNDP and [other agencies] and said, ‘We’re going to do this.’ … He might never have gotten it done.” Joseph adds:“There are people who achieve things that could not be achieved by the traditional manner, because the traditional manner is part of the reason why they ain’t being achieved. And that was Jim Grant.”
    As the word spread of Grant’s designs, fears and confusion uncoiled. What was this revolution? How could such a preposterous plan possibly go anywhere? Would UNICEF survive Grant’s reign? He soon earned a new nickname: the Mad American.
    Adamson knew he had to take sides. Finally, he made his choice. No matter how ill-advised the timing, no matter how much it slashed against the grain, Grant’s reasoning could not be dismissed. Some critics had charged that the eager new head of UNICEF was focusing only on the “symptoms”—mass child deaths, malnutrition, and pervasive ill health—and was therefore neglecting the fundamental causes of poverty and the complex, long-term, “bottom-up” solutions that were necessary to effectively combat it. But as Adamson came to appreciate, and would later write in a speech for his boss, these “symptoms of poverty help to crush the potential of the poor, to reduce their control over circumstance, to narrow choices available to them, and to undermine the long-term process of development.”
    He realized that, ultimately, what Grant was trying to do was “take up the slack.”
    That “slack” was an appalling daily toll of death and misery that didn’t have to happen. At the time, an estimated fourteen million children were dying every year of causes that had long ago been banished to the medical history books in theindustrialized world. The means to save these children existed; they were cheap, readily accessible—yet they were not being used. “It was as if a cure for cancer had been found, and no one was doing anything about it,” Adamson says. “Because they were poor and had no voice.”
    Jim Grant had decided he would do something about it.
    Adamson resolved that he would join the Mad American. “I decided this is worth a go,” he says. “I threw myself in.”

Chapter 3
TURNING OFF THE TAP
    It was on his way to school on frigid winter mornings, peddling his bicycle through the kinetic, imperial labyrinth of Peking, that he would see the bodies. They lay in the street. What surprised him most was that passersby did not seem at all alarmed. They did not stop. They just stepped over the corpses or around them, as if they were heaps of snow or garbage. Whether these people had starved or frozen to death the night before, their bodies had simply become yet another part of the teeming, motley urban landscape. Peking (now Beijing) in the late 1920s and early 1930s was a city of opium dens and prostitution and commerce of all kinds, a dense metropolis surrounded by ancient walls and living under the crumbling legacy of two thousand years of dynastic rule (the last dynasty, the Qing, had fallen in 1912). The threat of invasion from Japan hung menacingly in the air. It was also a place where awesome grandeur mixed with pernicious poverty.
    Commenting on the frozen bodies in the street years later, Grant would say that “it was virtually unthought of at thattime that all these people would ultimately read and write and have access to health services.” They were dispensable, insignificant—acceptable casualties for a society, not unlike many societies at the time, where