Clinton Hails ‘Magnificent Legacy’ of Ron Brown’s Mission

Sorrow cast long shadows across a springtime capital Thursday as President Clinton led mourning for Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown and the delegation of more than 30 others whose mission to help rebuild the Balkans ended on a fog-wrapped Croatian hillside.

Clinton ordered flags flown at half-staff and devoted much of his day to marking the passing of his friend and the “magnificent legacy” of the group’s mission of reconstruction.

“We should thank God . . . that there are still people like them, willing to answer the challenge,” Clinton told mourners during a service at St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House.

Noting that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had died 28 years earlier to the day, Clinton quoted King’s view that the measure of a person is “where he or she stands at times of challenge.”

Clinton postponed the public signing of the landmark line-item veto legislation and, after meeting with German opposition leader Oskar Lafontaine, devoted much of his day to contacting families of the crash victims.

Tributes to Brown

The president planned to talk about Brown’s sacrifice and public service again today when he visits Oklahoma City to mark the one-year anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Before appointing Brown Commerce secretary, Clinton knew him in his roles as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a Democratic campaign aide, an aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and a Washington lawyer-lobbyist.

Tributes to Brown came from around the world, including from nations that Brown had often visited to drum up business for U.S. firms: Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Germany, France and Canada.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher called Brown’s death an “immeasurable loss,” and Defense Secretary William J. Perry said that he viewed such dangers as a necessary price to pay for peace.

Brown drew generous praise from corporate America, which had warmed to him because of his promotion of business, despite its general coolness toward the administration. “No other Commerce secretary, in my opinion, has been as active in promoting American products and services in the global marketplace,” said Jerry Jasinowski of the National Assn. of Manufacturers.

Meanwhile, the independent counsel who had been investigating allegations about Brown’s tangled financial dealings said that he is closing down that inquiry and soon will decide whether to turn over the related investigations of Brown’s son, Michael, and other associates to law enforcement agencies.

Independent counsel Daniel Pearson said that he will meet soon with a federal appeals court panel that appointed him last year and Justice Department officials to determine how to handle remaining aspects of the investigation.

List of Victims

Experts said that the most likely option is for Pearson to transfer the inquiry involving Brown’s associates, including businesswoman Nolanda Hill and Michael Brown, to the Justice Department.

The Pentagon released an official manifest of the flight that named 35 victims, including Brown and 11 other Commerce Department employees, a CIA expert on economic redevelopment, a Treasury Department official, a Croatian translator, a Croatian photographer, 12 corporate executives, an Air Force flight crew of six and a New York Times reporter.

As relatives worked with officials to arrange for the return of the bodies, the Commerce Department remained at least partly in a state of shock. Phones often went unanswered, and many employees spoke of little else but the crash. The department’s press office referred questions on the crash to the State Department.

“It’s been hectic and chaotic, and we’re trying to get ourselves together. But we’re open for business,” said one official.

Another Commerce official, en route to work early Thursday, had difficulty controlling his emotions when recalling his lost colleagues, most of whom he knew.

“A week ago I was at a meeting with many of those on the plane, and they were thumbing through brochures about Dubrovnik--and today, they’re dead,” he said, his voice breaking. “A lot of these people were very young. A trip like this is something you look forward to. It’s very exciting. . . . People don’t ever think of the danger.”

“It’s too hard. It’s really too hard.” He could not continue.

Interviews and information from official sources began to give a fuller picture of some of the crash victims.

Chuck Meissner, assistant secretary for international trade, was responsible for international commercial policy development in the department’s International Trade Administration. Described by a colleague as “gentlemanly” and a workaholic, he had spent his career of more than two decades in numerous jobs in the private and public sector in the fields of international financial, monetary and trade policy.

He was married to Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Carol Hamilton, Brown’s press secretary, was one of his closest aides and one of the most fiercely loyal in protecting her boss when reporters called to ask about his financial dealings. Before working for Brown, she served as press secretary for the Clinton presidential campaign in New York state and, in 1988, had worked for New Yorkers for Jesse Jackson.

Gail Dobert, acting director of the office of business liaison, had followed Brown from the Democratic National Committee to her Commerce post, in which she tried to advance U.S. firms’ interests overseas.

Her job on this trip, one colleague said, “was making sure the CEOs were well taken care of. She did great under pressure, and she was always under pressure.”

Loss at Commerce

Bill Morton, deputy assistant secretary for international economic development, worked for Brown for seven years. The buoyant native of Colorado, who formerly worked on the Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart presidential campaigns, was responsible for coordinating all aspects of Brown’s travel.

Adam Darling, 28, of Santa Cruz, Calif., was the young man whose enthusiasm Clinton praised in his remarks at the Commerce Department on Wednesday. In 1992, Darling had proposed to ride his bicycle across the country handing out campaign literature on behalf of the Clinton-Gore ticket.

At Commerce, he had worked for Deputy Secretary David Barram as an advance man and speech writer, but he told friends recently that he was planning to go back to graduate school at UC Berkeley in the fall.

Lawrence Payne, special assistant in the office of domestic operations in the department’s U.S. and foreign commercial service, had “the distinction of eating his ice cream and selling it too,” the department said. Before joining the department, he owned and operated an independent chain of homemade gourmet ice cream and yogurt shops in his home state of Massachusetts and neighboring New Hampshire.

He had worked for former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas (D-Mass.) on Capitol Hill and during Tsongas’ 1992 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and on Wall Street.

Lee Jackson, executive director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development at the Treasury Department, played an important role in the federal government’s effort to help develop the former Soviet Union.

Jim Lewek, the CIA analyst on the trip, was described as an expert on economic reconstruction of the Balkans.

One of the executives who perished was David Ford, 43, director of sales for the European division of Guardian Industries Corp. and president of Interguard Corp., a subsidiary that maintains glass manufacturing facilities throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Ford, a native of Washington, had been based in Luxembourg for 15 years. Last week, before making the trip, two colleagues met with him and gave him a gift of a leather jacket with the “Guardian” insignia on the pocket.

“He loved it,” said Kathy Armstrong, one of the workers who had given it to him. “We were watching the footage yesterday, of people getting on the plane, and saw he was wearing that jacket.”

Armstrong, who helped coordinate his trip, said that she had asked him before his departure to provide biographical information to be sent to the Commerce Department. He replied by e-mail:

“Not in any way related to the Ford family (the car people). Extremely nice guy. Send $5 for photos. Youngest to receive ‘Employee of the Year,’ so eat your heart out.”

During his final mission, he was to donate 23 metric tons of flat glass to Sarajevo, for about 8,000 new windows. The glass was, in fact, delivered as promised to the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo and will be given to the hospital there, the company said.

* COMING BACK: Parsons, other firms begin to fill voids left by deaths. D1