Everywhere he turns these days, Brown runs the risk of being hemmed in by the web of business ties and political connections that has made him so successful. The extra attention comes in part from his role as a path-breaking African-American in the white establishment. His hungry eye for a deal has prompted a federal investigation into an alleged scheme to sell influence to the Vietnamese. It’s a noose that Brown may slip: last week he denied to federal investigators that he had ever discussed, asked for or accepted money from Vietnam. And at a White House soiree for the Democratic Party’s most generous “trustee” contributors, he was all smiles and confidence.
But the charges have brought new attention to Brown’s career–his evolution from a civil-rights advocate into one of the most powerful pols in Washington. Even some of his close allies wonder whether he can survive as investigators, reporters and Republicans comb through his multilayered professional life. “I think he’s going to be OK in the technical legal sense,” said a close friend with a high-ranking job in the White House. “But I don’t know how often he can go through one of these things and rebuild.” White House aides vow to stand by Brown, whom they know they owe: as party chairman, he was crucial to Bill Clinton’s victory. Whether the White House will continue to trot him out as a symbol and party spokesman is less certain.
Brown’s rise and method are unprecedented. He’s a credentialed player in the white establishment, with close ties to political leaders in the black community. He rarely levels accusations of racism, either for his own purposes or others’. He has prospered at a more subtle game: as a go-between whose ease and savvy in the white world, and seeming obliviousness to skin color, make him a reassuring presence. It is a role that has left Brown free to maneuver with a minimum of accountability–at least up until now.
Brown was never one to confront the establishment; he aimed to take it over from the inside. From the beginning he played the role of being a “first”: first black in his college fraternity, first black officer in his army unit. As a young National Urban League staffer in Washington in the mid-1970s, he befriended other young black professionals to form a political elite in a city where blacks, though a majority of the population, were just gaining local power. Brown “was the guy who volunteered to run the school rummage sale,” says his friend Cathy Hughes, who owns Washington’s most popular black-oriented radio station. But Brown always eyed a wider stage. In 1979 he joined the presidential campaign of Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was preparing to challenge President Jimmy Carter. Among his reasons, Brown said later, was that he “was tired of being limited by a small pond…You know, I was an expert on all things black.” Kennedy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made Brown his chief counsel. But when the Democrats lost the Senate in the Reagan landslide, Brown, nearing 40 years old, faced a choice: stay on as aide to the Democratic minority, or head “downtown” into the private sector. Brown chose to cash in. He joined Patton, Boggs & Blow, the most aggressive lobbyist/law firm in Washington. Though he’d never practiced law, Brown was immediately made a partner.
And he quickly helped bring in clients, some of whom had lobbied for legislation before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (The Haitian government hired Brown after watching him joust with right-wing isolationist Pat Buchanan on a TV talk show.) As he prospered, old friends were startled by the rapid transformation. When he went “downtown,” he did it with a vengeance. Actually Brown had always known high style: his parents had managed the posh Hotel Theresa in Harlem.
Meanwhile, Brown kept his hand in polities–black and national–through a series of roles in the Democratic National Committee. He negotiated changes in the voting-rights law that would enable Jesse Jackson and others to register millions of blacks. In Washington Brown made himself a player in local politics, supporting former mayor Marion Barry and making personal contributions to local candidates. Later, he became close to current Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, who married one of Brown’s old friends. Brown also plunged into business deals–most of them, in one way or another, dependent on clout in Washington and other cities. His partner, Tommy Boggs, brought him into a Louisiana waste-disposal company called Chemfix Technologies, which bid on big-city contracts. Brown set up his own company to bid, successfully, for the right to manage public-employee pension funds in Washington. He helped Patton, Boggs successfully bid on municipal-bond business in Washington, though the firm bad had virtually no experience in that field. With Kelly’s husband, and a friend from Denver, Brown became owner of a Washington radio station.
Busy though he was, he never neglected politics, serving as Jesse Jackson’s 1988 convention chairman. At the Democratic convention in Atlanta, Brown was pivotal, negotiating on Jackson’s behalf with aides to Michael Dukakis. Many of them were old colleagues in the Kennedy campaign. He made his old friends sweat as he gained one concession after another for Jackson, but he never openly threatened a revolt. His insider colleagues knew that, eventually, he’d deal.
Though the Democrats were clobbered in 1988, Brown saw an opening for himself With big bucks from partners at Patton, Boggs, he ran a state-of-the-art campaign to become party chairman. He had Jackson’s backing, but kept his distance. As he gained support, resistance stiffened among some Southern conservatives and Jews who distrusted his ties to Jackson. Brown felt they were playing a race card. So, for once, he would, too. “Suddenly anyone who remained opposed to Ron Brown was a racist,” said one DNC member who remains bitter about the contest. When Brown won, colorblindness returned. His chairmanship, he declared in his maiden speech to the DNC, would “not be about race, it will be about the races we win.” It was also about Ron Brown. When one former top DNC official offered to brief Brown on the inner workings of the party bureaucracy, the new chairman’s first question was astonishing: “He wanted to know what the perks were,” this former official said.
Brown was a superb chairman, rebuilding the party structure and staging a clockwork (if lavishly limousined) convention in New York City. But his tenure at the DNC also engendered–for the first time–scrutiny of the ties between his public and private careers. Though no one has proved he did anything illegal, Brown tends to answer character queries in grudging legalisms–crafted with the precision of a micro-surgeon–in the justifiable belief that most reporters and critics are too impatient, lazy or dumb (or all three) to cause him much trouble.
So: he says he didn’t work for the Duvaliers, but rather the Haitian government. Any work for the family wasn’t done by him, but the firm. When he promised to be a “full-time chairman” of the DNC, that didn’t mean he couldn’t do some business on the side in his spare time. In fact. he did do some business. He hadn’t personally pursued the Washington bond business, he had merely signed the letter from his law firm seeking it. When he was nominated to be secretary of commerce, he furnished Congress with a short list of six clients. In published directories of lobbyists, he listed himself as a representative of dozens more. He said he thought the committee had only wanted clients for which he had been the lead or “billing” partner.
In the days leading up to his confirmation hearing last january the word on the street was that Brown would get the grilling of a lifetime. The do-good groups were on the prowl; Republicans were talking tough. Clinton was supposed to be coming in on a wave of anti-insiderism, and no one was more “inside than Ron Brown.” But a funny thing happened at the hearing: nothing.
In retrospect it’s easy to see why–and it wasn’t just because his FBI report was clean. In carefully orchestrated fashion, all the themes had come together. Clinton owed Brown, big time, and had pledged to build a cabinet that “looked like America.” The Congressional Black Caucus, doubled in size as a result of the 1992 elections, was firmly in Brown’s corner. He knew virtually all the members of the hearing committee, most of them on a first-name basis. As DNC chair, he had funneled money and staff to help most of the Democrats’ campaigns. Attorneys at Patton, Boggs & Blow had given generously to most of them. Republicans had not been neglected, either, over the years. The firm’s lawyers had given contributions to many of them, including $3,000 to Bob Packwood in the previous year. Republican lobbyists who knew Brown offered support without being asked, flashing the thumbs up to their GOP allies. One of the unprompted volunteers was Charlie Black, another lawyer-lobbyist who had been Brown’s opposite number as “acting chairman” of the Republican National Committee. Black didn’t need to be asked: he knew another soul brother when he saw one. Brown, it appears, has friends everywhere. He will need them.
