THE JOYFUL POWER BROKER

By Kevin Fedarko

LAST TUESDAY AFTERNOON, RON BROWN found himself with some time to spare in Paris before flying on to the Balkans. So he went over to the U.S. embassy and engaged Ambassador Pamela Harriman in a stroll along the Seine. As they walked and chatted, the Commerce Secretary could barely contain his enthusiasm over a scheme he had just cooked up involving 200 Big Macs, which he had managed to persuade a McDonald's manager in Croatia to give him, free of charge. His plan was to pick up the burgers in Zagreb, fly them to Tuzla and pass them out to the U.S. troops he would be visiting. That gesture was pure Ron Brown: part theater, part business, with an eye on self-interest and a generous touch.

The purpose of Brown's trip was to demonstrate U.S. support for the peacekeeping effort in the Balkans, as well as to lobby on behalf of the 12 American industry leaders in his delegation who hoped to grab a piece of $5 billion in reconstruction aid already promised to Bosnia. After leaving Paris, Brown and his party spent the night in Zagreb, then proceeded to Tuzla, where the Secretary delivered his Big Macs. The troops were thrilled. Then around 2 p.m., Brown's entourage boarded an Air Force T-43 for the coastal town of Dubrovnik, where one of the worst storms in a decade was raging.

Just after 3 p.m., the plane suddenly disappeared from the radar screens in the Dubrovnik control tower. It was more than four hours before the truth emerged: the aircraft had slammed into a rocky hilltop nearly two miles from the airport. With the exception of a fatally injured flight attendant who died on the helicopter ride to a nearby hospital, every passenger was dead by the time Croatian rescue teams reached the site of the crash.

In Washington, a city famous for counterfeit displays of emotion, Brown's demise at the age of 54 immediately transformed the corridors of power into a theater of genuine shock and grief. And as his sea of mourners gathered at one another's homes, Brown was remembered as the complicated figure he had been in life: a fan of Hermes ties who liked to dine in deep-fry joints; a defender of the little people who enjoyed being chauffeured around in limousines; a dealmaker who could talk policy (if only to better horse-trade on Capitol Hill); a big-time Washington lawyer who never gave up public service; a man of conviction who often skirted the ethical edge; a keenly optimistic black man in the white establishment. His resume contained a gold-plated series of civil rights achievements, even if he refused to let them define him only in terms of race: first black chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee; one of the first black partners in his Washington law firm; first black Democratic Party chairman. There were many other firsts as well.

The morning after the crash, U.S. Army Brigadier General Michael Canavan phoned from Dubrovnik to inform Harold Ickes, Clinton's deputy chief of staff, that Brown's body had finally been identified. Famous for his steeliness, Ickes opened the 8:30 a.m. White House staff meeting with the grim news, then issued a call for business as usual. But within minutes he had turned the meeting into an impromptu wake, with staff members swapping fond anecdotes and roguish tales, all of them rich in laughter and full of deep pride in Brown. Even Ickes told one.

He recalled an incident during the transition of 1992, when Clinton was putting together his Cabinet. At the time, Brown was fervently hoping to become Secretary of State. Instead, Clinton offered to make him ambassador to the U.N., which Brown turned down. The evening he got Clinton's counteroffer, Brown and Ickes repaired to the bar in Little Rock's Capital Hotel. "Well, I didn't get State," Brown told Ickes, "and I'm not gonna do the U.N. The President wants me to be Secretary of Commerce." Brown took a sip of cognac and smiled. "What does Commerce do?" he asked. "I don't even know where the building is," replied Ickes. As he told the story, Ickes swung from laughter to tears, then settled into a wistful chuckle.

Much the same was going on all over town. Anyone who had ever collided with Brown's whirling-dervishness could barely imagine him motionless, much less dead. And they didn't bother hiding their sorrow. Clinton, whose overabundance of emotion has made him a target of jokes in the past, assumed the mantle of national minister for the rituals of consolation. On Wednesday, after sitting vigil with Brown's wife and family, he paid a visit to the Commerce Department. Speaking without notes, the President thrummed into his preacher stance, drawing on Scripture from memory, invoking the Baptist lessons he knows in his bones and letting the richness of his drawl do its work while he eulogized Brown as a "magnificent life-force" who "walked and ran and flew through life."

By Friday night, Clinton had called and spoken to the bereaved families of all 33 American victims, inviting them to join him at a memorial service Saturday afternoon at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. That was just the kind of reach-out-and-touch gesture Brown would have made. It was a skill he learned to develop early on. A son of New York City's black aristocracy, his first and perhaps most important lessons were imparted not by the wealthy prep schools he would attend as a teenager but by the human parade passing through his home, Harlem's Hotel Theresa, which his father managed. In its day, the Theresa served as a Mecca for famous black entertainers, sports heroes and, of course, politicians. Brown was on hair-mussing terms with the likes of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Percy Sutton and the young David Dinkins.

Those men instilled in Brown what would become his most salient trait: his incandescent self-confidence. "What stuck with Ron was how great it was that they were there, and how he was going to be like them," recalled his former assistant, Melissa Moss. "He was missing the computer chip that said, 'Caution, you can't do this.'" The hotel also offered young Ron his first chance to sample the rewards of peddling influence. Until guests like Joe Louis got wind of the scheme and put a stop to it, he made a brief career of badgering famous guests for their autographs, then selling them to friends for $5 a pop.

As Brown moved beyond Harlem to Middlebury College in Vermont and then into his career, his relationship with race seemed to become ever more complex. Instead of battering at the gates of the white establishment, he seemed more interested in slipping under the portcullis and dancing his way up to the ramparts. After college and a stint in the Army, he was hired by the National Urban League to do welfare casework in Manhattan. He completed law school at night, moved to Washington and eventually took at stab at politics by managing Edward Kennedy's California campaign during the Senator's unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. That led to several jobs with Kennedy, but Brown eventually left public service to join Patton, Boggs, one of the capital's pre-eminent lobbying firms. There he earned a six-figure income representing a client list that included a Haitian dictator and several Japanese megacorporations. In 1988 he dipped back into politics as a strategist for Jesse Jackson's campaign. Brown's skills as go-between kept the insurgent Jackson from tearing apart the Democratic Convention--an experience that left Brown with a keen sense of how divided the Democrats were as well as a conviction that he was the only one who could unite them.

With that in mind, he set out to capture the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. One by one, he won over many of the white Southern chairmen who distrusted him because of his association with Jackson. At the D.N.C., he kept the factions together, at least partly, by being evenhanded. In 1989 he supported Richard Daley Jr. in the Chicago mayoral race, standing against his former patron, Jackson, who was backing another candidate. But several years later, when two officials of the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference tried to prevent Jackson from speaking at a meeting, Brown delivered a searing rebuke. The groundwork of unity that he laid eventually enabled the party to rally behind Clinton in 1992.

When called to serve by Clinton, Brown set out to transform one of the government's most sclerotic agencies. Within months, the Commerce Department--of all places--had its own "war room," with charts, maps and tallies of foreign contracts for which U.S. firms were competing. Brown's aggressive lobbying on behalf of U.S. corporations won rave reviews from business leaders. On trips to Japan, Brazil, Africa and a dozen other places, a seat on his plane became one of the most coveted perks of the Clinton Administration.

Brown had his share of problems. His boosterism abroad lead to accusations that he was conflating business and diplomacy, two areas whose interests don't always coincide. In 1994, when he encouraged Clinton to separate human rights from trade issues in China, critics charged that Brown was woefully, and perhaps willfully, ignorant of the difference between statesmanship and salesmanship. There were also accusations that his trips were being used to reward Democratic contributors.

And then there were the scandals involving his personal financial dealings. So complicated were his many business interests that he found it impossible to put his assets into a blind trust when he took office. During the past four years, he endured a variety of separate investigations into his finances. Although none of the charges were ever proved (the most recent Justice Department case was dropped last week after his death), the scrutiny was capitalized on by G.O.P. budget cutters who were targeting the Commerce Department for elimination. The unsavory news stories also made it unlikely that Clinton would tap Brown to run the 1996 campaign. Between June and December of last year, he was largely frozen out of the White House's re-election effort. In January, however, Clinton decided to invite him into the Wednesday-night strategy sessions in the private residence.

Last Tuesday, Brown and Labor Secretary Robert Reich were attending a two-day Group of Seven conference in the French city of Lille. Poised to descend the grand stairway at their hotel, both men suddenly realized they were being watched by a crowd of reporters and photographers below. Brown leaned over to Reich and offered the kind of quip that captured his instinct for politics, his sense of timing and his self-deprecating humor. "The only way people will think we are doing something important," he told Reich, "is if we stand up straight, walk fast and let our arms swing." So they did.

Many admirers referred to those qualities last week, but Mario Cuomo's son Andrew probably captured them best when he recalled a visit to Los Angeles in March 1993, when Brown and Cuomo were delivering an aid package to the city. Outside a sporting-goods shop staffed by former gang members, Cuomo and Brown played basketball with the ex-gangsters for the benefit of the TV cameras. "The gang people were big," said Cuomo. "This was not going to be much of a contest. So Ron took the ball, and with the cameras rolling, he set up at half court and sent a single shot at the hoop." Swish. The gangsters cheered. Ron Brown turned and walked away. Game over.

--Reported by Ann Blackman, Margaret Carlson, Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson/ Washington and Eric Pooley with Clinton

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN, MARGARET CARLSON, MICHAEL DUFFY AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON AND ERIC POOLEY WITH CLINTON