[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 47 (Monday, April 15, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3274-S3276]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   COMMERCE SECRETARY RONALD H. BROWN

  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, as we return to session today, it is 
spring in Washington. The blossoms are out. It is a beautiful time, and 
yet I am sure the experience I had in returning with my family 
yesterday was comparable with others coming back to Washington; it 
brought home the terrible tragedy that occurred while we were away, 
that of the plane going down in Croatia carrying Secretary of Commerce 
Ron Brown and so many others, including two corporate executives from 
Connecticut, Claudio Elia and Bob Donovan. And coming back here to this 
city, where many of us came to know Secretary Brown, filled me with a 
sadness and a sense of loss yesterday and today.
  I wanted to come to the floor and share with my colleagues just a few 
thoughts about Ron Brown. I hope someday in the not too distant future 
to be able to offer to my colleagues some comments, if they did not 
have the opportunity to know them, about Bob Donovan and Claudio Elia, 
whose service to our country was extraordinary.
  Today, however, I wanted to speak about Ron Brown. I am proud that I 
had the chance to work with Ron Brown during his all too short tenure 
at the Commerce Department. I tremendously enjoyed working with Ron 
Brown in his various capacities as a private attorney, as a leading 
Democratic activist, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, 
and most closely and I think most creatively in this last period of 
years as Secretary of Commerce. I am honored that I can call him a 
friend. We are all going to miss him--it's painful to think that my 
staff and I won't have the sheer fun of working with him again--and the 
country will miss him even more. I have the greatest respect for him, 
as have so many others, as a wonderful, warm human being and as a 
leader who had a clear-eyed vision of how to make our people and our 
country better.
  This is a case which is so often true where you interconnect with a 
person in a professional capacity, but you never think of a man in the 
prime of life not being here. In a way, I suppose it is death that 
makes you appreciate even more the great skills and the enormous 
service that this individual, Ron Brown, displayed for our benefit.
  Ron Brown, it seemed to me, truly loved the job he had at Commerce. 
He always managed to fit well, wherever he was, and this job really did 
fit him like a glove, from the moment he took it. He had an early 
understanding that the mission of the Department of Commerce was to 
promote economic growth, that is job creation. He understood from his 
own experience the wide-open nature of our market system and that it 
was the unique way America had for creating opportunity for its 
citizens--the market, upward mobility.
  Ron Brown never saw the business community as an enemy, he saw it as 
an ally in expanding opportunity, and he threw himself into this job 
with a single-mindedness and joyous commitment to forcing the system, 
the economic system, to deliver for all Americans.
  Against this background, I want to talk about two areas of his time 
at Commerce that I think was so critically important. I believe that 
they were truly extraordinary, and set a new performance standard for 
our government's relationship with the private sector.


                                Exports

  The first has been written about extensively in the last days since 
his death, and even some over the preceding three years: The incredible 
export promotion operation he put together at Commerce. But I do not 
think that enough has been said about why that was so important.
  Until the mid-1970's, the U.S. economy was on top of the world, 
dominating it. While our economic rivals, led

[[Page S3275]]

particularly by Japan, were figuring out that selling advanced 
manufactured goods for export was the key to economic growth and 
raising the living standards of people back home, our Government in a 
way was coasting on our success. We were not paying attention to that 
message.
  Other countries built export promotion machines--and they were 
machines--through the most intimate and comprehensive alliances between 
business and government, the private sector and the public sector. But 
the truth is that our Government paid too little attention to that need 
to build those alliances. American businesses--and I would hear this 
repeatedly from business executives in Connecticut--would go abroad to 
compete, and they would see what the business-government alliances of 
our competitors were doing for export promotion.
  I remember being told a story by the executive of one of the 
companies in Connecticut, telling me that they were competing against 
two other companies, one from Asia and one from Europe, for a very 
large job in a foreign country. They went over there to participate in 
simultaneous bidding among the three business competitors. This company 
from Connecticut, a big company, had its executives and lawyers in one 
room. But in the other two rooms, the executives and representatives of 
the Asian company and of the European company were teamed up with a 
representative of the Asian government and of the European government, 
respectively. In that case, the Connecticut company did not get the 
contract. We lost some opportunity and jobs.
  The State Department, I am afraid, continued to treat American 
business as if it had to be held at arm's length. Too many 
administrations went along with that distant attitude. Preoccupied with 
the end of the cold war and retaining the political alliances required 
for it, the State Department embraced a traditional and outmoded notion 
of what foreign policy was all about, what mattered to people here at 
home. Too often they missed what was happening in the world economy and 
the American economy which has been a grave error. They made export 
promotion a low priority, while our rivals made it the top priority. 
The State Department treated U.S. business like pariahs, it was 
``Upstairs-Downstairs''--trade was beneath our diplomatic priorities.
  This hasn't ended. A Business Week editorial this week notes that, 
``The U.S. foreign policy and security elite believe security should be 
divorced from economic issues. Some go so far as to suggest that 
providing security is a perk of global power.'' It concludes, ``We 
don't. American workers can't be expected to suffer economically to 
protect [other nations] from one another.'' Ron Brown shared this view, 
and he was the new momentum for bringing our economy into foreign 
relations. The President was his staunch ally on this effort, and 
helped him force change in this area.

  Ron Brown, working together with President Clinton, understood that 
they had to create a central position in our foreign policy for our 
economic policy. Export promotion had to be at the core of our 
international outreach; that it was not a bad thing, but in fact it was 
a very good thing, that if a President visited a foreign country with 
the Secretary of Commerce and one of the items they discussed with the 
leadership of that foreign country was buying American goods.
  I come from a very export-oriented State. In fact, it has the highest 
level of exports per capita of any State in the country. We know that 
exports create jobs, high-paying manufacturing jobs, and that each 
manufacturing job has an economic multiplier effect, creating a chain 
of goods and services behind it, longer by far than most other types of 
jobs.
  The sad fact is that we have been disinvesting in manufacturing since 
the mid-1970's, even though we need those kinds of jobs more than ever 
to develop a strong economy and a better standard of living for our 
people which will continue America as the land of opportunity. Ron 
Brown, as Secretary of Commerce, understood this from the beginning of 
his service.
  When he began his export promotion effort, within days of arriving at 
the Commerce Department, the leaders of the American business community 
that I spoke to--and I particularly heard this from heads of firms in 
Connecticut--were in disbelief. Someone was finally paying attention to 
their priorities. Somebody was finally trying to help them pull 
together an American governmental countermovement to the vast efforts 
rival countries and their businesses had been mounting for decades, to 
take jobs and exports away from us. Finally, someone with real power, 
the Secretary of Commerce, understood the problem. The fact is, at the 
beginning a lot of folks in the business community were skeptical that 
Ron Brown could make this all happen.
  But he proved them wrong, to their delight. He was great at this. 
Trained as a lawyer and always a superb advocate, he used those skills 
on behalf of American businesses throughout the world. He knew how to 
run campaigns, and he ran this export operation like a campaign, which 
is exactly how it was. Nobody had ever done this before in the way that 
Secretary Brown did, and our country has never benefited as much before 
as we did from his service.
  He even set up, in the Commerce Department, something like a campaign 
``war room,'' where he would get reports on economic opportunities 
opening up to sell American products and create American jobs--an early 
warning system. Then the letters and the phone calls would start 
flying--Ron Brown was a phone wizard, it was a technology invented for 
him, he was forever reaching out to touch some business leader or a 
head of state abroad. Then following those calls with visits, such as 
the one he was on when his life on Earth ended. He was so enormously 
skilled, he was so hard working, he was absolutely and irresistibly 
likable, he had such a great smiling charm, such sharp intelligence, he 
was such fun, he had such energy.
  The customers loved his performance. They all knew he spoke directly 
for and to the President of the United States, and that he would relay 
their messages back to the White House. Even our friends in Japan, who 
have systematically been denying entry for too many U.S. products for 
too long, liked him, as Ron Brown worked very hard at breaking down the 
barriers.
  U.S. business strongly appreciated his commitment to them, an 
enormous accomplishment. He was a terrific political operator in the 
very best sense of this phrase--he was mobilizing the political system 
to serve the public's needs. The business community uncderstood this 
and respected it deeply--I've heard this again and again from U.S. 
companies. Ron Brown was a new kind of life force to them and they had 
great affection for him.

  Ron Brown and his team's export success was only beginning when he 
left us, because the historical changes he was starting are a long-term 
project. But this new direction was a very important accomplishment for 
America. A major job for Secretaries of Commerce from now on will be to 
promote U.S. goods, not just on the offhanded, random way of the past, 
but with all the force of Ron Brown's campaigns, or they will be judged 
failures. From now on, the Federal Government is going to have to get 
down and get to work with business selling our economy. It's about 
time, but it took Ron Brown to show us how to do it. Ron Brown has set 
an entirely new standard for the country by which all that come after 
him will be judged.


                               Innovation

  A second remarkable thing he did as Commerce Secretary was to fight 
for innovation. This has been almost nowhere mentioned in the press, 
and it is not well understood by the public or the fourth estate or 
Congress. But Ron Brown understood that for the American dream of 
opportunity to be sustained for a new generation, a higher level of 
economic growth was crucial. In addition to exports, he concentrated on 
another ingredient of that strategy: innovation. Even before he was 
sworn in as Commerce Secretary, his friend George Fisher, then 
president of Motorola and now of Kodak, invited him to speak to a 
leading group of business thinkers, the Council on Competitiveness. Ron 
Brown set out in that speech an aggressive agenda of technology 
development and promotion. He recognized that innovation has been the 
great American competitive advantage for generations, that it is now 
under attack as our competitors expand, and that it has to be renewed 
if we are

[[Page S3276]]

going to keep expanding our economy. Economists estimate that 
technology development--coupled with a technologically trained work 
force--has accounted for 80 percent of the increase in U.S. 
productivity and wealth for most of this century.
  Innovation is our bread and butter.
  Brown understood that since the Second World War, the Federal 
Government has backed most of the long-term research and development 
and applied R&D that has gone on in the United States, while business 
focused on shorter term product development. That is an economic 
reality--the risk and cost of R&D means that the private sector must 
focus on what it can raise capital for--shorter term products. It is a 
classic market failure problem, and until recently Congress on a 
bipartisan basis has supported the need for governmental support of 
innovation. Brown picked up a series of small technology and technology 
extension programs that had been quietly started at Commerce in 
previous administrations, and made them a central focus. With an able 
team around him, he made the Commerce Department the administration's 
leader in civilian technology development, and supported a new system 
of cooperative R&D development with business, requiring business to 
match Federal funding to ensure sounder Government R&D investments and 
leveraging Federal research dollars. He also helped expand a new system 
of manufacturing extension centers around the country, now in over 30 
States, to bring advanced manufacturing techniques and technology to 
smaller and mid-sized manufacturers desperately in need of it to be 
able to compete with global competitors. In a time of budget cutting, 
he successfully found the resources to build these programs. He was 
also head of the administration's information infrastructure task 
force, formulating policies on the new information highway and how to 
expand our population's access to it.
  He was a true innovation supporter, and was moving quickly toward 
making the Commerce Department what it long should have been: a 
department for trade and technology, where each of these two sides of 
the department provides synergy for the other. It was becoming an 
agency which provided governmental leadership in these two areas in 
support of the private sector, not trying to dominate it, and much 
stronger because of this.

  Ron Brown's clear success, of course, led to the usual Washington 
political reaction against signs of creativity. Unfortunately, for too 
much of this past year he had to spend time deftly deflecting attacks 
on the existence of the Commerce Department. But he had helped make it 
into an instrument for growth and job creation, and his efforts had 
strong support among business and work force constituencies. He had 
begun the process to put the Commerce Department on the map as a unique 
American engine to support opportunity and growth in America. He had a 
great dream for his agency, and I respect that dream very much. I, for 
one, pledge to him that I am not going to sit here in this body and let 
it get dismantled.
  All around this city of Washington are statues of Union Army 
generals. This is a good thing--they remind us of the crisis the Civil 
War represented to our country's future, of the great wave of sacrifice 
required thirteen decades ago to keep this country intact and to 
advance the freedoms it stands for. Now we are engaged in a different 
kind of conflict, a global economic conflict. There are no particular 
enemies in this conflict, at most we have rivals, not enemies, although 
in some ways the real enemy is ourselves because we have not yet been 
able to mobilize to confront our problems. This new conflict will test 
whether the great American dream of opportunity, of economic growth 
that will allow all our citizens to grow, will endure for future 
generations. Someday, if we are successful in keeping our opportunity 
dream alive, we should think about putting up some statues of the men 
and women in the private and public sectors who are the new generals, 
new kinds of heros, of that conflict. Ron Brown's statue should be one 
of the first we erect.


                                Barriers

  I have discussed his innovative role at Commerce, but I want to say 
something about barriers, too. Occasionally, I think about how Chuck 
Yeager felt piloting his X-1 rocket plane when he was the first to 
break the sound barrier. Ron Brown was a great barrier-breaker, too, 
our first African-American to achieve many things. While Chuck Yeager's 
courage enabled him to break his barrier, the sound barrier remained 
and had to be broken again by countless additional pilots. Ron Brown's 
barrier breaking style was a little different. It also required 
courage, but he had a way of breaking barriers that began to erase 
them. He would get through a barrier in his wonderful, excited, buoyant 
way, and he would make everyone who watched him think, there goes 
another one, and why didn't we do that long ago? When Ron Brown became 
Commerce Secretary, many were expecting the President to name an 
experienced business leader, and were appalled when he named a friend 
and politician. Big business has long been a barrier for African-
Americans, but Ron Brown's outstanding performance as Commerce 
Secretary, and the depth of support he built in the business community, 
was unlike anything any Commerce Secretary has been able to do before. 
We watched and thought, there he goes through another barrier, the 
biggest he had ever faced.
  In so doing, Ron Brown broke an even bigger barrier. America has been 
blessed with a long line of outstanding African-American leaders. In 
the past, those leaders typically have been leaders of the African-
American community, and that has been very important for the country, 
too, and we need many more. Ron Brown well-remembered and was intensely 
loyal to his African-American roots, but, like Colin Powell, he was 
also a national leader, who was clearly understood, in his great 
energetic way, to be battling for the well-being of every American. 
That is a new, promising thing in America, it is a strong new step down 
our country's freedom road.
  Mr. President, he led this effort to take some small, relatively 
unknown program in the Commerce Department--the Advanced Technology 
Program is one--to build it into an engine for technology growth and 
job creation.
  Much was said in the aftermath of Ron Brown's tragic death about him 
being a bridge builder. I say he was also a barrier breaker. I think 
sometimes about Chuck Yeager, how he felt piloting that X-1 rocket 
plane when he first broke the sound barrier.
  Ron Brown was a breaker, too, but the thing about Yeager's 
accomplishment is that barrier has to be broken every time someone 
chooses to do it. Ron Brown broke barriers that erased them. When he 
became Commerce Secretary, many were expecting the Secretary to name an 
experienced business leader. They were disappointed when he named a 
friend and politician.
  But Ron Brown, by his outstanding performance at Commerce and the 
depth of support he built in the business community, broke another 
barrier and brought with him the business community and a lot of 
Americans.
  Ron Brown was true to and proud of his African-American roots and the 
community from which he came, but he became in his lifetime like Colin 
Powell: Not just an African-American leader, but a great American 
leader.
  Mr. President, finally, I say this. All around our city of Washington 
are statues of our great military heroes. Now we are engaged in a 
different kind of global conflict: an economic global conflict. If we 
ever start building statues for those generals who served as 
courageously and with great success in the economic battles that affect 
the quality of life and job opportunity for people in our country, we 
ought to erect a statue to Ron Brown as one of the greatest of those 
leaders.
  I yield the floor.

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