[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 59 (Thursday, May 2, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4634-S4636]
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 flying back with my family 
yesterday was similar to what others returning yesterday experienced: 
It brought home the terrible tragedy that occurred while we were away--
the plane that went down in Croatia carrying Secretary of Commerce Ron 
Brown and so many others. It filled me with a sense of loss again 
yesterday and today.
  I am proud that I had the chance to work with Ron Brown during his 
all too short tenure at the Commerce Department. I enjoyed working with 
Ron Brown at various stages of his career-- as an attorney, as a 
leading Democratic activist, as chairman of the Democratic National 
Committee, and most closely and, I think, most creatively in these last 
3 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.
  You never think of a man in the prime of life not being here. In a 
way, it is death that forces you to appreciate even more the great 
skills and the service that Ron Brown, displayed for our benefit.
  Ron Brown truly loved the job he had at Commerce. He always managed 
to fit himself well to the tasks he undertook, wherever he was, but 
this job really did fit him like a glove, from the moment he took it. 
He understood as soon as he started the job that the mission of the 
Department of Commerce is to promote economic growth, that it is job 
creation. He understood from his own experience the wide-open nature of 
our market system and that the market and its upward mobility was the 
unique way America had for creating opportunity for its citizens.
  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 moving the system, 
the economic system, so that it would deliver for all Americans.
  Against this background, I want to talk about two efforts he spent 
his time on at Commerce that I think were critical. 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 days since his 
death, and even over the preceding 3 years: The incredible export 
promotion operation he put together at Commerce. But I do not think 
that enough has been said about why it was so important.
  Until the mid-1970's, the United States economy was on top of the 
world, dominating it. While our economic rivals, led 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 was coasting on our success. We 
were not paying attention to the emerging economic 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 
our Government paid too little attention to the need to build these 
alliances. American businesses--and I heard 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; his firm was competing against two other 
companies, one from Asia and one from Europe, for a very large order in 
a foreign country. He 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 
representatives of the Asian government and of the European government, 
respectively. The government representatives were combining with their 
companies to enhance their firms' offers. It made the contest unequal. 
The Connecticut company did not get the contract. We lost an 
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, of what mattered to people here 
at home. It missed what was happening in both the world economy and the 
American economy, which has been a grave error. It 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 with President Clinton, understood that we 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. It was not a bad thing, but, in fact, it was a very good 
thing, if the President visited a foreign country with the Secretary of 
Commerce and the issues they discussed with the leadership of that 
foreign country included 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 other types of 
jobs.
  The sad fact is that we have been disinvesting in manufacturing since 
the mid-1970s, even though we need these 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

[[Page S4635]]

from us. Finally, someone with real power, the Secretary of Commerce, 
understood the problem. At the same time, in the beginning, many in the 
business community were skeptical whether Ron Brown could make all this 
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 what it is. 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 around the world 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. He followed those calls with visits, 
such as the one he was on when his life ended. He was so enormously 
skilled, he was so hard working, he so 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 
to and for 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 United States 
products for too long, liked him, as he worked very hard at breaking 
down their barriers.
  U.S. business strongly appreciated his commitment to them, his 
accomplishments. 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 understood 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 historic 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 in 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 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 United States 
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 U.S., 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's 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 both an innovator and an 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.


                                barriers

  I have discussed his innovations at Commerce, but I want to raise an 
additional subject. Much was said in the aftermath of Ron Brown's 
tragic death about his role as a bridge builder. I say he was also a 
barrier breaker. I think sometimes about Chuck Yeager and how he felt 
piloting his X-1 rocket plane when he first broke 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 other pilots. Ron Brown's barrier-breaking was 
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 
disappointed when he named a friend and politician. 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

[[Page S4636]]

African-American leaders. Many of those leaders have been seen as 
leaders of the African-American community. Ron Brown was intensely 
loyal to his African-American roots, but, like Colin Powell, he was 
also a national leader, an American leader who was clearly understood, 
in his great energetic way, to be battling for the well-being of every 
American.
  In his struggle to save the Commerce Department over the last year, 
Ron Brown often compared the abolition of the Department to unilateral 
disarmament in the international economic wars of today. In closing, I 
note that all around our city of Washington are statues of our great 
military heros. Now we are engaged in a different kind of global 
conflict: an economic global conflict. If we ever start building 
statues for those who have served courageously and with great success 
in this economic battle for the opportunity and the well-being of our 
people, we ought to erect a statue to Ron Brown as one of the finest of 
those leaders.

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