My life

On April 3, with springtime in full bloom in Washington, I was working in the Oval Office when I received word that the air force jet carrying Ron Brown and a U.S. trade and investment delegation he had organized to increase the economic benefits of peace to the Balkans had flown off course in bad weather and crashed into St. John’s Mountain near Dubrovnik, Croatia. Everyone on board was killed. Barely a week earlier, on their trip to Europe, Hillary and Chelsea had been on the same plane with some of the same crew members.

I was devastated. Ron was my friend and my best political advisor in the cabinet. As chairman of the DNC, he had brought the Democratic Party back from our loss in 1988 and played a pivotal role in uniting the Democrats for the 1992 election. In the aftermath of the 1994 congressional election losses, Ron had remained upbeat, lifting everyone’s spirits with his confident prediction that we were doing the right things on the economy and would win in 1996. He had revitalized the Commerce Department, modernizing the bureaucracy and using it to further not only our economic objectives but our larger interests in the Balkans and Northern Ireland. He had also worked hard to increase U.S. exports to ten

“emerging markets” that were sure to loom large in the twenty-first century, including Poland, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Indonesia. After he died I received a letter from a business executive who had worked with him, saying he was “the finest Secretary of Commerce the United States ever had.”

Hillary and I drove to Ron’s house to see his wife, Alma, and his children, Tracey and Michael, and Michael’s wife, Tammy. They were part of our extended family, and I was relieved to see them already surrounded by loving friends and dealing with their loss by telling Ron Brown stories; there were many worth repeating from the long journey he had traveled from his boyhood home at the old Hotel Teresa in Harlem to the pinnacle of American politics and public service.

When we left Alma, we went downtown to the Commerce Department to talk to the employees, who had lost both their leader and their friends. One of those who died was a young man Hillary and I knew well. Adam Darling was the idealistic and spunky son of a Methodist minister who had entered our lives in 1992 when he made news by riding his bicycle across America to support the Clinton-Gore ticket. A few days later, just two weeks before the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Hillary and I planted a dogwood on the back lawn of the White House in memory of Ron and the other Americans who had died in Croatia. Then we flew to Oklahoma City to dedicate a new day-care center to replace the one lost in the bombing and to visit with the victims’ families who were there. At the University of Central Oklahoma, in nearby Edmond, I told the students that while we had apprehended more terrorists in the last three years than in any other previous time in our history, terror required us to do more: it was the threat of their generation just as nuclear war had been the threat for those of us who had grown up during the Cold War.

The next afternoon we made the sad trip to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where America brings home those who have died in service to the nation. After the caskets had been solemnly carried off the plane, I read the names of all who had perished on Ron Brown’s plane and reminded those in attendance that tomorrow was Easter, which for Christians marks the passage from loss and despair to hope and redemption. The Bible says, “Though we weep through the night, joy will come in the morning.” I took that verse as my theme for Ron’s eulogy on Ap-ril 10 at the National Cathedral, because for all of us who knew him, Ron was always our joy in the morning. I looked at his casket and said, “I want to say to my friend just one last time: Thank you; if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here.” We laid Ron to rest in Arlington National Cemetery; by then I was so exhausted and grief-stricken after the terrible ordeal that I could hardly stand. Chelsea, hiding her tears behind sunglasses, put her arm around me and I laid my head on her shoulder.