AN EMPTY SEAT AT THE TABLE

By Jack E. White

FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS, the first week of April has often been a time when their heroes have died. In 1950 it was blood-plasma pioneer Dr. Charles R. Drew. In 1968 it was Martin Luther King Jr. Last week it was Carl Stokes of Cleveland, the first black big-city mayor, and Ron Brown, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Commerce, who at 54 perished doing what he always did best: trying to make deals.

Brown will be remembered more as the Frank Robinson than the Jackie Robinson of big-league politics--that is, as a star manager instead of a player. Most black leaders make their mark by demanding that blacks get a seat at the table. Brown not only sat at the table, but often sat at its head. He was among the first of a new breed of black Washington insiders with the connections and influence to make things happen for clients as diverse as civil rights leaders and fat-cat corporate executives. Jesse Jackson, for one, describes himself as "a tree shaker, not a jelly maker." Brown was just the reverse, a jelly maker par excellence.

That skill came to Brown naturally. He grew up in Harlem during the 1940s and '50s, when it was a vibrant crossroads of black culture, prestige and political savvy. He was the pampered child of college-educated parents who equipped him with bottomless self-confidence, poise and ambition--everything except the power and wealth he later supplied for himself. His family's apartment in the Theresa Hotel, where his father was manager, looked down at the glittering Apollo theater and was only a few yards away from the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, where street orators expostulated on everything from Garveyism to the theory of predestination.

But even as a child, Brown learned to be comfortable in the white world. Unlike most blacks of his generation, he had little firsthand experience with white racism. He went to elementary school in midtown Manhattan, to high school in suburban White Plains and to college at Middlebury in Vermont, where he was the only black in his class--and, more tellingly, the first one in the local chapter of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. His frat brothers liked him so much that they defied the whites-only charter to pledge him. As a newly commissioned Army second lieutenant en route to a post in Virginia, he was so naive about what it could mean to be black in America that when a waitress at a segregated Newport News, Virginia, drive-in refused to serve him and his wife, he recalled later, "I thought maybe there was something wrong with the car door." When it dawned on him that he had been rejected because of his race, Brown drove off, apparently without making a protest. It was the first time his charm had not protected him from being treated as a second-class citizen.

Such experiences shaped Brown's optimistic view of race relations--that personal contact and bargaining could resolve differences far better than confrontation. As his boyhood friend Cecil ("Butch") Forster put it, "I think Ron thought it was a privilege to be black. He had experienced so many challenges." Or as another old friend, Carl Wagner, remarked last week: "With Ron, it was not 'What is the grievance?' It was always 'What is the challenge?'" His emphasis on the importance of personal ties helped him acquire a remarkable series of mentors and allies: Mario Cuomo, who taught him law at St. John's University in New York; Vernon Jordan, who made him the National Urban League's general counsel; and Ted Kennedy, for whom he managed the key state of California during the 1980 presidential campaign. It was his talent for spotting talent, rather than his own inventiveness, that distinguished his leadership of the Democratic National Committee. He resurrected the career of Paul Tully, a veteran Ted Kennedy adviser who had fallen into disfavor, and put him in charge of political strategy. Tully got hold of voting patterns for every congressional district and county in the country; then he and Brown focused the party's efforts on the states they needed to win rather than on hairsplitting doctrinal feuds. Bill Clinton's 1992 victory was the ultimate insider achievement.

Being on the inside brings not only opportunity but also temptation, which Brown did not always resist. Like most successful African Americans, he rose without the wealth that some whites bring to public service, yet he lived as though he were rich. His convoluted business dealings before he joined the Clinton Administration led some to predict that he would be forced out for ethical lapses. At the time of his death, an independent counsel was investigating his ties to a rich businesswoman who had allegedly paid Brown $400,000 for his share of a company in which he had invested no time or money.

Such dealings are part of what being an insider is all about: they go with the territory. But in Brown's case, so did working to open new markets for U.S. companies and throwing a healing balm over racial conflicts through the sheer force of his personality. Ron Brown proved that a black man could play the game as well as any white man ever did. In a country where black competence is still often called into doubt, that made him a hero.