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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.