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As Brown moved beyond Harlem to Middlebury College in Vermont and then into his career, his relationship with race seemed to become ever more complex. Instead of battering at the gates of the white establishment, he seemed more interested in slipping under the portcullis and dancing his way up to the ramparts. After college and a stint in the Army, he was hired by the National Urban League to do welfare casework in Manhattan. He completed law school at night, moved to Washington and eventually took at stab at politics by managing Edward Kennedy's California campaign during the Senator's unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. That led to several jobs with Kennedy, but Brown eventually left public service to join Patton, Boggs, one of the capital's pre-eminent lobbying firms. There he earned a six-figure income representing a client list that included a Haitian dictator and several Japanese megacorporations. In 1988 he dipped back into politics as a strategist for Jesse Jackson's campaign. Brown's skills as go-between kept the insurgent Jackson from tearing apart the Democratic Convention--an experience that left Brown with a keen sense of how divided the Democrats were as well as a conviction that he was the only one who could unite them.
With that in mind, he set out to capture the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. One by one, he won over many of the white Southern chairmen who distrusted him because of his association with Jackson. At the D.N.C., he kept the factions together, at least partly, by being evenhanded. In 1989 he supported Richard Daley Jr. in the Chicago mayoral race, standing against his former patron, Jackson, who was backing another candidate. But several years later, when two officials of the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference tried to prevent Jackson from speaking at a meeting, Brown delivered a searing rebuke. The groundwork of unity that he laid eventually enabled the party to rally behind Clinton in 1992.
When called to serve by Clinton, Brown set out to transform one of the government's most sclerotic agencies. Within months, the Commerce Department--of all places--had its own "war room," with charts, maps and tallies of foreign contracts for which U.S. firms were competing. Brown's aggressive lobbying on behalf of U.S. corporations won rave reviews from business leaders. On trips to Japan, Brazil, Africa and a dozen other places, a seat on his plane became one of the most coveted perks of the Clinton Administration.
Brown had his share of problems. His boosterism abroad lead to accusations that he was conflating business and diplomacy, two areas whose interests don't always coincide. In 1994, when he encouraged Clinton to separate human rights from trade issues in China, critics charged that Brown was woefully, and perhaps willfully, ignorant of the difference between statesmanship and salesmanship. There were also accusations that his trips were being used to reward Democratic contributors.