This has been a long week for those of us who loved Ron Brown.”
— President Clinton, during his seventh eulogy of his Commerce secretary
It was indeed a long week — “interminable,” as the president himself called it in eulogy number six. It was a week, you began to notice, that was longer than it needed to be. You began to notice, in fact, that over the course of those seven days the president had taken his widely acclaimed role as national healer to a new level — not merely rising to it, not merely acting it out for the country’s benefit, but actually (how else to put it?) milking it for all it was worth.
We are often reminded that President Clinton’s is the first baby boomer presidency, but seldom as forcefully as during the first week of April, when the sad news came of the death of Ron Brown and 34 others on a Croatian hillside. From that moment a process unfolded that would have been thought excessive in any other time than ours, unimaginable under any other administration than Bill Clinton’s.
Some aspects of the process, of course, were classic Washington, and appallingly so. Mere hours elapsed before political hay was being made. The most shameless comment came quickly from the right. Paul Weyrich, eponymous host of NET’s “Direct Line with Paul Weyrich,” linked Brown’s death with the failure of the do-nothing Republican Congress to abolish the Commerce Department. “Had the Republicans prevailed,” Weyrich told his dozens of viewers, “it is likely Brown would be alive.”
The president refused to be outdone. Upon hearing of Brown’s downed plane Wednesday morning, he met with Brown’s wife, then motorcaded to the Department of Commerce. There he delivered the first of his many eulogies, even though Brown’s death had yet to be confirmed. Mrs. Brown had asked him, Clinton said, to tell the assembled bureaucrats: “Ron was proud of them, that he liked them, that he believed in them, and that he fought for the Commerce Department, and tell them that you’re going to do that now.” And he added: ” Which I thought was appropriate.” And don’t let any budget-cutting Republicans tell you different.
But then the politicking ended. The president was not so crass as to further exploit Brown’s death for political purposes. His appearance at the Commerce Department that Wednesday afternoon was a dazzling performance: He spoke as if in conversation, in unhurried tones. He came equipped with a Bible verse that he read to good effect, and then said: “Ron Brown walked and ran and flew though life, and he was a magnificent life force.” He continued in this vein for a while longer; every spontaneous sentence was exquisitely parsable, as the transcript shows. Then he called for a moment of silence, broke it off with a somber amen, and began hugging. He started at the stage and worked his way outward. Employees, family members, guards: He hugged as though he were trying to keep warm.
The president cancelled all appointments; he did not resume a normal schedule for another four days. By Thursday the plane crash was being called a “national tragedy,” and it was clear that Clinton’s handling of his role as national healer was going over extremely well. He attended a memorial service that morning, at which he delivered another eulogy. He greeted the press outside the chapel and rephrased his remarks for the cameras. He hugged almost everyone who had attended the memorial service.
In the meantime, his press secretary told the press that the president was calling the families of the dead “one by one.” Any time left over, the president was going to use to call friends and colleagues of Brown because he found the experience “very therapeutic.” Friday morning he invited the press onto the South Lawn of the White House, to photograph him and Mrs. Clinton as they planted a tree in Brown’s memory. He delivered a brief eulogy on the South Lawn, then flew to Oklahoma City to pay tribute to the victims of last year’s bombing. He devoted a large part of his remarks to eulogizing Brown.
On Saturday, the president delivered his weekly radio address. It was a eulogy of Brown. He then flew to Dover Air Force Base, where the arrival of the bodies from Croatia was being broadcast live on CNN. His press secretary said the president spent several minutes with the family of each victim, in private, for a total of several hours of one-on-one grieving. At Dover he delivered a eulogy of Brown. It was the longest eulogy yet. On Sunday he rested.
Graveyard prose is inescapably extravagant, but the high notes of the president’s various eulogies, especially those from prepared texts, were breathtaking. At the time of their deaths, Brown and his staff were escorting American businessmen in pursuit of business opportunities. In the president’s rendering their trip became “a mission of peace and healing and progress,” and their deaths a martyrdom to. . . industrial policy. The death of Lincoln was solemnly evoked, and comparisons invited. These excesses were not uttered in the clumsiness of the moment but were written out in advance of carefully staged events. The extravagance of the sentiments was their essence. You got the feeling that if you stripped it away, there would be nothing left.
Not even grief, perhaps. Even some journalists began to flinch as the ” interminable” week refused to come to a close. “It’s something this president does exceedingly well,” said NBC’s Bob Faw, about the redundant eulogies and daisy-chain hugs and meticulously publicized private phone calls. Faw went on: “The gestures, the words do seem genuine. Sometimes they aren’t.” To illustrate, Faw showed a tape of Clinton leaving one of the Brown events. ” Recently,” Faw said, “he seemed jovial until he noticed the cameras, then switched to tears.”
After the sabbath, there was another visit to the Commerce Department, and then, at the full-dress funeral, the longest eulogy of all, and then a graveside service at which Clinton was, so to speak, never far from center stage. When at last it was over, he had taken his offce beyond the rhetorical presidency, beyond the bully pulpit, beyond, even, the ceremonial presidency; what we watched evolve during Brownfest was the narcissistic presidency.
There is more to come: another memorial service in Harlem’s Apollo theater, sponsored by Charlie Rangel, and the promise of a charitable foundation dedicated to “continuing Ron’s work,” which will of course require some sort of kick-off event at which the president will want to appear and make a few remarks. As before, loss and grief will not be exploited politically. But they will be reduced, as they were this week, to an occasion for personal indulgence, mere instruments of vanity. Faw is right: The president is very good at it. He is an exemplar of the generation that gave us the “task force” and the “workshop,” the “hotline” and the “crisis resource center.” He calls himself a “change agent” when he’s upbeat, the “adult child of an alcoholic” when he’s feeling blue. A man of such inclinations could never be expected to treat grief the old-fashioned way, with a measured, brief ceremony of sorrow and then silence.
By Andrew Ferguson
