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Ambassador Rice: Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you so much for coming.
It's my great honor to welcome President Obama and President Clinton.
And let me also thank very personally Congressman
Charlie Rangel for his --
(applause)
-- for his extraordinary leadership in getting this
building named for Ron Brown.
I'm also glad that we're joined today by Martha Johnson,
the administrator of GSA.
And this building's architects, Gwathmey, Siegel and Associates,
wanted to design an iconic tower that would become a landmark in
New York City, and they have done a truly remarkable job.
I want to pay particular tribute to this project's lead architect
Charles Gwathmey, who died in 2009 at the age of 71.
It's fitting that this building in which we represent America to
the world is named in memory of a man who represented America so well.
And I'm so moved to see the Brown family here today,
especially Alma, Michael, Tracey and their families.
So let us begin the program today by asking the incomparable
Patti LaBelle to sing our National Anthem.
Ms. LaBelle.
(applause)
Ms. LaBelle: ♪ Oh, say can you see ♪
♪ By the dawn's early light ♪
♪ What so proudly we hailed ♪
♪ At the twilight's last gleaming ♪
♪ Whose broad stripes and bright stars ♪
♪ Through the perilous fight ♪
♪ O'er the ramparts we watched ♪
♪ Were so gallantly streaming ♪
♪ And the rockets' red glare ♪
♪ The bombs bursting in air ♪
♪ Gave proof through the night ♪
♪ That our flag was still there ♪
♪ Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave ♪
♪ O'er the land of the free ♪
♪ And the home of the brave ♪
Woo!
Thank you, Brown family.
(applause)
Ambassador Rice: Thank you, Patti LaBelle.
Ms. LaBelle: You're welcome.
(laughter)
Ambassador Rice: It's a particular personal honor for me to be the first U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations to work in this magnificent new
building, with its beautiful architecture and its
extraordinary art provided by the Foundation for the
Preservation of Art and Embassies.
And the reason is because Ron Brown was very special to me.
When I was four, my family moved into a house that backed on the
Brown family home, so I knew Secretary Brown well and I grew
up with Michael and Tracey.
In fact, what very few basketball chops I have I got
playing on the basketball court in their backyard.
I later had the great honor of serving with Ron Brown in the
Clinton administration.
I particularly admired the way he mentored an entire generation
of young African-American policymakers.
Secretary Brown made the Commerce Department an incubator
for extraordinary talent, and we are honored to have so many of
those colleagues here with us today.
Secretary Brown was also great company.
I'll never forget how much fun it was to travel with him to
Africa in 1995, and I'll never forget the powerful reaction he
engendered when he said, "The United States will no longer
concede African markets to traditional colonial powers."
Secretary Brown was more than a great American commerce
secretary; he was also a great diplomat,
and he was an extraordinary role model.
His life was cut far too short, but he lived more in his 54
years than most of us ever do.
It's a wonderful testament to Ron Brown that we dedicate this
magnificent building in his honor.
Now it's my great pleasure to welcome Secretary Brown's dear
friend and old boss, President Bill Clinton.
(applause)
Former President Clinton: Thank you very much.
(applause)
Mr. President, Ambassador Rice, thank you for your service in
both administrations.
Patti, thanks for singing.
Alma, Michael, Tracey, Kendall, Morgan and Ryan,
Herman and Caleb, thanks for being here to honor your
husband, father, grandfather.
Congressman Rangel, thanks for your role in making this day
come to pass.
And Mayor Dinkins, I'm glad to see the two of you there,
all spiffed out in your bow ties.
(laughter)
It makes me think that before my time on earth is up I might
learn to tie one.
(laughter)
I'd like to thank former Secretaries Rodney Slater and
Alexis Herman for coming.
They were Ron Brown's colleagues and friends.
Commissioner Kelly, thank you.
And I'd like to join with what Susan said in thanking the late
Charles Gwathmey for his wonderful work in this
magnificent building.
When Susan was talking about her basketball chops,
it reminded me of something I sometimes try to forget.
Ron Brown was Chairman of the Democratic party as all of you
know before he became my commerce secretary.
And he never lost his sense of humor.
We had gotten beaten in most of the last presidential elections
and we were often divided, and he made sure we were united in
this election.
And so I asked him to be commerce secretary,
but he said he didn't want to be a conventional commerce
secretary, he wanted ordinary Americans to know what he was doing.
So he continued to travel with me in the country to go out
across America to meet with business people,
to meet with working people, to meet with community leaders so
they knew the connection between what he did and how they lived.
And one day we were walking in South Central Los Angeles and I
said, Ron, we need to go in that sporting goods store over there
because those guys are great.
They have done everything they could to keep kids out of gangs.
They even took the parking lot behind the sporting goods store
and put a basketball court up there.
And we need to go in there and thank them.
So we moseyed in, we thanked the guys.
They said, well, there's a bunch of kids playing ball out back,
you ought to go look at them.
So all of these young -- I mean, really young --
kids were out there and they looked at Ron and me like we
were, you know, freshly unwrapped mummies.
(laughter)
And they asked if we wanted to play.
So we said sure.
We took off our ties and our coats.
I took a couple of kids.
He took a couple of kids.
Very shortly, he forgot his job and who appointed him.
(laughter)
And for the rest of his life to anybody who would listen,
he would say, there Bill Clinton was with his hands in my face,
all over my body and I was 20 feet away and the game was
ending and I shot nothing but net.
(laughter)
He made us all laugh.
There was something very serious, however,
behind his appointment as Secretary of Commerce.
I was the first president who had both the honor and the
responsibility of serving after the Cold War when the old order
faded away.
My first national security advisor, Tony Lake,
said after we dealt in quick succession with Somalia, Haiti,
Bosnia, and God only knows what other headaches,
he looked at me one day and said, Mr. President,
you know, sometimes I really miss the Cold War.
(laughter)
And every time I hear some armchair critic say to you,
you haven't given us a grand theory for why you do
everything -- we're living in a world where the best we can do
is do the right thing based on how we want the world to come
out and try to put networks together.
It's obvious that there's no clear dividing line between
foreign and domestic policy.
No clear dividing line between our economic security and our
national security.
And we needed all hands on deck in a troubled economy in 1993.
I also thought for too long economic policy had been made
too much only by Treasury which tends to get overly concerned
with the bond market and finance alone and by the White House,
which has to worry about the President's politics.
So we got everybody else involved,
including Labor and Transportation,
and all the other economic agencies --
the SBA, OPEC, XM Bank, but especially Commerce.
When the Commerce Department was established and Herbert Hoover
was the commerce secretary -- a job, by the way,
in which he did very well -- it was a big deal.
But over time it had become viewed as a second tier agency.
I knew that if we were going to have a successful economic
policy, we had to do not just the macroeconomics but the
microeconomics -- or what Ron Brown called, the art of the deal.
I knew we were going to bring back manufacturing in America.
If we were going to expand the economic base and do it in a way
that helped other countries and treated them fairly,
we had to have someone who understood that we needed both
more trade agreements and enforcement of the ones we made.
I knew that we had to have an America that was good for
business and labor.
He was the perfect commerce secretary.
But when I asked him to take it, he didn't know that.
As a matter of fact, I later learned that he went out after I
offered him a job and called a friend and says,
what does a commerce secretary do, anyway?
(laughter)
By the time he took the job he knew what the commerce secretary
did and he knew what he wanted to do.
I have many memories that reinforce the importance of this
building being named today.
He was part of our delegation in Nelson Mandela's inauguration.
Before long, he was heading an investment fund for South Africa.
And today the commercial section there is named for him in Johannesburg.
When we were trying to make peace in Northern Ireland it was
obvious that the impulse was coming from the Irish
themselves, and the more prosperity they had the more
they would demand that they put aside old conflicts.
So I asked Ron Brown to generate economic opportunities for
Northern island.
He soon became so popular there he said that he was the original
Black Irish.
(laughter)
And then there was the Balkans.
In less than a week it will be the anniversary of the day
Ron Brown and Chuck Meissner and all those other good people gave
their lives trying to help people half a world away recover
from the ruins of war.
He was in the end as much of America's voice of the world as
any diplomat could hope to be.
I'm sorry, and the President is sorry that the Secretary of
State's not here today, but he sent her to London where
Ron Brown would want her to be.
But we loved him, Hillary and I did.
We didn't dislike him and admire him, we loved him.
When everybody else was down, he was up.
When everybody else said the glass is half empty,
he'd say no, it's half full.
When everybody else said we're about to hit a dead-end,
he'd say, no, we're about to break down a wall.
And he never forgot that all those old saws were true.
You could do well and do good.
You could do good for your own and do good for others at the same time.
And you could do good and have a real good time doing it if you
were hanging around Ron Brown.
In the central highlands of Africa where my foundation does
a lot of work, when people meet walking past each other on the
trail and one says, hello, good morning, how are you,
the answer that is typically given, translated into English,
is not, I'm fine, how are you; it is, I see you.
I see you.
Ron Brown saw people.
Nobody was invisible.
Not the people who served his food or to the people who
cleaned the streets.
He never forgot the lessons he learned in the Theresa Hotel,
barely a block from where my foundation office is now,
thanks to Charlie Rangel.
Joe Lewis was around him when he was a little boy.
He called him Little Brown.
Little Brown became a very big man.
And he became the symbol of what America ought to be in the 21st Century.
I am grateful that I knew him.
And even today I miss him all the time.
On my desk in Harlem there are only pictures of my family and
one of me and Ron Brown laughing our heads off.
I ask you to remember that today.
It'd be hard for a person to live 154 years and do more good
and bring more joy and symbolize more of what we need to do.
He would be very proud that Barack Obama became President of
the United States and very proud of you, Mr. President,
for what you're doing in Libya with the international community.
(applause)
He would be very proud of you for wanting to share the
responsibilities and the credit, for wanting to build a world
we'd all like to live in when America is not the only big dog
on the block, economically, politically, or militarily.
A world where people embrace their common responsibilities
and create shared opportunities.
He would be proud.
The rest of us are grateful.
And also grateful that with all you've got going on you came up
here today to honor our friend.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
(applause)
President Obama: Thank you.
(applause)
Thank you so much; thank you.
Everybody, please be seated.
I am so grateful to be here in this beautiful space.
Let me begin by thanking the Brown family for making me a
part of this celebration.
I want to thank President Clinton for his leadership and
his outstanding example when it comes to foreign affairs.
I want to thank my outstanding -- and I mean outstanding --
U.N. Ambassador, Susan Rice.
(applause)
And the members of the diplomatic community who are
here for your wonderful work.
Our dedicated U.N. Mission staff.
I want to thank Charlie Rangel for helping to make this day possible.
Mayor Dinkins, it's wonderful to see you.
All the great friends of Ron Brown.
It is a pleasure to be here.
I only met Ron Brown once.
I was primarily an admirer from afar.
Thank you, Patti, also for your pipes.
(laughter)
Unlike Ambassador Rice, I didn't grow up next-door playing
basketball on the Brown family court.
Although now I know where she got her jump shot and where her
brother John got his jump shot.
We play occasionally in the "way over 40 league."
(laughter)
Unlike many of you, I didn't directly experience his
irrepressible spirit -- always the best-dressed guy in the room.
I'm sure he gave some tips to these two.
(laughter)
And the most confident, never losing his cool; an outlook --
as Ted Kennedy put it -- where "no, you can't" always became
"yes, you can."
So Ron Brown was my kind of guy.
(laughter)
Unlike President Clinton, I didn't serve with Ron Brown,
whose legacy is measured in the lives he touched and the
memories that all of you carry.
And coming to the podium as the final speaker, I was thinking --
once again, everything has been said, and, once again,
Bill Clinton has said it better than I could.
(laughter)
But while I didn't know Ron Brown personally,
I knew his story, and I drew inspiration from that story.
And so when you say he'd be proud that I'm President,
I think it's fair to say that I'm President in part because of
him -- because of the example he set;
because of the organization that he brought to the Democratic
Party; because his capacity to get Bill Clinton elected --
which in turn I think showed how we could govern in a way that
met the realities of the late 20th century and ultimately the
21st century.
He carved out that path for so many of us.
And I know why it's so fitting that the home of our United
Nations -- United States Mission to the United Nations is named
in his honor.
Obviously, Ron wasn't a diplomat in the traditional sense.
He never held the rank of ambassador.
He never forged a peace accord between warring factions --
unless you include the 1988 Democratic convention.
(laughter)
We're here not because of the titles that he held,
but because of the life he led.
Because Ron Brown embodied the values and the ideals,
that sense of possibility, that is at the heart of the American story.
His was a quintessentially American story --
growing up in Harlem, serving his country in uniform,
working his way through law school,
and then just breaking down every barrier that he came across.
He lived that American creed that if you work hard enough,
if you're willing to put your shoulders to the wheel,
there is nothing you cannot do.
As President Clinton mentioned, he never forgot where he came from.
No matter how successful he became, he was there,
counseling kids on the street, giving them hope;
fighting for workers and minority businesses to make sure
that they had the same chances that he had had;
mentoring the next generation -- so many of you --
imparting not only wisdom but the inspiration of his example.
"The American Dream," he always believed,
"rightfully belongs to every child in this nation."
Ron Brown brought people together across race and
cultures, various stations in life --
an ability that no doubt came from deep within him.
He was at once proud of his race --
he never shied away from it -- but he transcended his race at
the same time.
It was said that some Republican business executives,
when they went out on a trade mission,
every once in a while they'd look over and say,
that was Jesse Jackson's campaign manager.
And yet here I am and I like this guy and he knows my
business, and he is helping me succeed.
And in that way, not only was he serving them,
but he was also serving the country --
because that understanding that he was fostering on those trade
missions, they'd bring that back home and make it easier for
people to work together in other contexts.
That was the lesson of his life --
that despite all the differences that we supposedly are divided
by, at the end, we're bound by what we have in common,
as Americans and as human beings.
And Ron Brown understood America's unique role in the world.
He had that blend of idealism and realism,
which recognizes that when we advance the prosperity of
others, we advance our interests.
The scope of our influence, the values that we care so deeply
about, they ripple around the world.
And that's good for us.
That's why he invested so much time and energy in Africa.
It's why he argued that economic progress and human rights can't
be separated.
That's why he called commerce and economic development the
"infrastructure of democracy."
That's why he was on that flight to the Balkans --
because, he said, just as America "took the lead in the
peace process, we need to show the way in rebuilding from the
ruins of war."
We need to show the way.
That was what Ron Brown did.
And that's what America and our tireless diplomats do every
single day, around the world and here at the United Nations.
And so on an occasion such as this,
we don't just dedicate a building;
we also rededicate ourselves to the principles that guide us,
as a sovereign nation but also as a member of the international community.
We believe, as we declared in the charter of this institution,
"in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth" of all
people and "in the equal rights of men and women and of nations
large and small."
And so, as united nations, we address the conditions that make
the world more just and conflict less likely --
caring for children, tending to the sick,
keeping the peace in places that are wracked by conflict,
speaking out for the rights and dignity of every human being.
We believe that just as every sovereign nation has rights,
that they also have fundamental responsibilities.
Governments exist not simply to perpetuate themselves,
their own rule, but to fulfill the aspirations of their people.
And history teaches us that nations are more secure and the
world is more peaceful when nations meet these
responsibilities -- to uphold human rights,
to resolve differences peacefully,
when we advance our interests together.
We believe that when nations fail to meet these basic
obligations -- when peace is threatened or international law
is undermined -- that we cannot stand idly by.
The words of the charter must have meaning.
The writ of the international community must have credibility.
Violations of these core principles must have consequences.
Because what we've learned from bitter experience --
from the wars that were not prevented,
the innocent lives that were not saved --
is that all that's necessary for evil to triumph is that good
people and responsible nations stand by and do nothing.
There are times -- as when President Clinton showed
extraordinary leadership in the Balkans,
and moments such as now in the situation in Libya --
where our conscience and our common interests compel us to act.
We believe that force should not be the first option.
We understand the costs and risks involved in the use of force.
So, whenever possible, we turn to alternatives that might
change behavior -- condemnation that puts violators on notice,
sanctions that increase pressure,
embargoes that block arms to aggressors,
and accountability for those who commit crimes.
And should those prove insufficient,
we have to be prepared to take the necessary measures to uphold
international peace and security and protect innocent people.
That's what we're doing in Libya,
in large part because of the extraordinary work of some
people in this room.
And finally, we believe that the world is more secure and the
interests of the United States are best advanced,
when we act collectively.
As I said last night, the burden of action should not always be
America's alone.
So in Libya today we see a broad and growing coalition,
including Arab partners.
And I had to apologize to President Clinton before he
walked out because he never sees his wife.
(laughter)
But the extraordinary work she's doing in London today,
the extraordinary work that she's done over the past several
months is part of that core understanding that when we act
together, it's a force multiplier.
Today we see the NATO Alliance in command of the arms embargo,
the no-fly zone; starting tomorrow,
the mission to protect the Libyan people.
We see the United Nations and many international organizations
providing the assistance that's needed to people who've been
harmed by Qaddafi over the last several weeks.
Today in London we're seeing more than 30 nations and the
Libyan opposition come together to support a transition to a
future that better serves the Libyan people.
That's how the international community should work --
more nations; the United States right there at the center of it,
but not alone -- everybody stepping up,
bearing their responsibilities, carrying the costs of upholding
peace and security.
That's what it means to be united nations.
That was the vision imagined by the founders of this institution.
"In our disillusionment after the last war,"
Franklin Roosevelt said, "we gave up the hope of gradually
achieving a better peace because we had not the courage to
fulfill our responsibilities in an admittedly imperfect world."
And over the past six decades, there have been times where this
imperfect institution and its members did not find the courage
to fulfill our responsibilities.
And we are forever haunted by that.
We have seen the consequences of that in atrocities that might
have been prevented.
And yet today in Libya, we are showing what's possible when we
find our courage; when we fulfill our responsibilities and
when we come together, as an international community,
to defend our common interests and our common values.
We're saving innocent lives.
We're making it clear that the United States of America,
and the world, stand with those who seek to determine their own
destiny, free from fear, and free to dream of a day when
they, too, can live in justice and dignity.
I think that's the essence of American leadership.
That's what it means to lead.
This is the purpose of the United Nations.
And this will be the work of all who now labor in a building that
bears the name of somebody who understood leadership,
who lived a life of leadership, and that is Ronald H. Brown.
We are grateful to him.
And I cannot think of a better way to honor the extraordinary
work that he has done and the influence that he continues to
carry in all of our lives.
So with that, I would like to invite Alma,
Michael and Tracey to join me for the presentation.
(applause)
All right, let's get a picture of this.
(applause)