WND BOOKS EXCERPT
Did Ron Brown die for Enron's sins?
Explosive new expose on the man 'who knew too much'
Posted: April 3, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor's note: Today, on the eighth anniversary of the untimely passing of
Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, WorldNetDaily features an excerpt from Jack
Cashill's explosive new book on the Clinton aide's life and death – "Ron
Brown's Body." In his book, Cashill takes a close look at Brown's checkered
career as Clinton fund-raiser and Cabinet member, and in the process exposes
the Clintons' dirty, relentless practices for getting financial backing.
Cashill draws disturbing links between the political machinations of the
Clintons in the '90s and Hillary's current political career.
"Ron Brown's Body" is available for pre-order at ShopNetDaily.
By Jack Cashill
2004 WorldNetDaily.com
"ENRON CORP. CONFIRMS NO ENRON EXECUTIVES ON BOARD COMMERCE SECRETARY RON
BROWN'S MISSING PLANE." (April 3)
Throughout the day on April 3, 1996, even as America's power brokers scrambled
to spin their respects, the man whom they presumed to honor lay face up amidst
the mud and debris of a barren Croatian hillside.
Death, as it often does, humbled its victim, this man of impeccable style, and
left his body in ironic disarray, his arms thrown helplessly over his head, the
shirt ripped clean off his back, his pants severed at the knees like a careless
frat boy's, the mocking vestige of a tie draped around his neck.
His name was Ron Brown, the United States secretary of commerce and an all too
appropriate icon of this time and place. No man's life more clearly embodied
the cynical ethos of official Washington and yet, given that cynicism, no man's
death was more fully welcome therein.
For the two most desperate years of the Clinton presidency, 1994-1996, Ron
Brown found himself at the nexus of White House machinations, the central
exchange, the point where presidential power alchemized into hard cash more
crudely and less discreetly than at any time in a century. Here, Brown was both
exploiter and exploited, victimizer and ultimately victim, the classic "man who
knew too much."
"Why Ron Brown Won't Go Down." So declared the grimly ironic title of a
just-released article in the American Spectator. But the article's author
miscalculated the physics of Washington power. Ron Brown did go down. Just
before 3 p.m. Croatia time, the Air Force CT-43A that bore him drifted
"inexplicably" off-course, sideswiped a hill nearly two miles from the
Dubrovnik airport where it was headed and skidded to a wrenching stop.
Hours before the first American arrived at the crash site to confirm Brown's
death, while at least one American passenger still lived, President Bill
Clinton descended on the Commerce Department and, in the artless words of CNN,
"eulogized his friend nonetheless."
"Nonetheless"?
"His favorite Scripture verse was that wonderful verse from Isaiah," said
Clinton of Brown. "They who wait upon the Lord shall have their strength
renewed. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They will run and not grow
weary. They will walk and faint not."
This verse would provide the essential metaphor for Brown in the days to come.
He was the man "who walked and ran and flew through life." This was all
fabrication. Brown did not know the Bible. He could not cite a single verse.
His quest for spirituality had begun only in the last weeks of life and only
then out of desperation. Still, on the dishonesty scale, this bit of
presidential dissembling barely registers.
To be sure, eulogies almost invariably aggrandize the virtues of the deceased,
but Clinton was not so much eulogizing Brown as he was constructing his own
defense:
[W]hen we met earlier this week, right before he left for the Balkans, he was
so excited because he thought that, along with these business leaders and the
other very able people from the Commerce Department on this mission, that they
would be able to use the power of the American economy to help the peace take
hold in the Balkans, to help people in that troubled place have the kind of
decent, honorable and wonderfully ordinary lives that we Americans too often
take for granted.
In truth, Brown was not excited at all. When they met earlier in the week,
Brown begged not to go. At this, the most anxious moment of his life, he
dreaded the prospect of the trip. There was nothing decent or honorable about
it. There no longer was anything approaching decency or honor on such junkets.
He was sick of being, in his words, "a mother-f---ing tour guide for Hillary
Clinton."
And this leads to the essential deceit of Clinton's hasty eulogy. The president
and his wife did not love Brown as Clinton avowed. Nor did they enjoy much, if
any, of "his friendship and his warmth." No, the relationship, always cool, had
turned cold. Brown feared the Clintons, feared to even call them, and they
deeply distrusted him.
This, the opinion-shapers in the major media chose not to know. They had
already chosen their story line. Rather than recount Brown's fate as a
cautionary tale on the perils of power, the media routinely meshed the death of
"this great American hero" on April 3 with Martin Luther King's death on April
4, 28 years earlier. President Clinton, in fact, unblushingly claimed Brown,
like King, died "answering a very important challenge of his time," and no one
dared to call the comparison profane.
And so the story would have ended: Ron Brown buried at Arlington National
Cemetery with more pomp than any government official since RFK, a nation in
mourning for its fallen hero and a president bereft. But Ron Brown's body had
one more story to tell.
At the U.S. Army base at Dover, Del., three days after his death, Armed Forces
Institute of Pathology photographer U.S. Navy CPO Kathleen Janoski noted a
nearly perfectly circular hole in the top of Brown's head. It would measure
just about .45 inch in diameter.
"Wow. That looks like a bullet hole," said Janoski.
The pathologists who heard her cry and heeded it would soon enough wish they
hadn't. They opened the door on a mystery that simply refuses to stay shut.
And, like many others who questioned the official story line during the
Clintons' most desperate years, they have suffered for it.
"We do not know for sure what happened there," said Clinton of the crash in
Croatia. This much was likely true, at least not the details of what happened.
It is also true he did not want to know. His administration's lack of curiosity
would stoke the already overheated fires of conspiracy and forge an astonishing
range of theories.
The theorists, credible or not, were starting with the wrong question. The
right question – the first question – was not why did the plane come down.
The right question was why did it ever go up.
The only people who knew for sure were those in Washington.
And just maybe those in Houston.
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