A stunned capital was in mourning Thursday. Flags flew at half-staff, and grief hung over the Commerce Department on a sunny spring day that should have held the promise of new life.
The bodies of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and his entire entourage had been found, recovered from a plane crash in Croatia on Wednesday."People are coming to work" said one Commerce staffer, who declined to provide her name. "But obviously, it's a very sad day."
A grieving President Clinton, whom Brown helped win the White House in 1992, ordered flags flown at half-staff in the nation's capital.
James Carville, a senior aide in Clinton's 1992 election campaign and a top adviser still, said the mood at the White House was "uniquely somber."
"People really knew him and knew him well," Carville said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "I'm sort of taken aback at how somber it is."
Brown's longtime friends from his activist civil rights and Democratic Party days remembered the 54-year-old Cabinet member as a gifted black leader.
"He wanted to do good things, big things," Vernon Jordan, a former Brown colleague at the National Urban League, said on NBC's "Today" show. "He loved life, he loved people, he had a need and desire to accomplish things for himself and his community."
Robert Johnson, chairman of Black Entertainment Television, called Brown, "the first of a new black generation" unlimited by racial barriers. "He was a power broker of the kind you're not used to among black men."
The Air Force and the National Transportation Safety Board dispatched a team to Dubrovnik to investigate Wednesday's crash near the Adriatic coast. And the Army field headquarters in Tuzla, Bosnia, assembled an emergency team to help search for bodies amid high winds and sheets of rain.
"We have found the last victim," Croatian Interior Minister Ivan Jarnjak told the state HINA news agency Thursday, confirming that none of the 33 aboard survived thecrash of the U.S. Air Force plane. A woman found alive at the scene died as a NATO helicopter carried her to a Dubrovnik hospital.
The State Department was waiting to release the names of the victims pending notification of their families.
Besides Brown and Commerce Department officials, the passengers included New York Times correspondent Nathaniel Nash and about a dozen top American executives exploring business opportunities in the Balkans. A Croatian news photographer for the daily Slobodna Dalmacija newspaper was also on board.
Clinton, visiting the Commerce Department's Washington headquarters on Wednesday to deliver the tragic news, praised Brown.
"He was one of the best advisers and ablest people I ever knew. And he was very, very good at everything he ever did," Clinton told about 700 Commerce employees, several huddled together in stunned sorrow.
With first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and most of the Cabinet on hand, Clinton led Brown's subordinates, many of them weeping, in silent prayer.
"This is a man whose multiple talents will not be easily replaced," said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's delegate to Congress. "For the African-American community, the loss is into infinity."
Clinton and his wife joined a parade of friends and dignitaries who trekked to Brown's home to comfort his wife, Alma. Longtime political allies of the former Democratic Party chief - Sen. Edward Kennedy, former National Urban League chief Jordan and others - were among the visitors.
Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros described the mood in the Brown household.
"They're proud and they have a lot of reason to be proud of Ron's accomplishments. They are strong people and they're holding up," Cisneros said.
Among corporate executives believed to be aboard Brown's plane were Walter Murphy, a senior vice president for AT&T Submarine Systems Inc. of Morristown, N.J.; Robert A. Whittaker, chairman and chief executive officer of Foster Wheeler Energy International, Clinton, N.J.; and John A. Scoville, chairman of Harza Engineering Co., Chicago.
The T-43 aircraft that crashed 1.8 miles north of the runway at the airport near Dubrovnik was the same plane used earlier this week to shuttle Defense Secretary William Perry in Bosnia and, last week, Hillary Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, through Turkey.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Howell Estes III, operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the plane, an Air Force version of the Boeing 737, was making an instrument landing when it apparently veered off course and into the 2,300-foot hillside.
The Air Force said in a statement that the 23-year-old plane was not equipped with a "black box" flight data recorder, unlike commercial planes and most Air Force planes used to carry VIPs and other passengers.
The devices record voice transmissions and information about the plane's systems and are often used to help investigators determine the cause of crashes.
Estes said the crew manning the Dubrovnik tower reported no signs of emergency before the plane disappeared from their radar.
"There were no calls made indicating any kind of a problem aboard the aircraft," Estes said. "They were in contact with the tower, making their approach when contact was lost."
Croatia's ambassador to the United States, Miomir Zuzul, said the plane first hit the mountain with its right wing, then its right engine. "The aircraft is not completely destroyed," he told Associated Press Television.
The U.S. ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, said: "I can simply state two facts: First, the weather yesterday as the plane flew in was terrible; people in Dubrovnik say it was the worst storm in decades."
"Secondly, the plane was not where it should have been. And it seems to have flown not along the coast but along the valley. Beyond that point, I don't want to speculate on what might have caused the crash," Galbraith told a news conference.