WHEN COMMERCE SECRETARY RON Brown was killed in a plane crash in Dubrovnik, Croatia, last April, I took the occasion to write a column about the way public officials are now treated in the world’s greatest democracy, saying, “The press, talk shows, the politicians themselves and their consultants, the guys around the corner—we have all raised trash talk to the American dialogue.”

He was dead at the age of fifty-four, an extraordinarily talented man who probably could have made $100,000 in a good week as a well-connected Washington lawyer. But in a society where the first questions are usually about what you do and how much you’re paid for it, Brown was risking life and limb on another American fool’s mission. Like millions of his countrymen before him, he was trying to make the world a better place for people he did not know and probably misunderstood. For this he was being paid $99,500 a year.

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