Strong Voice For Veterans Quits Cabinet

Veterans Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown, a career advocate for veterans who convinced President Clinton that the nation should spend more money on its former military personnel, has submitted his resignation, according to administration officials.

Officials said Brown’s departure was not unexpected. Near the end of Clinton’s first term, Brown told thenWhite House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta that he did not expect to remain in the Cabinet for long, the officials said.

Deputy VA Secretary Hershel W. Gober, a longtime Arkansas friend of the president, is considered by many members of Washington’s veterans lobby as Brown’s likely successor. Gober was state director of veterans affairs in Little Rock.

A combat-disabled Marine, the 53-year-old Brown established a reputation early in Clinton’s first term for defying pressures to shrink his agency and brashly telling lawmakers they should cut other programs before touching his department. “I don’t think, quite frankly, they have had to deal with a veterans’ advocate before,” he said afterward.

Although he strongly supported the VA’s massive bureaucracy, Brown successfully forced the department to begin moving away from its huge hospital system and toward a system of outpatient care for the nation’s 26 million veterans.

That and the increases of almost a $1 billion a year in funding he won for his department in an era of a declining veterans’ population may be his biggest legacies, veterans groups said.

When members of Congress would suggest that the VA should also bear some of the budget cuts facing other agencies, Brown, who lost use of an arm in Vietnam, would tap his injured limb as proof he had sacrificed for his country.

Veterans deserve nothing less than first-class care from their government, he would add.