Sam Brown

The cover of "Action Update" (August 16, 1979) showing Sam Brown (right), the Director of the Action Corps which administered the Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and other service programs. Richard Celeste (left) was appointed Peace Corps director after the resignation of Peace Corps Director Carolyn Payton. The cover of "Action Update" (September 30, 1979) depicting Sam Brown, who was appointed Director of the Action Corps by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. One of Brown's initiatives as Action director was to have VISTA workers support Carter's energy conservation policies.

Sam W. Brown Jr. (born July 27, 1943) is a former political activist, the head of ACTION under President Jimmy Carter, and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Early life and education Sam W. Brown Jr. was born July 27, 1943, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In his childhood, he wrote, "it never occurred to me that America could be wrong." where he was first the president of the young Republicans and then the student body president. In 1967 Brown was the chairman of the National Student Association's national supervisory board. In 1967 Brown ran for president of the National Student Association and lost. As revealed by the president of the organization, Philip Sherburne, in a conversation with the organization's finance director, Michael Wood, the CIA had been funneling money to the organization through various charity fronts in exchange for covert cooperation from students in the NSA's international programs. As spokesman for the national NSA's national supervisory board, Brown was particularly appalled by the predicament of members of the NSA's international programs: "The fantastic pressures these people were under were simply incomprehensible to me... The agony of these people who were trapped and were unable to break this relationship was awful." Brown said that the supervisory board had no knowledge of the CIA's involvement until it was reported, announced that the NSA would assist in any investigation of the CIA's role, and said, "The United States Government owes an unconditional apology to the N.S.A. for using the N.S.A. in this duplicitous manner."

Youth Coordinator for McCarthy for President Brown was the youth coordinator for Senator Eugene J. McCarthy's Presidential campaign. The campaign's main appeal for Brown was that "it gave an opportunity and gave an excuse to walk up to people's doors and say, 'Hi. I'm Sam Brown. I'm here because I'd like to talk to you about the war in Vietnam - and about Gene McCarthy.'"

Brown says that hard work is the secret for being a successful organizer.

On October 15, 1969 an estimated two million people took part in the moratorium in what may have been the largest US demonstration of all time.

On November 15, 1969 a crowd estimated at 250,000 had a massive demonstration at the Washington Monument. After the November 15 demonstration the energy in the movement seemed to dissipate. Brown dedicated the book to Jesse Unruh "who taught me the importance of organization" and to Gene McCarthy who showed Brown that "there are some things worth organizing for." Anthony Lake, a member of president Carter's transition committee, recalled "Sam was very good at pushing his point of view with sufficient flexibility so he could make deals and stick with them. He has very deeply held and decent principles, but he is practical enough to move them along." Action Corps had been created in 1971 by President Richard Nixon to administer the Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America and other service programs.

Changes in ACTION mission Seven months into his tenure as ACTION director, Brown released a blueprint for change, declaring "the mission of Action is to mobilize people for voluntary action at home and abroad to change the conditions that deny fulfillment of human needs by calling on the best and most creative instincts of the human spirit."

Brown clashed with Payton from the start.

Controversy after Payton's resignation

Many of the policy issues between Payton and Brown were revealed after her resignation. Brown for example announced that the Peace Corps would only work in the poorest countries based on GNP and announced that the Peace Corps would pull out of countries that did not meet its criteria for aid. Peace Corps Director Payton responded that "Whether or not we could find satisfactory jobs for volunteers was a better criteria than how much money a country has ... It's offensive to me to tell a host country what their needs are." They claimed, that Payton's differences with Brown ended in an argument during a trip to Morocco, when Brown openly berated Dr. Payton before Action Corps officials and Brown's "attacks culminated with a midnight phone-call demanding her resignation, which she refused to give, after which he went to her hotel room and pounded on her door for a full fifteen minutes, demanding to be let in to continue his harassment". According to P. David Searles in his book the Peace Corps Experience: "Under Celeste the agency was given considerable autonomy to direct its own affairs," wrote Searles, "although strictly speaking it remained under the Action umbrella."

Between 1981 and 1994 Work in private sector Brown has been General Partner of Centennial Partners, Limited, a real estate development firm with offices in Colorado and California, since 1981.

Support for First Gulf War The New York Times reported in 1991 that Brown said that force could be necessary to restore stability in the Middle East and keep nuclear weapons from the hands of Saddam Hussein.

Head of delegation to the CSCE and OSCE Margaret Carlson reported in Time Magazine in 1994 that President Clinton had appointed Brown Ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), a 52-nation organization in Vienna that mediates conflicts in the former Soviet republics and promotes human rights, and that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had held hearings on Brown on November 18, 1993 and approved his nomination by a vote of 11 to 9. Before Brown's nomination could come to a Senate vote, Republicans Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Hank Brown of Colorado sent Brown a barrage of over 100 questions including why Brown had dropped a requirement that Peace Corps volunteers be instructed in the menace of communism and whether Brown had thrown any objects, "including human feces," at the 1968 Democratic Convention. "No one understands why Hank Brown has decided to make Sam Brown his nemesis," wrote Carlson. Brown served as the Head of Delegation, without the rank of ambassador, to the US Mission to the OSCE in Vienna. On November 17, 1997, President Clinton awarded Brown the personal rank of Ambassador in his capacity as the Head of Delegation to the 1997 OSCE Ministerial Preparatory conferences, an appointment that does not require Senate confirmation.

As head of delegation Brown defended the CSCE as an alternative to NATO in shaping European security. "The CSCE is the natural multilateral forum, as the trans-Atlantic institution where Russia has an equal voice, for work on these questions. This is not war and peace in the traditional sense, but instability around Russia's borders. It's very different from what NATO does," said Brown.

Later career

Executive director of the Fair Labor Association (FLA) The Fair Labor Association (FLA) named Brown their Executive Director in January 2000. The Fair Labor Association is a non-profit organization designed to complement existing international and national labor laws that was created in 1999 after President Bill Clinton recognized the need for supervision over the apparel industry regarding issues of human rights.

Role in 2004 election Brown worked to raise funds for John Kerry in the 2004 election and was not happy about the debate over Kerry's service in Vietnam.

Personal life He married Alison Valentine Teal, born in 1945 in Omaha, Douglas County, Nebraska, the only daughter of Clarence W. Teal and Valentine Moline. Her mother, a 1924 graduate of Smith College, was a novelist, short story writer, publisher of three novels, and also contributed short stories to several magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Child's Life. Both of her parents were long time active volunteers of the Omaha Community Playhouse which was founded by Dodie Brando, mother of actor Marlon Brando. The Clarence Teal Cameo Award, which recognizes exceptional performances in a cameo role, was named for him.

She is a 1966 graduate of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. She is a writer/photographer and a frequent political contributor on the Huffington Post as well as her own blog site.

Brown met Teal in 1968 while he was a leader of the "Get Clean for Gene" McCarthy student movement, being a youth coordinator for Senator Eugene McCarthy's Presidential campaign in 1968. In 2004, Brown said that he once dreamed of being a senator.