Nailing Down More Cabinet Diversity

President-elect Bill Clinton took another big step toward making sure his Administration truly reflects the diversity of America by announcing on Thursday that he will nominate former San Antonio Mayor Henry G. Cisneros to be secretary of housing and urban development and disabled Vietnam veteran Jesse Brown to head the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Both men bring to their jobs not just impressive paper credentials but long histories of working firsthand, and with sensitivity, on many of the problems they will be dealing with in the Cabinet. As Clinton put it at his press conference announcing the appointments, they “have lived the issues they will now address in government.”

Cisneros, 45, gained national attention in the 1980s as the first Latino mayor of a major American city. In his four terms as San Antonio’s mayor, Cisneros is credited with bringing the public and private sectors together to revitalize the city’s downtown, to improve its tourism and convention business and to build both a new stadium and a University of Texas campus for his hometown. Cisneros also displayed admirable flexibility and pragmatism in dealing with neighborhood activist groups, an important new force in San Antonio politics.

All those qualities will be vital in Cisneros’ job, one of the toughest in the new Administration. As he himself acknowledged Thursday, one cannot discuss the challenges facing HUD without mentioning last April’s Los Angeles riots. Those deeply troubling disturbances sent a warning to the entire nation that it ignores the plight of the cities at its peril. Ironically, one of the few officials in President Bush’s Cabinet who took that message to heart and tried energetically to make the White House pay attention was HUD Secretary Jack Kemp. So Cisneros is one Clinton appointee who has a genuinely tough act to follow. But he should, at least, get more support from his President than Kemp did.

Brown, an African-American born in Chicago, will be the first person who has worked for a veterans advocacy group before getting the top job at Veterans Affairs. Over the last 25 years he has worked his way up the ranks of the Disabled American Veterans, an association of 1.1 million vets disabled due to wartime injuries. Brown, 48, lost the use of an arm after being shot while on patrol with his Marine unit near Da Nang in 1965.

Brown won’t have a hard act to follow. His predecessor was once booed at an American Legion convention and resigned from office earlier this year when the Veterans of Foreign Wars refused to endorse Bush for reelection despite the campaign controversy over Clinton’s draft record. Brown’s challenges will be tough nonetheless. Some of the entitlement programs that help feed the national deficit involve veterans’ benefits, so he must help Clinton find ways to trim programs without depriving vets of benefits they have earned.