PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
by Salena Zito
Karen Hughes is leaving Washington for the last time -- for the second time.
Hughes became the Bush administration's first communications director in 2001 but left in 2002 to be with her family in Texas, where she worked for George Bush when he was governor. She remained in daily contact with the president and was lured back to Washington in the final three months of his 2004 re-election campaign.
For the past two years, she's been the face of America's image-building effort abroad, as the State Department's undersecretary for public diplomacy.
Her exodus this weekend is for keeps, she says.
Hughes was the last of the president's inner-circle of fellow Texans. Dan Bartlett, who succeeded her as communications director, and Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, both left in the fall. The ambassador-level public diplomacy post was created in 1999, when the U.S. Information Agency was folded into the State Department's Bureau of Public Affairs.
Hughes is the fourth woman to hold the title, following Charlotte Beers, Margaret Tutwiler and President Clinton's first appointee, Evelyn Lieberman.
Her interest in public diplomacy began early. Born in France, her father was Maj. Gen. Harold Parfitt, the last U.S. governor of the Panama Canal Zone.
"We grew up with a taste of diversity ... so I had an interest in different cultures from my childhood," she says.
She admits to taking on a job where any successes may not be seen for generations.
Her first mission was to counter al-Qaida's propaganda machine in the Muslim world, which is rarely held to any standards of accountability.
Her office created a "catalog of lies" to warn journalists "about believing what (al-Qaida is) saying, because more times than not it turned out not to be the case," she says.
If U.S. warplanes bombed a target in Afghanistan, for example, "the Taliban ambassador would immediately announce that 500 babies had been killed. Well, we would have to have a team go in and do an assessment and find out what had really happened. ... We were not going to say it wasn't true until we knew the facts. Often, that was three or four days later."
Since U.S. officials could not respond immediately, she says, what people remembered was the Taliban's claim that U.S. forces killed innocent people.
Hughes made it her mission "to improve the State Department's multimedia capabilities" to counter such propaganda. A digital-outreach team now searches Arabic Web sites and blogs, to correct misinformation about U.S. policy.
A rapid-response unit monitors foreign media reports and issues a daily summary for U.S. ambassadors dealing with reporters abroad.
Hughes believes "the people-to-people contact" has the most impact, however.
"The way I like to put it is, public diplomacy is not about short-term goals, it's about long-term relationships," she says. "The best example is that the president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, first came to America on a public-diplomacy program in 1985. We have made a lifelong friend."
Despite her efforts, anti-U.S. sentiment overseas has grown, according to some observers. The Pew Research Global Attitude Project has found America's image continuing to decline in most Muslim countries and in Europe.
"Much of this increased negativity toward the United States is being driven by opposition to American foreign policy," says Richard Wike, a senior researcher for Pew. He thinks Hughes "had a difficult job" and "there are limits to what public diplomacy can achieve."
Hughes points to a moment in Turkey as the most memorable of her two-year tenure.
"It was on my very first trip abroad, I was in a low-income housing project in Turkey and I had just delivered books to children there about America. While I was meeting with the parents afterwards, a young father ... asked me if the Statue of Liberty still faces out.
"Here is this man who wonders, in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and all the security precautions, is America still that welcoming country? Is it still that beacon of hope that he thought it was?
"That one moment has made me a lifelong advocate of public diplomacy."
