The Hughes Doctrine
By BOB MANN
The New York Times
March 21, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Austin, Tex.
SO what can we expect from Karen P. Hughes if she is confirmed as under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs? What steps will President Bush's confidante take to rehabilitate America's image in the Arab world and around the globe?
While reporters and Congressional staffers are combing Ms. Hughes's public statements, interviews and speeches in advance of her confirmation hearings, I accidentally stumbled into a little research project of my own. In my garage.
Back in 1976, Karen Hughes - then Karen Parfitt - was my star journalism student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. At the end of the term, I did what I've traditionally done with work from some of my best students: I stuffed some of it into a cardboard box. (That box has now been stored in attics, garages and basements around the nation.)
During her years as a national figure, never have I explored that tattered old box or elected to write about Karen Hughes. In fact, the box probably would have gone untouched had the recent death of my father not moved me to go rummaging through materials I had stashed away years ago.
And what did I find? Well, first there was a 29-year-old, critter-friendly, half-eaten grade sheet, which lists Karen Parfitt as seated between Molly Sawyer and Marianne Seiler. Karen was in a late Thursday afternoon deadline reporting lab of only six students. The time slot wasn't popular with students who liked long weekends.
The yellowed grade sheet indicates the future Ms. Hughes made a B+ on that initial deadline undertaking, an exercise in which I barked out facts that students nervously tried to convert into a news article while I paced among them, ranting and raving in tough city-editor fashion.
Most students pounded feverishly, some of them panicked, on old Royal typewriters, but not Ms. Hughes.
From day one, she got my attention with her intense focus. Her steel-blue eyes shut out the rest of class and concentrated only on her words. Always, she finished first, ripping out her copy and cockily presenting it to me. I loved it.
I asked those lab students on that first day in the spring of 1976 to write a short biography and to discuss their ambitions. Ms. Hughes, then 19, typed out:
"The most important issue facing America is the question of her foreign policy. I have lived in other countries and seen anti-American feelings growing as totalitarian governments or a loss of democracy begin to sweep their country.
"I think America is in danger both internally from the dissentions of her own people on foreign policy and externally from the strong governments in the world which are not democratic."
As a journalism student in the heart of Texas, Karen Hughes was composing what has become the Bush doctrine. Perhaps her portfolio is not so "new."
In that same lab was Lawrence Ayo Ladigbolu, a 35-year-old from West Africa - and one of the university's few foreign students at the time and certainly the only African student in the journalism program.
Some of Mr. Ladigbolu's work was in my garage, too. Here's what he had to say about world affairs: "I think the most important issue facing America today is a general lack of confidence in the leaders and the subsequent loss of confidence in every body, because of Watergate and the recent disclosures about the C.I.A. and the F.B.I."
Ms. Hughes and Mr. Ladigbolu were the only students in the class with ardent interest in foreign affairs - for what then appeared to be different reasons. Karen Hughes's father was military and, at the time, governor of the Panama Canal Zone. Lawrence Ladigbolu's father was a Methodist minister. Over the course of the term, the two often talked about the larger world, but I don't recall the specifics of those chats.
What I do remember is that Karen Hughes tapped fast and hard on her old Royal that Thursday afternoon. Here's what she had to say about her ambitions: "My lifetime goal is to contribute in a positive way to whatever task I work at," adding, "My greatest personal asset is a dogged determination which only forces me to work harder at something when I have difficulty with it.
"My greatest personal liability," she typed on, "is perhaps trying to satisfy other people more often than thinking what is best for me." The under secretary-designate, given her loyal service to the president, is perhaps still burdened by that "liability."
Mr. Ladigbolu listed his liability as "a tendency to trust people too quickly."
In her new mission, perhaps Karen Hughes should find Lawrence Ladigbolu and resume the discussions they started so many years ago. I imagine that what they could learn from each other would enrich us all.
Bob Mann, press secretary to Senator Edward Kennedy from 1984 to 1987, lectures in journalism at the University of Texas, Texas State University and Huston-Tillotson University.
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