When I asked Karen to come, I asked her to come and to help us make public diplomacy strong and central to the mission of transformational diplomacy and she has done that. She's done it in spectacular fashion. I asked her because she is a good friend and longtime colleague, because she is a good friend and longtime advisor to the President and I knew that she would bring a great dedication and a great commitment to all that we are trying to do. But I did so knowing, too, that she was going to serve here in Washington at great sacrifice because in fact Karen's family has remained in Texas and I know that that has been a strain. But even with that, she's done just a remarkable job.

If I could put on one sheet all of the things that Karen has achieved I would do so, but it would take me a quite long time to talk about her achievements. I want to just underscore a few. First of all, that Karen has cared about the people that she has overseen and worked with. She has built a strong organization that the next Under Secretary and indeed future administrations will be able to rely on. The public diplomacy shop are, as we call it, is a place to which many of our best officers are going, where they want to serve because it is known that public diplomacy is valued. She's made it possible for every ambassador around the world to feel comfortable going out and talking about America's message, pressing the public diplomacy case. And she's done so by institutionalizing, for instance, a Rapid Response Unit that every day lets people know what Washington is thinking and can help them so that they can be confident in speaking for the United States.

Karen has been a contributor to the War on Terror, having created the Counterterrorism Communications Center that is staffed by people from around the government so that we are able to work to counter the message of terrorists and to spread instead a message of hope and democracy. We have expanded English language programs that we think is the best way to reach many of the young people in the world. And Karen's work in Muslim outreach -- outreach to women, I think is very well known to you.

I’ve also appreciated the fact that she has created regional media hubs which allow us to better deal with the fact that particularly in the Middle East, but around the world, there are regional media that we need to be able to engage and to get America's message out.

All of these, along with extremely good focus on public/private partnerships, which has brought us together with the private sector in ways that I think that we wouldn't have imagined, constitute an extraordinary -- as we call it -- body of work. But that list really could never completely show and could never completely say all that Karen has meant to this Department, all that she has meant to the Administration, and all that she has meant to me as Secretary. Because in addition to the extraordinary work that she's done in fulfilling, I think, most of the recommendations of the many commissions on public diplomacy that preceded her, she has also been a valued counselor, a valued policy advisor. Karen has been in my morning meetings every day, so that as we go through the policy issues of the day, I have had the benefit of her wisdom and her advice.

She will obviously leave a very big hole and big shoes to fill. But she will remain a valued advisor to me and to the President. And I know that we can call on her, and will call on her, as we continue the last year of the Administration. But, Karen, thank you for everything that you've done. You have more than exceeded what I could have hoped for in taking over public diplomacy when you came. And now, as you finish, I hope that you have a sense of the tremendous contributions that you've made.

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: Thank you so much, Madame Secretary. I want to thank President Bush and Secretary Rice for giving me the great privilege of representing our country abroad and reaching out to the people of the world in a spirit of respect and friendship. It's been a special honor to work for Secretary Rice, who is both a great friend and a great role model and an outstanding Secretary of State for our country.

I also want to thank my outstanding team in public diplomacy. All that we've been able to accomplish is due to their work, and all the people of the State Department -- Foreign Service, Civil Service, Foreign Service Nationals, Presidential appointees. I've learned so much from every one of them and I've been honored to serve with them in representing America across the world.

Later this year, probably mid-December, I will be returning home to Texas. I feel that I've done what Secretary Rice and President Bush asked me to do by transforming public diplomacy and making it a national security priority central to everything we do in government, while also engaging the private sector more extensively than ever before.

I've spent almost nine of the last twelve years of my career now in government service, and after commuting between Washington and Austin, not nearly as often as I would like to for the last two and a half years, I'm looking forward to returning to private life and to living in the same city with my husband once again.

When I look back at the last couple of years, I'm very proud of what our public diplomacy team has accomplished. We've aggressively expanded our programs, fought for and won increased funding, and put in place many innovations and institutional reforms. They include aggressive and significantly expanded media outreach. The Secretary mentioned the media hubs and the Rapid Response Unit. We've transformed the Bureau of International Information Programs into a high-tech hub with websites in English and six different languages, created a digital outreach team that goes on the blogs in Arabic to counter misinformation and myths -- we're soon to add Farsi and Urdu, and stood up a video production unit. Our ambassadors are now empowered and expected to engage with the media, and every Foreign Service officer is evaluated on public diplomacy activities.

We've also put in place extensive outreach to young people, teaching English to thousands of high school students in more than 40 Muslim-majority countries. Last year, we started a new program to reach an even younger audience of 8 to 14-year-olds with a summer program that includes English teaching, computer, arts and sports activities and leadership training.

I'll never forget meeting a young man in one of our English programs. I asked him what difference it had made. And he said, "I have a job and none of my friends do." Now, that young man came from the same neighborhood in Morocco that produced the Casablanca suicide bombers, and in addition to a job he now has a hope and a reason to live, rather than to kill himself and others in a suicide bombing.

We've engaged Muslim populations through a new program called Citizen Dialogue, which sends Muslim Americans overseas to engage with Muslim communities, and we've brought more than 600 religious clerics, scholars and community leaders from Muslim countries to get to know us better -- brought them here to America.

We've engaged the private sector more extensively than ever before, leveraging about $800 million in partnerships ranging from disaster relief to education and health programs, to working to make our airports and embassies more welcoming.

We've significantly expanded outreach to women, with a new breast cancer initiative in the Middle East and Latin America, and businesswomen's mentoring initiatives. A new partnership with U.S. higher education has helped attract a record number of international students to study in America and we've reversed the trend of decline that began in the years following September 11th. We issued an all-time high 591,000 student visas in 2006 and traveled with university presidents across the world to send a welcoming message to international students.

Our flagship programs like Fulbright are at record highs. We've restarted exchanges with Iran for the first time since 1979, and participation in our education and exchange programs, our people-to-people diplomacy, has grown from 27,000 in 2004 to nearly 40,000 today.

We've done a lot of work. I've worked very hard on the Broadcasting Board of Governors to set a strategic direction and recruit new leadership to our entities there. We've launched a global cultural initiative and expanded sports programming and started a public diplomacy envoy program to enlist well-known Americans like Michelle Kwan and Cal Ripken, Jr., to represent our country overseas. And as the Secretary mentioned, we've implemented a majority of the recommendations from more than 30 studies of public diplomacy, including the comprehensive Djerejian report.

I'm very proud of what we've started. I will continue to be a champion of public diplomacy and will continue to work on some projects with the Secretary and the Department. I'll be an advocate of more funding for more programs. And I want to encourage my fellow Americans to study abroad, to engage with the world. One of my plans is to do some study myself and improve my Spanish. And so I think one of my messages has been that as Americans we need to engage more and listen and reach out to the people of the world, and I'll continue to be an advocate for that.

So, Madame Secretary, it's been just a tremendous honor, one of the great thrills of my career, to have this opportunity to work for you and with you. And I want to thank my public diplomacy team and thanks to all of you. Thanks so much.

(Applause.)

2007/948