I cannot tell you what a thrill it is to see such a turnout, to see twice the number of people coming out this year as came out last year to show your support of the Department, to see what's going on here. I just left the Oval Office running over here and said to the President, as he was heading off to another event that I was supposed to be with him at, "Can't go with you, sir. Got to go see my troops." And he said, "Give them my greetings as well." And so, I bring you greetings directly and five minutes old from the President of the United States. (Applause.)

I'm especially pleased to see you all, in that we are reorienting this day a little bit and calling it Foreign Affairs Day. And the reason I wanted to do that was to embrace the entire family, to show that we care about everyone who has made a contribution to American diplomacy, everyone who has contributed some way or another to the greatness of this Department. And it seemed to me I would be missing an opportunity if I didn't use Foreign Service Day, which is such an important day, and has such a rich tradition, to use that, to broaden it and bring back all other members of our component, in order to show that we are a team, we are a family, we are knitted up across the generations. We also have PMIs here today, to show that we are interested in the future.

I want to connect this family in a powerful way. Not just for nostalgic reasons and to bring the old-timers back, but to make sure the old-timers, those of you who -- and I'm an old-timer, so I'm not putting you down -- but to show that I want you here not just for nostalgia and to reflect about the past, but because you are part of our present, and I want to make you a part of our future. I need you. I need you to help take the message of American diplomacy, take the message of what we need from the Congress, take the message of how important diplomatic careers are throughout the country so that we start to "brand" ourselves throughout the country once again and tell the American people that American diplomats around the world, every day, are serving their interests, are carrying their value systems forward, are showing the rest of the world what democracy and freedom and human rights and individual liberty are all about. And I want to make sure that we get this message out to the American people and they know what those wonderful young men and women, who are your successors, are doing around the world and why those young men and women enjoy and must have the support of the American people.

And so I want you to be disciples, not just retirees. I want you to be those who go back to your communities and talk about it, those who will serve as mentors for those who are coming along. Pick out that young college youngster you know from your family or your own children and grandchildren and push them in the direction of Foreign Service or Civil Service or serving our interest in one way or another. I am so pleased that you are here today, but I'm not misled. I'm not misled.

Ruth was kind enough to say maybe you all wanted to see me or perhaps you were a posse chasing me. I don't know which. (Laughter.) But I also know if Ricky Martin was here, or even Charles Manson, the axe murderer, there would be three times as many people who would come to see that. (Laughter.) So I have no illusions about that.

But for whatever reason, welcome. Welcome back to the Department. Welcome back to the family. Welcome to this homecoming.

One of the things I have tried to do in my tenure as Secretary of State, in addition to foreign policy advisor and other things that I have to do with respect to overseas interests and visiting around the world and greeting visitors who come here, I was determined that I would try to be the best leader and manager of this Department that I could be. Because I feel strongly about that and I feel strongly about the concept of stewardship, stewardship meaning take care of the people who are entrusted to my care by the American people, by the Congress; take care of the resources that are given to us by the Congress, and make sure those resources are used in the best possible way. But stewardship also means fighting for what we need. Stewardship means that I and the other members of the new team had an obligation to set out clearly what we needed to make this the best organization possible, what we needed to empower those people out in our missions and to make sure that once I set that out, once I put it out there, we fought like the devil to get what we needed. I am very pleased with the results we have achieved in this first year.

I went to the President early on during the transition and told him there was clearly a need for resourcing the Department at a more acceptable and a much higher level. I also told him there was a great deal that had to be done with respect to personnel issues within the Department. I told the President that I wanted to communicate a flavor, a sense throughout the Department that we were on the first line of offense for carrying America's values out there. We are just as important as the Pentagon and our armed forces deployed. We are in the first line of offense.

I said to the President I wanted to create a vision within the Department that we are all connected, from the Secretary out to the newest consular office who just arrived at our furthest post away from Washington. I want it all to be part of one team, so we're connected and we're connected by bonds of trust. They trust us here at the Truman Building, we trust them out there.

I even have a little game I play with the staff back here at C Street. They don't like it, particularly. But my operating philosophy is, the embassy is always right and you guys here, especially on the seventh floor, are always wrong. (Applause.) They know more. They're supposed to know more. They're out there in touch. Empower the embassies, empower the ambassadors, empower the missions. We give them guidance, we give them direction. But turn them loose, and let them know that we trust them. And when they make a mistake, we'll fix that mistake. We are not going to crucify people. Trust comes from allowing our youngsters, allowing our missions out there to take risks in order to accomplish great purposes.

And the President said, "great, let's move in that direction." I said, "now, Mr. President, you've got to support our efforts." And during a tight budget season he has done that. He allowed us to go forward and ask for significant increases in budget authority from the Congress for both running the Department and for our foreign affairs accounts. In my testimony before the Congress in this first session, I testified something like 10 times. I testified before any committee that would have me. And I've made the case and so far we have done well. Now, we are in the tightest part of the budget season and there are always compromises that have to be made. But, so far, I am very, very pleased at how well we are doing.

And we are focusing on three areas. One, information technology. It's a new world. It's a new world and, with respect to communications, with respect to connecting to our people out there, with respect to how we have to now move at warp speed with 24/7 information cycles, the old days of just writing cables and going back and forth is not good enough. I want every single employee in the Department of State to have access to the Internet on his or her desk, no matter where they are in the world, and I am determined to see that happen, and I am going to get Congress to fund it. (Applause.)

The second thing I was interested in was making sure that we did a good job of providing our people with the facilities they need out there. We do get a lot of money from the Congress for construction of embassies and other facilities. And I wanted to make sure that we spent that money in the best possible way and we knew what we were doing so that we could justify getting even more money in subsequent years. And so we've reorganized how we do that and presented our reorganization to the Congress. And they are very supportive. And we are trying to do things that are sensible. And I am very pleased that I was able to obtain the services of Chuck Williams as the head of what is now called OBO, Overseas Buildings Office, rather than FBO, the acronym that you've been so familiar with.

And we have pulled that organization out from under Admin and put it reporting directly to the new Under Secretary for Management, Grant Green. And in the few months already, General Williams, a Corps of Engineers officer with enormous experience -- used to be Corps of Engineers, now retired, of course -- enormous experience in actual construction, is doing a terrific job. And I think you will see marked improvements in all of our facilities around the world, and the speed with which we can pull these facilities on line.

Now, the third area I was so interested in is personnel. We haven't been doing a good enough job of recruiting personnel, training personnel, and getting them into the system. It has taken us too long. The clearance process has been too difficult. The administrative process has been too unwieldy. There were years in the last decade where we didn't bring anyone in at all. You can't run an organization like that. You can't have air bubbles in your personnel system, because you pay for it years down the road.

And so this has been a high priority for us, and we have hit that priority hard and we have had considerable success: 1,400 new positions, not only filling vacancies, but creating new positions. But beyond that, for the first time, trying to create a float, a float of positions so that we can be ready for the unexpected when it comes along and not just steal from some other functional area, some other mission. We want a float so that people can go off to training without emptying positions that have to be filled, and thereby create a problem within the organization. I am very pleased that Congress is supportive of this.

We are cutting the accession time. It has been taking us 27 months from the day someone takes the exam until they are actually on the rolls. We are cutting that to eight months under the leadership of our Director General, and as a result of the work that had been done by Marc Grossman before her. We are taking things like the security clearance process that had taken something like 120 days, under the leadership of Dave Carpenter who handles security for us, we are accelerating that with killer teams that are going out there to do it, and we will get that down to 80 days.

In this tough market we're in, you can't simply sit around and not fight for the people you need. And you're not going to get them. They're going to go to dot-com land or some other land or somewhere else if it is going to take you 27 months to access somebody. No longer. We're going to get it down to eight, and I hope we're going to get it even lower than that as we get further into it. (Applause.)

We started now recruiting seriously -- we started to recruit seriously, not just sort of word of mouth. The advertising budget was something like $50,000 last year. We are going to make it 10 times that. What's more important than recruiting the right kinds of people? And what has been the result so far? I am just so proud to share with you this morning that, for the Foreign Service exam that's coming up, we received 23,500 applications for that one exam, twice as many as last year, principally as a result of a new energy in the Department and our advertising efforts. 23,500 young Americans have stepped forward and said, I want to get on the path of being a Foreign Service Officer. Of that number, 3,000 are African Americans, the highest number of African Americans who have ever signed up for that exam, three times the number who signed up last year. Two thousand are Hispanic Americans. We are reaching out beyond the intellectual and academic community. We want retired military officers who bring a lot of overseas experience and language experience in, military experience in that is very translatable into what we do in the State Department.

I want to reach out all over our society in order to bring diversity, not just racial diversity but academic diversity and experience diversity into the Department to keep it growing and thriving and make it an exciting place that people want to be a part of. And I am determined to make that happen, and that is where I need your help. Talk about it.

We are sending out hometown recruiters just like we used to do in the Army. We are doing everything we can. We are putting exciting web sites out there, so people can figure out how they can join the Department. We are doing so many other things to try to improve the quality of life, whether it is rebuilding our facilities or whether it is what I talked about a moment ago with respect to the Internet or the new cafeteria/shopping area downstairs, Foggy Bottom, which I hope you all will have an opportunity to drop by while you are in the building. We have done some other things to make sure that people know that this is a people-friendly place. I want retirees to come back and visit. That's why I changed the access policy. (Applause.)

We always have to find a balance between proper security and getting the job done. And I am very pleased that we have a cooperative attitude within the Department to make sure we protect ourselves, protect our secrets, protect our facilities. But, at the same time, we can't be so protective of ourselves that we can't get the job done and we are afraid to take risks. We will find that right balance, and one of the first things I discovered was we had done some things with respect to the retiree population that were not consistent with the kind of vision I had for the Department, and we have modified that. And, please, come back any time you want. Go to Foggy Bottom. If you're really mad, knock on the, you know, elevator and say you want to come up and see me -- not all at once -- but I'd love to see you. (Laughter.)

We want to open the place up. We need your insight. We are doing other things to make life more attractive for our youngsters. We are doing a lot of things that will endear us to the Congress. We are doing a lot of things to reach out to Americans all over and let them know what's going on here at the State Department.

Congress has been enormously supportive of our efforts. I have not run into a pocket of resistance anywhere. Now, there are some who would like to change our priorities a little bit. There are some who want to reorganize certain things. But, in general, there is a huge well of support up in the Congress for modifying things within the Department in a positive, forward-looking way, and we will get that kind of support manifested, I think, in the kinds of budgets that the Congress will be approving for us, consistent with the overall budget constraints that we live under.

Many studies in the past have said, why doesn't the State Department have a presence up on Capitol Hill? We're working on that, too. We're working on that, too. I have been to the leadership of the House, the leadership of the Senate, anyone else I could find. Every reception I go to, I grab any leader that's around there from the Congress and said, we want to be up on Capitol Hill; give me the space I need to put a consular office up there, and people up there who can be readily available to handle your constituent interest. And they have said, we're going to do that. It's just a matter of finding the space. Now, I thought finding space in this building was hard, but not as hard as finding space up on the Hill. But we're going to get it done, to show the kind of interest that we have in having sound congressional relations.

We are doing other little things, just to let the people who work for us know that we care. We discovered when we came in, for example, just a small example, that we've been retiring people for several years here and giving them awards, but there were no medals. We hadn't been giving them the medals. We had failed to order the medals. So we have done all of that. And we are now catching up with anyone who has ever left this Department without receiving that medal in their hands. They are going to be getting it soon with a letter from me saying, sorry it's late, but this is to let you know that we care. So this is an attitude we're creating throughout the Department. An attitude -- (applause).

Just to summarize this section of my presentation, I want you to know that my vision is to create a department that is connected from top to bottom with trust, with confidence in each other, the kind of confidence that allows me to say to an assistant secretary, don't check with me, just go up on the Hill; you know what our policies are, I trust you to represent me well. The kind of trust that allows people to do their job, and when they see something that's wrong, they'll use the dissent channel, they'll let us know that something's wrong and not be afraid of getting their head cut off. The kind of trust that will spread way outside this building to colleges and universities and places all across the country, and people will say, that's the kind of place I want to be a part of, I want to join that State Department, I want to be moving forward.

That's my simple vision. And we will do it through good leadership, we will do it through good managership, we will do it through being good stewards of the resources that have been entrusted to our care, human resources as well as material resources. And you are an essential element of that resource base. You are stewards of this Department, just as surely as I am.

We've got a lot of things that are going on in the Department, a lot of things that are going on in foreign policy that I can talk to and about. But you will be hearing a lot in the course of the day, so I don't need to belabor too many of these points. Let me just say that we are in the eighth month of the administration. We are starting to put in place all of the elements of our foreign policy. In most areas of the world, things are going exceptionally well. Here, in our own hemisphere, the President very, very aggressively reached out to Canada and Mexico early on. We had the Quebec Summit a few months ago, the Summit of the Americas, where 34 of the 35 nations of this hemisphere came together and recommitted themselves to democracy. I am leaving in about an hour-and-a-half to go to Peru to sign an Inter-American Charter on Democracy, which gives us the membership rule of being a democratic nation in this hemisphere. And the club will take action against you if you violate these democratic membership rules.

With respect to Europe, the President had two successful trips to Europe that show that we are engaged, we are not unilateralists, we are not walking away from Europe. We are going to be active members of NATO. We are going to participate in those operations we are committed to in the Balkans. We went in together, we'll come out together. We are looking forward to the expansion of NATO.

We are working closely now with the Russians. The President spoke to President Putin this morning. I will be speaking to my Foreign Minister in Russia, Mr. Ivanov, in my car on the way to the airport on the way to Peru. He and I talk at least or twice a week. It has only been three days since I last spoke to him and we have met seven times in the first seven months. So there is a lot going on with respect to Europe and with respect to Russia.

With respect to Asia, I can say in similar vein, even though we had a bit of a setback earlier in the EP-3 incident with China, that is behind us. The Chinese are anxious to engage. I had a most successful trip there two months ago and it's clear that they value this relationship with us. And we have opportunities to move forward with China and we will not see China as an enemy, but as a powerful, important country, where there are issues we disagree upon -- human rights and proliferation -- but other issues we can work together on for a safer Asia-Pacific region.

Strong alliances with Japan, with Korea. The Australian Prime Minister will be in the Oval Office in a few moments and I will be racing over there to meet with him and the President.

I started with a trip to Africa to show that we are interested in Africa, deeply interested in Africa. I wanted to also make sure that they knew we were committed to fighting the problem of infectious diseases and especially HIV/AIDS. So we have a lot of good things going on.

There are some serious challenges that have been there for years, and their difficulty is no less now than they were many, many months ago and over the years, the Middle East being uppermost with respect to those challenges. And I am spending a lot of my time, the President is spending a lot of his time, trying to move this process forward, to get conditions of security that will allow us to get back to a peace process. But until we get to a security process, where the violence has gone down and trust is starting to be restored, it is very difficult to get to a peace process.

The Persian Gulf area remains an area that is still troubled, and we are engaged there. Trade has taken a much higher priority standing in our foreign policy than it might have in the past. With the end of the Cold War, trade has become a major, major aspect of our relations. And I spend as much of time on trade issues as I do on security or any other kinds of issues.

And so President Bush has a simple vision of taking America's message to the rest of the world, with respect to democracy, the free enterprise system, the individual rights of men and women, and he is going to take this message in a powerful way. And we are going to be engaged in the world. We are going to be multilateral.

But at the same time, when issues come along, when agreements or treaties come along that we don't think serve the intended purpose of such an agreement, or we don't think it serves our interest, we are going to speak up and we are going to disagree and we are not going to become a party to treaties and agreements that don't achieve their purpose and don't serve our interest. This isn't unilateralism or pulling out; this is essentially standing up for the values and the systems in which we believe and we have a commitment.

So I think you are going to see that the administration's foreign policy really starts to take hold, especially with President Bush's upcoming trip to the United Nations, and then to Asia in October. There will always be lots of chatter in this town about who's on first, who's on second, who's on third, who's winning, who's losing, who's visible, who's invisible. This is noise level, ladies and gentlemen. It has thus always been that way.

Let me just say to you that the President has put together a team of foreign policy and national security officials who have known each other for years, who are good friends, who work together in a collegial, cooperative attitude. Do we disagree? Oh, yeah. (Laughter.) Surprise, surprise, surprise. We disagree from time to time. From time to time, we have little food fights. (Laughter.) But we always come together to solve a problem because every member of this team understands we have but one agenda, we have but one purpose and that purpose is to serve the President of the United States, as he executes the foreign policy of the American people. And that is what pulls us all together.

And so, things go up, things go down. But I want to say to you that your State Department is actively involved in all of it. And I also want to say to you, so that there is no illusion on anyone's part, your Secretary of State is in the middle of it all, serving the function intended by our laws and by our Constitution to be the senior foreign policy advisor of the United States to the President of the United States. And it is a team that is working together well and a team that I think will make the American people proud. But, above all, a team that is working together to serve a President who has a vision and knows where he is taking this country with respect to foreign policy.

So welcome back to the Department, enjoy your day. I hope you find all the presentations interesting. And, remember, don't just see this as something you do once a year. I want you to think about us every day of the year, as you go back to your communities, as you go back to your other occupations. Talk us up. As Ruth said, there is no such thing as an ex-State Department person. You, each and every one of you and your families, are an essential part of our family and that's the way I will all view you, part of one team, one effort, one crusade, one group of people united in trust and commitment to this great country of ours. Thank you very much.   (Applause.)