of biographies of the white house. it's available at cost if you're interested. we have many more first ladies to go as the series continues. hope they'll read along with us and learn more about the interesting aspect on american history. a special thanks to our guest tonight. and to tim naphali for helping to tell her story. >> thank you very much.

>> next week on our series, "first lady, betty ford." shortly after moving into the white house, she had a mastectomy.

she released a statement detailing her illness. during her husband's re-election campaign in 1976, she feels so popular, the campaign slogan was vote for betty's husband. when the president lost, she delivered the concession speech. and after the white house, she publicly shared her experience with alcohol and prescription drug addiction leading to the creation of the betty ford center. next monday, the life and career of first lady betty ford, live at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span and c-span 3 as well as c-span radio. offering the special edition of the book, "first ladies of the united states of america." it has a biography and portrait of each first lady and comments from noted historians on the role of first ladies throughout history. it's available for the discounted price of $12.95 plus

shipping. plus a special section "welcome to the white house." it's the white house historical association and chronicles life in the executive mansion in the tenure of each of the first ladies, you can find out more at c-span.org/first ladies. >> c-span, we bring public affairs events from washington directly to you, putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events, conchses, and offering complete gavel-to-gavel coverage to the u.s. house all as a public service of private industry. we're c-span created by the cable tv industry 34 years ago and funded by your local satellite provider. now you can watch us in hd. >> now a discussion on u.s. diplomatic efforts in mutz limb countries. we'll hear from foreign service officer walter douglas who spoke

at the center for strategic and international event for 50 minutes. >> john was hinting at the origin of this report. it went up on the website last week. i am not going to go through it because i think you can read it, but i want to point out how the things came about and where it takes us. as john said, what was fascinating, as we looked at 26 reports since 9/11 dealing with the middle east, how amazing it was that how few of them had been spoken to the officers in the field. in the sense of we have a lot of advice coming, that the best they can come up with is give public diplomacy more money. money does not solve all the problems.

and so that was one of the incentives for doing this. what goes on over there? how does it work? i've been associated with public diplomacy and spent the past 10 years working in that region. the arab middle east, pakistan, afghanistan, and if you look at the officers in that region to come up with suggestions, challenges, what faces us out there, i stayed away from policy because that is the white house's prerogative, to what do we do overseas when we get there? i have taken in a lot from what i have seen, but everything i put in this report is mine, not the state department's report. i can do some independent thinking. that was important through that clearance process to make sure that i speak in my voice and nobody else's. something else that was interesting coming out of this is defining what public diplomacy is.

there has been talk about this since 9/11, but basically -- and there has been a lot of reporting -- but to define what it is, and one thing that was striking, one thing that came out in the report is we hear about messaging. washington, are you messaging? are you getting this message right? public diplomacy is larger than that. messaging is something we do in the press, the public diplomacy is a panoply of programs and platforms that we use to engage the audience is out there, to make them more accepted to american foreign policy. what we spend our money on, the projects going on overseas, and a person who was always pointing out, he repeats this so often, i can save, it is the sum of these two things. adam is no longer what the state department, so i can mention that.

it is true, we probably spend 3/4 of our money spending on fulbright, international visitors, targeting those people that can make a difference in the opinion landscape. that is the way you can target certain people who are very important, and the shotgun effect when we use the media to reach broader audience. in washington that was not was fully understood and i wanted to put that in the report, that it is not just messaging, not just how you engage in audiences, how you make them see what you are doing and show them we have a point of view that is respectable. i think it is important if you look at the cover of the report, if you see who is on there, it is not a spokesman on there. that is an english-teaching officer, someone in pakistan with me. he stood for that other side of public diplomacy that is not often reported, but english

teaching is something we use effectively out there, the target it to certain audience we think are more at risk, but it is a way we get out our word to a to for an audience and give them a broader sense of what is going on in the world, and maybe they will be able to inform other people what is going on as well as getting ahead in their own lives because english is such added advantage. it was important to have that on the cover and not a spokesman at a podium. i would like to say to wrap of why the report -- there's something else that motivates to love us. officers in the field are very patriotic. so many of us feel really strongly about what we are doing, but nobody had really looked at what we were and what we were doing. this is a reported where i wanted to say here is how we see what is going on overseas. here is how we think it should

be implemented. this is how we will take something that comes from the white house and shape it for the audiences out there. the heroes of my report are that public diplomacy ocean in the state department, the ones charged with leading the diplomacy efforts worldwide. i wanted to tell their story and get out what goes on. that is why i took what i've got here, i spoke to public diplomacy officers, and this is a summation of this. i wanted to get that story from what was going on, because the heroes here are of my colleagues in the state department that are overseas, working difficult environments, engaging audiences, making them more receptive to our policy initiatives. if you look at the report itself, and i do not want to go through it all, but i think i have not engaged in policy structure because that is what the white house does.

i tried to give a how-to outline of how we do overseas, the challenges and opportunities we have. to highlight a couple of them, more than a couple, but one thing i think it's interesting is when we approach societies, i divided the report, in telling america's story versus engaging attitudes in a country. people are unclear what we put an emphasis on, and what i have said is every country will be different, and that is why that ties in the field are so important, because they can help us work through. anyone should weigh up, what are we trying to do here? do we want to take people overseas who might turn violent and say they do not take that route, but that they do not go the violent route. in this part of the world, after 9/11 it is a question we have to ask. every country is different. every one of them will have a

different percentage assigned to one side or the other. i wanted to highlight it very much, and not everybody understands we have these wall functions out there. i also felt and i mentioned in the report that we need a third office, and we created what in pakistan to engage in changing attitudes and behaviors, if her from press or cultural affairs work. it was important to vote out there that there are a number of different ways to approach these questions. in places like pakistan and afghanistan, we have so much money given to us to do public diplomacy we have the lecture of being able to create anything we want. even officers without resources can do a lot to change things. another point i brought across is the diverse as he of audiences. one thing is you hear people say that muslims or something like that. there are many different

audiences and many effort types of muslims believing a lot of different things. people need to become attuned to that right away and understand certain communities believe what they, another community believes another. in washington people do not understand those differences. it is understand that it is interesting to understand who is more susceptible to a message, who do we have to work harder with, who is important, who is not, but diversity out there is incredible. it ties in with the need to speak to these people in the languages they speak. in india it is funny, i bring this up, do you ever see two indians speaking english to each other? unless they have an english language listener, they will speak hindi to each other. in the middle east, once they engage in each other, they need to be speaking those languages. we need to be there in those

languages. it is where you have to listen to them to what they say, not rely on english. those english language newspapers out there, i remember in pakistan i was speaking to an editor, i said, can you tell what is this about? they said, these are for you, the foreigners. this is not something that pakistanis used to communicate with each other. that was an important insight, and is one thing that we have to make sure we do not rely on english to out there to interpret what is going on because that is not where the action is. it is in the vernacular and it is important to be there. i wanted to talk about security, which i did in here. in afghanistan or around pakistan, and libya and yemen, security is a huge concern for us. in other places while we have these embassies that are much more secure, real public diplomacy takes place outside

and disease. i argue people we want to reach do not come into our facilities. that is where the value is, going into their institutions and meeting them out there. i quoted thomas friedman who came to turkey after the bombings in turkey and he looks at our new consulate, and remarked how this was a bad message. it can be or it is a difficult message out become it can become, but as public diplomacy officers, you get out of that environment. that is vital. that is why that is not such a key stumbling lock. it is very important to see these other places -- you get out and that is what officers do. finally, or not finally -- sorry -- the next steps in the report by set out a series of recommendations. one thing that is important is and i go back to this 26th report written since 9/11, the one recommendation for everybody was to spend more money on

public diplomacy. that is not going to happen. basically, what i tried to come up with, with jeannie's help was, we could come up low-cost or no-cost solutions, because the state department is not looking to dump tons of money into something new, and in this budget environment it will be a while. what we came up with a lot of the things we could do by shifting emphasize, real things the state department can do. i believe some of them are underway to a certain extent, and i looking forward to this afternoon speaking to a life of people to find out where we are in that way in the state department. let me wrap up and say the limitations of this report -- the limitation is obvious. it just deals with one part of the world. there is a whole world out there.

people say, why did you not cover indonesia? in india i am finding a series of public diplomacy ideas that are different than what i had in my report because i'm dealing with a different environment where we are running a country, working in a country that is up to 70% approval ratings, different from what we have that is covering this report. what i am saying is there were limitations because of time, money, effort, all that sort of thing, but i hope this will spark more reports of what we are doing overseas. it is vital that we understand public the promising. i'm delighted to go to state to speak to people who do that, and i will give them a mini report on my report. i will stop there. what i would like to do, i hope i have given a bit of an overview here. i hope you have a copy of the report, have read it, or looking

forward to read is because there is a lot here that will define something that has not been seen before. i am glad that the academics i brought in say we have not had a report from the field, and they have been awaiting this. it was delayed in coming up. the research for this went into the summer of 2012, but now they have something in the courses where they can look at what we're doing in the field and try to make judgments that might be different than what we hear if they were aligned on material coming out of here. thank you very much, and i look forward to some questions and answers. [applause] >> thank you, walter. as you suggest, there is a lot to chew on there. one thing you did not talk about at all in your report really was the issue of metrics. and one of the things i see the state department, in the

fascination with metrics for social media, because social media tends to produce area precise metrics. from your position in the field, what is your sense of the role of metrics, how do you use them, and how are people misusing metrics in ways that we have to stop? >> metrics is a question that is a difficult one or public diplomacy. you mentioned i was in advertising before, and you always had is the product sell or not? it1 was an interesting metric and if it did not sell well, they fired the ad agency. you would pay that way. they tended to blame the ad agencies first.

metrics are something that is difficult. we know that public diplomacy conservatives to the fault of the soviet union. we talked about it, but it played a role in undercutting the intellectual likelihood of the soviet union. today, it is difficult because you can't measure inputs, but not outputs. there is some work done in the private sector, mostly when someone takes an action to understand that they have absorbed that idea -- i mention it is not just the tweets you do, it is the retweets you have to count. that's one way we do it, but nobody has come up with an idea that says they have changed the way of looking at the united states based on what we have given them their any have tried to do that, the vehicle to do. i did come up with a recommendation, and this is over the years speaking to hill people, hill staffers, one thing

we need are narratives. how does this stuff play out writ large? we can bring to get all these public diplomacy programs are on the road, what message are we getting out, pointing to success stories, nodding having exact metric saying we moved the needle from 50 to 60, but saying we are putting out these ideas, there is an effort, it makes sense, and if your narrative aches cents, able can trust your on to something. that is one of the recognitions i have there, to get out to the hill, get to the state department in the field, more about these narratives that are going on. >> and would that suggest that the number of people engaged, the number of people who are in our audience is less important than creating a dynamic, and we

need to be more attuned to the dynamics we create rather than the size of the audience i mean, it sounds to me you are recommending sort of looking at waves and creating ripples rather than trying to measure the force. >> i think that is right. if you go on broadcast television, you get huge numbers. how many of those people are important to the influencing policy? that is an open question. we have exchange programs and everything we do where we say that as someone who is important to the debate, we want to expose them more, get the people on an exchange program in the united states where they can see what we do. you make judgments about the value of the audience out there, some more valuable than others. when you put it together you draw the conclusion of what you're getting out there, what word is going out there, how

much you are causing a debate. to actually measure the impact is difficult. you have got to put all these factors together on that one idea you want to get across and maybe there is another idea and how those blend together. you have got to use all these tools. there are probably at anyone post you could draw up a p.d. toolkit that would have 25 things that we basically -- and it is all from using a local staff in the vernacular language using the ambassador as a speaker, do use and econ officer as a speaker, using exchange programs to bring in speakers into these countries -- all these different things to get the message out, hitting different audiences that we think our part. how you measure the impact, what moves the needle, that is important. >> as a manager, how do you think about the problems of allocating resources across the entire tool kit? >> at the beginning of going

anywhere, you have to sit back and say what are our objectives here? this is something that i have learned that csis and going to exercises with you and around here was trying to see what the goals are upfront and do not worry about the limitation write a but set out the strategic goals. there is a tendency to mix implementation and strategic goals, and you have to see them as something separate and reach into the toolkit at what works best in that environment. that becomes a judgment call him a more an art than science. if you're in an open country like india, you can do a lot of things. i'm getting out of my where were the report is. you might have difficulties in other places where it is more closed. in the middle east you have a tremendous variety of countries, more open than others, but some can't surprise use. when i was in riyadh, i was amazed at how open they were at engaging in so many topics.

outside of saudi arabia, people do not realize, and when you were over there, you're been able to engage and you know that receptivity to what is going on. you try to judge what is the best way to engage the audiences i want to reach. use it as a blend of those two things, the broad media with a more narrow targeted approach. >> you just pursued one other line before we open it up. you have mostly spent your career overseas, but you had a lovely year in washington. when you presumably are at a target for other embassies' average programs, for public diplomacy in washington. who do you think was especially good? what kinds of things did you see as a target where you said the, you know what can i recognize what they are doing and they are being effective, and we should try to take a page from that and do what we are doing overseas. >> an interesting question. what struck me is how rarely i would think people did engage me. often officers were working on specific countries, that one and this he will engage them, but

engaging more broadly you do not come across it as much in the state department. that said you end up with events, certain things-- >> you were at csis, right? >> when i was here? >> yeah. >> we engaged in a love audiences. i do not think anybody targeted me to same way i would have expected. i would think they could do more of that. the think tanks at csis being my favorite, obviously, have a lot of ideas and a lot of these people they want to engage more with. but i do not see it as much as i would have expected. when i looked at audiences when i was her, i went other thing tanks and i look at the audience as was struck that some embassy people, but i would have expected more. i think probably they be it is because -- i mentioned this, the public the policy function of the state department is unique. every other country does not seem to have the same way. i found that state department people were much more around the city, hitting around them and i see that overseas can engage in

the think tax overseas. i noticed other countries doing it less than we do perhaps because they do not have a dedicated function of how am i going to engage that audience. i see that less and less. >> as i look in the audience i see a lot of people who know more about the diplomacy than i do. let me turn it over to you. yes, sir. do me a favor, three things -- wait for a microphone, identify yourself, and do ask only one question. >> thank you so much. a good presentation. i am a retiree, originally from pakistan. your recommended approach in a muslim country is the same yardstick for kingdoms like

saudi arabia or some of the middle eastern countries and pakistan, like a democratic country? >> one thing that comes out is a variety that is out there. we have to shift gears. at one point i talked about a good arabist can take 15 years of training, the guy who can understand advances in the regional culture, the local cultures, effort arabic that is spoken arabic out there. it is important we recognize diversity and everybody who works overseas sees that. what works in saudi arabia is not something that will work in jordan. they have different levels of openness. in saudi arabia, we had an american archaeology team out there to him was something new and different. in jordan, they have had them there for 100 years, back to the

ottoman days. it is different. every country you have to look at it as a different activity. that is one region best reason why you have to have the guy in the field them met with a woman trying to interpret a decent societies and say what works best here, because as you said, some are open, some have a democrat political process, others do not. others have a monarchy. all these systems demand a different part of the tool kit to go into action. >> how do you think about working a monarchy? you are now in the world's largest democracy, where you have served in one of the world's most important monarchies. how do you think about the targets for public diplomacy in a system where you are not trying to target elected

officials? >> some people say there is an audience of one when you have a monarchy. it is much more broader. there are a lot of influences they. the king goes out and goes on trips to meet his subjects, and there are a lot of people eating advice, so i think the important thing is who are these people, who are opinion leaders there? you want to engage them as much as possible. i think all over that region you deal with varying degrees of democracy and lack of democracy, but you still always have people who influence the debate. you always have a guy who will go on tv and talk about something. talk shows are huge business in this part of the world. these guys will have different ways of portraying it. there are those who do not support government so much or

will have a different way. the key thing is to find out who are those people. a systematic watching of live television, something kids are good at, can -- you will find who are the people who speak most about the subject you want, and within three weeks of watching, you can come up with i am noticing these people coming up, and they are influencing debate. you probably want to engage those guys. they will be important to you. and so i think it is listen to look at who is out there, and come up with who are those people who are important. it is not just one guy at the top. >> george washington university. you make a strong case for looking at public diplomacy in the field and for the most part look at the state department's role in the field. you have also served in large type for embassies where there are a variety of departments and