[iwar] NYTIMES- Behind the PR campaign

From: yangyun@metacrawler.com
Date: 2001-11-11 18:08:14
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November 11, 2001
Adept in Politics and Advertising, 4 Women Shape a Campaign
By PETER MARKS

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - Twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush summoned his close aide
Karen P. Hughes, telling her that the job of coordinating wartime
public relations for the government would be hers.

"When he called me in that morning, he told me that this will be an
ongoing process of educating the public," said Ms. Hughes, counselor
to the president. "He said, `O.K., go for it.' "

In the following weeks, Ms. Hughes, a former television reporter in
Texas who led media operations in the Bush presidential campaign, has
settled into the role of chief keeper of the message. She works
closely with three other women: Victoria Clarke, chief Pentagon
spokeswoman; Charlotte Beers, under secretary of state for public
diplomacy; and Mary Matalin, chief political adviser to Vice President
Dick Cheney.

The four are among the Bush administration's most important shapers of
the words and images that the allies are seeking to convey to a global
audience. (Others include Ari Fleischer, the president's press
secretary, and James Wilkinson, a Hughes deputy who has set up a
comprehensive center to counter Taliban propaganda.) They talk several
times a day ? including a daily 9:30 a.m. agenda-setting conference
call, presided over by Ms. Hughes ? and bounce ideas off one another
frequently.

In the male-dominated machinery of war, it is a rarity, even in
enlightened times, to find so many women in highly visible roles with
the responsibility for trying to influence public opinion about
military operations and other aspects of a conflict.

And their relationship is even more unusual, founded in the deep
connections at least three of them forged in long stints in Republican
politics and on the campaign trail.

"Three of us have not worked together in just this war," said Ms.
Matalin, who is perhaps the best known of the team, as a longtime
adviser to Mr. Bush's father, a Republican commentator on television
and the wife of James Carville, a Democratic political consultant.

Of the four, Ms. Matalin, 48, also enjoys perhaps the warmest
relations with Washington reporters. She also speaks warmly of the
intimacy she feels in working with the other women. "I know how Torie
thinks," she said, invoking Ms. Clarke's nickname. "I know what Karen
thinks. We skip right past the pleasantries."

If the nature of the collaboration is unusual, so is the nature of the
event. "This is a very uncommon war," said Ms. Clarke, who worked in
the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain of Arizona last year
and was press secretary to Mr. Bush's father in his unsuccessful bid
for re-election in 1992.

"This is not just about military matters," she added, explaining that
the scope of the conflict requires the message makers to consider
diplomacy, economics and law.

The women have other common pursuits. Like the other three, Ms. Beers,
66, who did not return calls seeking comment, also comes from the
world of image making, but her background is Madison Avenue, rather
than Pennsylvania Avenue. She is the former chairwoman of the giant
advertising agencies Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson. Ms.
Clarke, too, once worked in advertising, as president of Bozell Eskew
Advertising, which specializes in issue advocacy and corporate
communications.

That they share a background in selling images or ideas may be
fortunate, some political observers say. "In some ways, the challenge
this White House team faces is very similar to being in a political
campaign," said Martin Kaplan, a former chief speechwriter for Vice
President Walter F. Mondale and now associate dean of the Annenberg
School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Although some in the administration acknowledge privately that in the
early weeks after the attacks, the allies were slow to develop a
response to statements by Taliban officials, Ms. Hughes and others say
that a strategy is taking root. In the coming weeks, Ms. Hughes said,
the press operations, under a newly formed umbrella group, the
Coalition Information Center, will highlight issues, like the
Taliban's treatment of women, that cast the Afghan leadership in a
negative light. The first lady, Laura Bush, is expected to be enlisted
as a leading voice of that information campaign, she added.

Ms. Matalin said it was perhaps not a coincidence that such issues
would be front and center.

"I think we probably bring - and I don't mean this to sound sexist -
but we probably have more of a subconscious outrage at these issues,"
she said. "This is something that crosses my mind every day: a third
of these women in pre-Taliban days were doctors, lawyers and teachers.
You can't help but be outraged."



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