March 23, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Karen Hughes, one of the most powerful women in American politics and advisor to President Bush, delivers the lecture Lessons Learned in the White House at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Karen Hughes
- Hughes has been described as the most powerful woman presidential advisor in history
- She worked as a much-valued Counselor to the President during George W. Bush’s first 18 months in office
- Author of the just-released memoir Ten Minutes from Normal
- Sunday, April 25
- 3 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public $10 / UCSB students $8
- Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
Karen Hughes, who has been described as “the most powerful woman ever to serve in the White House” (Dallas Morning News) and President George W. Bush’s “most essential advisor” (ABC News), will deliver the lecture Lessons Learned in the White House on Sunday, April 25 at 3 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. As Counselor to the President for his first eighteen months in the White House and as his communications director since he first ran for Governor of Texas in 1994, Hughes has been a crucial influence in President Bush’s inner circle. Along with campaign manager Joe Allbaugh and chief strategist Karl Rove, Hughes formed one-third of the “Iron Triangle” of senior advisors who ran Bush’s campaign and steered him toward the presidency.
It has been said that Karen Hughes brought the working mom’s perspective to the White House, often asking of President Bush’s policies, “What does this mean for the average person?” During her tenure in the Bush White House, she advised the president on a wide range of issues, crafted the communications and message strategy for the administration and was responsible for overseeing the Offices of Press Secretary, Media Affairs, Speechwriting and Communications. She helped develop and lead the international communications effort during the early months of the war against terror and was instrumental in creating the new White House Office of Global Communications. According to CNN.com, “Her trademark line is that she has worked with Bush so long she can finish his sentences, and she said the president jokes that she was at his side ‘when the motorcade was one car.’”
Yet the move from Texas to Washington was hard on her family and, in a controversial, headline-making decision, in April 2002 she chose to place family first and quit the nation’s capital to return to Austin. There, Hughes continues to advise the president through a retainer arrangement with the Republican National Committee. Although President Bush lamented her leaving Washington D.C., he said at the time, “She will still be in my inner circle. She had put her family ahead of her service to my government, and I am extremely grateful for that approach and that priority. I value her advice, I have her advice. And I value her friendship, and I will have her friendship.”
After Hughes resigned from the White House, columnist John Dickerson of Time magazine wrote, “No one has been more responsible than Hughes for keeping the flow of information from this Administration sanitized and restricted. But her send-off from Washington was glowing. Gone were the nasty nicknames—‘Nurse Ratched’ and ‘the Enforcer’—replaced by supportive e-mails from people she had so often vexed.”
Hughes is also the co-author of George W. Bush’s autobiography A Charge to Keep, published in November 1999. The jacket blurb for the book claims that Bush “addresses the questions that may well decide who becomes the next president: crime, education, abortion, tax and tort reform, and the continuing battle ‘for the soul’ of the Republican Party. He is, by no one’s definition, a conventional candidate.”
The daughter of H.R. Parfitt, a major general in the U.S. Army, Karen Hughes was born in Paris, France. Her father’s military career led to his being the last governor of the Panama Canal Zone. Hughes is a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Southern Methodist University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Journalism. A former television news reporter for KXAS-TV, the NBC affiliate in Dallas/Fort Worth, she covered the unsuccessful run by George H. W. Bush for president in 1980 and found herself fascinated by politics. After working on the Reagan-Bush re-election campaign in 1984 and on local Texas campaigns, Hughes rose to the position of Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas in 1991.
Courtesy of Borders, books by Karen Hughes will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
Karen Hughes is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Tickets are $10 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.