Man on a mission

ORTLAND, Maine -- As the Vietnam War slid toward quagmire in the mid-1960s, a young press aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson named Harold C. Pachios saw firsthand how a White House mobilizes, in his words, to "shield the administration from accountability." It didn't work. "Ultimately, Johnson was held accountable by the American people for a war that was unpopular, that was ultimately found to be unnecessary," says Pachios.

Will history deliver a similar verdict on the Iraq war? Caution seems to vie with gut instinct as Pachios ponders the question in his law office overlooking downtown Portland. It is not an abstract issue for the

67-year-old attorney but one that lies at the heart of his increasingly challenging task as a Democratic member of the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. The bipartisan panel oversees government-sponsored efforts to improve America's image abroad -- an image that, Pachios says, has been badly battered by a war that "in the end, 10 years from now, might be in the Vietnam category." He concedes that it's not yet clear whether the Vietnam parallel will hold, but on the damage to the

nation's standing, he is far more certain. "The things that bind us to people in the world are being eroded," he says. If he sounds frustrated, it is because Pachios -- described by longtime friend Bill Moyers as "a natural patriot" -- has devoted more than a decade to strengthening those now-fraying bonds.

In the mid-1990s, Pachios began urging the US State Department to combat America's image problem by developing TV programming to reach the Muslim world; it became a reality this year with the launch of Al Hurra, a US-funded satellite TV network that broadcasts news and public affairs programs to the Middle East. "I was in Egypt last summer, and every porch had a satellite receiver," he says. "Do we know how to move people on the other end of those satellite receivers? If you know how to move people in

Abilene and Seattle, you know how to move people in Istanbul and Jakarta." And yet Pachios now finds on his frequent trips abroad that international opinion of the United States is more hostile than at any time since he was appointed to the commission by President Clinton in 1993 -- and not just in the Muslim world. During a recent trip to South Korea, a staunch ally of the United States, Pachios heard torrents of negative comments about America. He rummages among the papers and well-worn passports on his desk (among many other places, Pachios has been to Syria, to the West Bank, and to Jordan, but not to Iraq) and comes up with a copy of a recent survey that found "discontent with America and its policies" widespread in western Europe as well as in the Arab world.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pachios notes, Americans struggled to make sense of the antipathy toward the United States around the world. "The question began to resonate in the press and the public: `Why do they hate us?' " Today, he says, "They hate us a lot more than they did in 2001."

A fixture in civic life

George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader who is senior counsel in Preti Flaherty, the law firm where Pachios is managing partner, says his friend sees the big picture in part because he descends from Greek immigrants (all four of Pachios's grandparents emigrated from Greece). Immigrants and their descendants a generation or two removed, Mitchell says, "have a passionate loyalty to the United States but an awareness of other cultures and societies, and a sense of the American role in the world. I think Harold has a good sense of that." At one point, Pachios chaired the Commission on Public Diplomacy, a bipartisan, seven-member panel that meets eight to 12 times a year. Pachios, who was reappointed by President Bush last year, is one of the longest-serving members in its 54-year history. Based on their travels and independent analysis, commissioners report to the president, the secretary of state, and Congress on the effectiveness of international information efforts (such as Al Hurra and Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language radio station), cultural exchanges, and US-funded nongovernmental organizations.

Pachios has focused much of his energy on trying to revamp the State Department's approach to the Muslim world. He has argued that attempts to communicate the US message to the Middle East have fallen short because too many of its employees are not fluent in the language of the countries where they are stationed and because the US government has not fully recognized that the rules of foreign affairs irrevocably changed with the dawning of the information age.

Recently, Pachios has used his commission post to analyze the effects of, and voice his concerns about, the US government's new, more restrictive policy on visas issued to foreigners. He has argued to State Department officials that "one of the greatest sales points we had with people abroad was having them come here" and that the nation should "not destroy our ability to have foreigners interact with us by coming here to our country."

With US popularity at a low ebb, Mitchell says, Pachios's role on the public diplomacy panel gains importance. "He's got the perfect temperament for it, a willingness to listen to all arguments and reexamine one's assumptions," says Mitchell. "He's not dogmatic in the sense that he's fixed on one point of view. I felt he could be persuasive around the world in explaining the American position to others and advancing American interests in that way."

In the view of Moyers, a broadcast journalist under whom Pachios worked in the Peace Corps and later in the White House, Pachios's work on the commission is "in a way a fulfillment of where he started 43 years ago when he came to work for me," when he first focused on communicating the nation's highest ideals to the international community.

Even back then, rubbing elbows with the top elected leaders while still in his mid-20s, Pachios knew he would eventually return to his home state. Maine has had its share of high-profile public figures over the years: Mitchell; former Democratic senator and secretary of state Edmund Muskie; former Republican senator and defense secretary William Cohen; and the late Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican who was the first woman elected to the US House and US Senate.

Though less well known, Pachios has been no less a fixture in Maine's civic life over the years. He ran only once for political office, in 1980, and learned the difference between political theory and political practice when his congressional bid was buried in the Reagan landslide. "I found out I was not nearly as smart as I thought I was," Pachios says ruefully. But in a state that prides itself on the contributions of public-spirited private citizens, Pachios has made the most of that role: serving stints as chairman of the state Democratic Party and president of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, spearheading passage of the state's coastal pollution laws, chairing committees on campaign finance reform, joining the legislative committee of the United States Olympic Committee. He lives in Cape Elizabeth, the Portland suburb where he grew up, and although his two sons are grown, he still goes to high school basketball games just for the fun of it.

Coming home There was a time, back in the heady days of the New Frontier and the Great Society, when Maine might not have seemed big enough to contain Pachios's ambition, when he might have been tempted to believe his future lay inescapably in Washington. Though he downplays it, saying, "I wasn't a central player," he had lived through a significant chunk of history before he was 30.

He had a hand in the legislation that created Head Start and VISTA, worked in the Peace Corps during its infancy, and served as Moyers's right-hand man in the Johnson White House, where he became known as a superb advance man. Moyers recalls that when he sent Pachios to do the advance work for a presidential trip, "I didn't have to give him a blueprint. Hal is just one of those intuitive people who knows what the right thing is to do. . . . In the service of a large cause, he will take on the most mundane duties."

It all began when a politically connected classmate turned to Pachios one day in contracts class at Georgetown University Law School and asked: "You want a job? We're starting this thing called the Peace Corps." Before long, he had become deputy congressional liaison for the Peace Corps and developed a lifelong admiration for its first director, Sargent Shriver. "He may be the greatest man I've met," Pachios says of Shriver.

High praise, given the public figures Pachios has run across in his numerous capacities over the years. With the relish of a veteran storyteller, he recounts his one hour alone with former president Harry Truman, who came to the Johnson White House for a bill-signing ceremony. Pachios told Truman that although his mother was a Republican, Truman was her favorite president. Truman turned, grinning, from the window and barked: "Let me tell you something, young man: Mothers are always right!"

Another major Washington figure gave Pachios some crucial advice when he stood at a crossroads in the late 1960s. Pachios had left the White House in 1967 to serve as an adviser to the secretary of the Department of Transportation, then spent the summer of 1968 as head of scheduling and advance work on the vice-presidential campaign of Muskie, a fellow Mainer. He was trying to decide whether to stay in Washington or return to Maine and launch his legal career, finally using the law degree he had earned several years earlier. Of all people, it was Clark Clifford, the legendary Washington lawyer and power broker, the insider's insider, who convinced Pachios that it was time to return to Maine. "If you stay in Washington, you're always going to be concerned about who's in power," Clifford told him. "If you really want to be a lawyer, go back home and learn how to be one."

Pachios did. He joined a Portland law firm that had only four attorneys (that firm has since merged with another firm to create Preti Flaherty, which today boasts 71 lawyers) and plunged into the public affairs of his home state. Mitchell says Pachios likes nothing better than to talk about the Red Sox (one of his sons works in the Sox' premium sales department). But Pachios keeps a vigilant eye on the wider world -- and he stays mindful of how the world is looking back at the United States. Of late, the picture has been worrisome.

Pachios says that the US public must face up to the roots of international hostility and that the US government must take steps to ameliorate it. In his view, it stems from two primary causes: the US invasion of Iraq and what he calls the "perception" that America has not been even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Part of the US image problem stemming from the Iraq war was "the words our leaders used," according to Pachios. "If you talk about `Old Europe' and put them down, you will not have good relations with the people," he says, describing what he calls "a message that we didn't need the rest of the world . . . that shock and awe would take care of most diplomatic problems."

However, he says, "The messages that we've had coming from the White House the last four or five months have been good messages. They haven't gotten through because the terrorists make the news." He lauds President Bush for the president's conciliatory remarks during a recent trip to Europe. "He said `We need you. We cannot succeed without you.' That's a great message," Pachios says.

Pachios believes the United States needs to recognize that the telecommunications revolution has changed the world so completely that every word by a US official reverberates far and wide, with effects on public opinion in foreign countries, and that public opinion in turn shapes the positions taken by foreign governments. Images of the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, which were seen often on Arabic-language news networks like Al- Jazeera, "had an enormous impact," he said.

On Monday, in a follow-up interview after the US transferred control to an interim government in Iraq, Pachios predicted Iraq will "continue to be in turmoil, unfortunately," and declared of the Iraq war: "If you add up the price that so many paid, it was ill-timed and ill-conceived." Emphasizing that he was speaking for himself and not for the commission, he added, "US policy drives most of the anti-Americanism in the world," not the failures of outreach programs. "We are going to have a real struggle in the world unless we can restore American credibility," he says. The good news, he adds, is that "We know how to do that."

For one thing, in keeping with his fundamental optimism, Pachios is confident the American people will not abide the new, darker view of this nation the war seemingly gave rise to in the world. He enthusiastically notes that State Department applications for foreign service have risen significantly. "There will be a reaction to this poor image of America," he says. "Americans do not want us to be isolated, disrespected, hated, and unbelieved."

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.