Remarks at 2004 J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding Ceremony

Well, thank you very much, Dr. Fenton-May, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. And Dr. Fenton-May, I say to you, that as a former employee of the Coca Cola Company, where I used to be an assistant truck driver, when I was a young lad growing up in the South Bronx section of New York, I regret that my career with Coca Cola did not take me to the elevated height that it has taken you over a 30-year period. (Laughter.)

But it gave me a good start in life, so I'm delighted to be here, and also to express my thanks to the Coca Cola Company. I'd like to also thank Ms. Ingrid Saunders Jones, Chairperson of the Coca Cola Foundation, as well.

I’m delighted to receive the 2004 J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding, and I'm deeply honored to be included among such a distinguished group of previous award winners.

I have such experience with the Fulbright Program over the years, and as I travel around now, I will go into a country and I'll meet with a prime minister or a foreign minister, especially the emerging countries that have come out from behind the Iron Curtain, or one of the undeveloped nations of the world that is now developing and moving on. And shortly after we sit down and exchange pleasantries and have that first sip of coffee, somebody at the table will say, "And I was a Fulbright scholar." (Laughter.)

And they're all now in positions of leadership, and after a while, I -- enough already. I know. I know. You're all Fulbright scholars. (Laughter.) But it just shows you the power of this program and what this program has been able to accomplish in its history. It's just remarkable, and receiving the Fulbright prize, that means a lot to me. And to receive it here in my favorite room of the State Department, the Benjamin Franklin room, makes this honor even more exciting for me.

As many times as I’ve presided over ceremonies and other events in this room, I never get over the sense of awe I feel every time I walk in here. And as I’ve passed in and out of this room over the past four years, my hope has always been that I might live up to the responsibilities of my office as given to me by those who are our Founding Fathers, who came down through history, this legacy of what they had achieved.

One of those responsibilities is to do whatever I can to make America an exemplar and a promoter of understanding among people of different beliefs, cultures and origins.

We’ve struggled with that responsibility within our own society, but I believe we've done it successfully, and one of the things I love doing is talking to foreign audiences about how we took our founding documents of 227 years ago, that were beautiful documents in a flawed society, and over those 227 years, every passing year, try to get the reality of our society closer to what our Founding Fathers have in mind and how you have to have something to hang on to, these dreams.

And that's why being here in this room to receive this prize means so much to me, named for Benjamin Franklin, father of the American Foreign Service, our very first envoy, our first ambassador overseas, but it was also the American founder who inscribed most deeply in the American soul our openness to people and our openness to ideas.

Franklin believed that a free and open society, bold in its ambitions but tempered by a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, would best promote understanding at home, understanding around the world.

So Ben Franklin would grasp immediately the importance of the Fulbright Program as the vanguard of America’s effort to promote greater global understanding. Let me cite just a few specific examples of new Fulbright Program developments of which I am immensely proud and which shows you that this whole program is still fresh and alive and coming up with new initiatives and ideas.

Thanks to President Bush’s leadership, we renewed the Fulbright Program with Afghanistan and with Iraq, as was noted earlier, bringing these two nations back into the fold of our premier exchange program.

Last February I had the pleasure of greeting 25 new Fulbright scholars from a newly free Iraq. They came to America. You should have seen their faces. They were so full of hope. They came to study. They came to learn. They were determined to get all that they could from this experience and to return to their country and contribute what they have learned here to the development of their country. They and others like them deserve that chance, and I believe they’ll get it.

Americans and so many others around the world are struggling and sacrificing to help the Iraqi people reclaim their place of honor in the community of nations, and we must not fail, we must not fail so that they can succeed.

Over the past four years we’ve also expanded the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants Program. That program brings graduate students from abroad to U.S. college campuses, where they teach their native languages -- Urdu, Housa, Arabic, Turkish, Uzbek, Hindi and others -- they teach all of these languages while they are still students here and studying in the United States. What a way to exchange cultures and ideas and skills.

We’ve developed outreach programs so that U.S. Fulbright alumni can share their knowledge of Islamic societies with American K-12 students and with the general public. Engaging the alumni of State Department exchanges is a high priority for us, and I commend the members of the Fulbright Association for your activism and for your commitment.

In all of the exchange programs that we have, we're going to do something similar, trying to create alumni associations so we don't lose anybody over the years. We can keep reaching back and down and making sure we know what these folks are doing and how they can help us bring along new generations of exchange students.

In response to the September 11th attacks, the Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, led so ably by Assistant Secretary Pat Harrison, launched the Partnership for Learning Initiative -- P-4-L for short.

P-4-L engages public and private sectors here and abroad to address common concerns in education, human capacity building, and economic development. That engagement includes exchanges for college and high school students and the people who influence them -- their teachers, their coaches, and their religious leaders, and I thank Pat and her team for their creativity and dedication in developing this initiative, and in managing the Fulbright Program and related exchange programs.

I tell young audiences everywhere I go, and I've gotten into the habit now, over the years, that when I go to visit in the country there is always somebody who wants to throw a dinner or to bring in some intellectuals for me to talk to. And I've got nothing wrong with an intellectual, but these are people my age, you know, and that's old. I want to talk to young people. So I've made a habit now talking to the next generation. There is nothing I can do with me. I want to talk to the next generation. And it is so important that we reach out to these youngsters and bring them in.

When we have our Iftaar dinner here, the breaking of the Ramadan day fast, for the first couple of years that we did it here, I had a nice table right here in the middle of the room and I surrounded myself with very, very distinguished men and women, who were Muslim scholars or leaders in the American Muslim community and it was terrific, but I decided for the last two years that I want just kids at my table, all young people, who are here exchanging views as part of one of our exchange programs.

And I cannot tell you how exciting it is to have eight or nine kids from Azerbaijan or Afghanistan or Indonesia sitting at a table and we just chat, "What did you like about living in America? What is the family you're living with like? Was it different than what you expected?" And what I've learned over and over, they learn not what you think you're teaching them, they are seeing things. They are getting experiences that will be life-changing to them and it has nothing to do just with the education they're receiving, but they are leaving with a lot more than you ever imagined they would leave with.

We’re also reaching out to disadvantaged young people from countries with significant Muslim populations who wish to learn English, but who lack the ways and the means to do so.

We developed a program of micro-scholarships that now enable more than 3,600 students in 39 countries to study English and learn about American society.

Going beyond the classroom, we’ve also created CultureConnect, a worldwide program that pairs renowned American professionals in sports and in the arts with younger audiences abroad to build cross-cultural understanding.

I’m sure these new programs will be as successful as the Fulbright Program has been in advancing international understanding. I’ve had personal experience of this success in just the past few days.

On Saturday I was in Rabat, Morocco for the first meeting of the Forum for the Future. My counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammed Benaissa, was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Minnesota.

A day earlier I was in Brussels for the NATO ministerial meeting. There I met with my close friend, Javier Solana, the European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security policy. He, too, was a Fulbright student at the University of Virginia.

The ambassadors of more than a dozen countries of the United States, some of whom are here today, are Fulbright scholars. So I see them everywhere. And I brag about this and I brag about the fact that this Department of State is so deeply involved in it, and four of our current U.S. Ambassadors abroad -- to Chile, Gabon, the Philippines, and Syria -- are Fulbright Program alumni, as well.

Just because a counterpart in diplomacy is a Fulbrighter doesn’t mean we never have differences, of course. But there’s no question that the Fulbright bond helps make communications and understanding easier at so many levels.

Fulbrighters have also been extraordinarily active and successful in the world: 34 have won Nobel prizes; 65 have won Pulitzer prizes; 21 have received MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Awards; 14 have received the presidential medal of freedom, our nation's highest honor.

And Fulbright scholars have generally been successful in ways that advance both American interests and principles -- a Fulbrighter: Armindo Maia, helped lead East Timor’s struggle for freedom and democracy; Alejandro Toledo, a shoeshine boy turned economist, and now the president of Peru, was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford.

The success of Fulbrighters far transcends government service. One of the most prominent educators in the United States today and the person who chaired the committee that selected me for this, Dr. Ruth Simmons, President of Brown University, the daughter of a sharecropper, she earned her doctorate from Harvard and won a Fulbright Fellowship to France. She works tirelessly to support education.

Then there's Dr. Najma Najam, from Pakistan, founded the Fatima Jinnah Women’s University -- the first and only graduate school for women in her country -- and she did that just two years after her Fulbright award at the University of Pittsburgh.

So many other stories, I could go on and on and on. In the Fulbright Program’s 58-year history, more than a quarter of a million Americans and foreign citizens have benefited from this experience. But whether they become prime ministers or poets, scientists or senators, educators or engineers, Fulbrighters have all carried with them a better understanding of cultures other than their own, and as a result, they serve as agents of change, they shape opinions, and they contribute to the advancement of both knowledge and international understanding.

Better understanding among people is not a magic potion. Not all conflicts in the world are solved, or even caused or solved by misunderstandings, some are based on real interests that really conflict.

But we’d be irresponsible not to take full advantage of what President Lincoln called the better angels of human nature. And that’s what the Fulbright Program is all about. That’s what this award is all about. And that’s why I’m so proud to accept it, and I accept it not on my own personal behalf, but on behalf of all the wonderful people in my Department who work in this program.

I accept it on behalf of all of the men and women of the State Department, who today are out in the many embassies and missions that we have around the world, serving on the frontlines of freedom through diplomacy to create better understanding between people to do their part to make sure that we don't have wars because we have found ways to achieve peace, and the Fulbright Program has been dedicated to that proposition from the very beginning.

So we're deeply honored to have you here this evening and I'm deeply honored to receive this award in the name of the men and women that I have been privileged to lead here at the Department of State. Thank you very much.