PDWorldwide International Consulting
Public Affairs, Public Relations, International Education and Cross-Cultural Understanding
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Bio
William P. Kiehl, Ed. D.
Founding President and CEO
William P. Kiehl is the founder President and CEO of PD Worldwide, consultants in international public affairs, higher education management and cross-cultural communications.
In February 2004, he was appointed Executive Director of the Public Diplomacy Council at the School of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. He served in that position through April 2007 when he was elected to the Public Diplomacy Council's Board of Directors and as Treasurer in April 2009. Dr. Kiehl was Editor of the on-line journal American Diplomacy from 2009-2011 and currently serves as Contributing Editor (Books). He retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in November 2003 but served as an Instructor in Public Diplomacy in the School of Professional and Area Studies at the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State for several years. He continues to take on special assignments for the U.S. Department of State at overseas embassies. He was awarded a doctoral degree in Higher Education Management at the University of Pennsylvania. His primary interest of research is international education.
As the Diplomat in Residence at the U.S. Army War College's Center for Strategic Leadership, he was the Senior Fellow of the U.S. Army Peacekeeping Institute (now the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute) until July 2003. His duties included advising the Center and the Institute on foreign policy and conducting outreach with the academic, military and civilian government communities. He continues to advise the U.S. military on issues of influence operations.
With the reorganization of the Foreign Affairs agencies in October 1999, Dr. Kiehl was named Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Resources of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Department of State. With USIA he was Acting Deputy Associate Director for Educational and Cultural Affairs and also Staff Director of the Interagency Working Group on U.S. Government-Sponsored International Exchanges and Training (IAWG).
Overseas, Dr. Kiehl was Director of the U.S. Information Service in Bangkok, Thailand. As the first Chairman of the Bangkok Interagency Council on Administrative Support Services, he led representatives of some 34 government agencies in finding efficient solutions to administrative problems at one of the largest U.S. overseas missions. He also directed U.S. press and cultural affairs in London, Helsinki and Prague. His other Washington assignments with USIA included: Acting Director and Deputy Director, Office of Program Coordination and Development and Country Affairs Officer for the USSR and the Baltic States.
William Kiehl joined the U. S. Foreign Service in 1970 and retired with the rank of Minister-Counselor in the Senior Foreign Service. His first overseas posting was to Belgrade, Yugoslavia; followed by assignments to Zagreb and to Colombo, Sri Lanka. Kiehl escorted the exhibition "Agriculture USA" throughout the former Soviet Union in the late 1970s and thereafter served as Embassy Press Officer in Moscow. A decade later he was Public Affairs Advisor to Ambassador Max Kampelman and the U.S. Delegation to the CSCE Moscow Conference on the Human Dimension. He was a principal member of negotiation teams for cultural and exchanges agreements with the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. During his career he directed media responsibilities for overseas visits by Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton to the United Kingdom, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine and Thailand as well as for summit-level meetings in Geneva, Helsinki and London.
In addition to his Doctor of Education degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Kiehl earned an honors degree from the University of Scranton and an M.A. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. He was Honorary Visiting Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. Before joining the Foreign Service he worked in the Governor's Office of Pennsylvania, his home state. He is the recipient of numerous Foreign Service honor awards and two Hammer Awards-- for his role in reinventing USIA's Information Bureau in 1994 and for his work with the IAWG in 1998. He received the Frank J. O'Hara Award for Distinction in Government Service from his alma mater in 2002.
His publications include: "Unfinished Business: Foreign Affairs Consolidation was only the Beginning",
National Security Studies Quarterly (Winter 2001), "Peacekeeper or Occupier? U.S. Experience with Information Operations in the Balkans", International Peacekeeping (Winter 2001-2002), "Information Operations: Time for a Redefinition?" (USAPKI, 2002); "Partnership: Information Operations and Civil-Military Cooperation in Peacekeeping", Cornwallis VIII (April 2003), "Can Humpty Dumpty Be Saved?", American Diplomacy, November 2003, "The Weakest Link in American Foreign Policy",The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004, "America's Public Diplomacy at a Crossroads", YES, 2005, America's Dialogue with the World (ed.), 2006; second edition 2007, "Humpty Dumpty Redux: Saving Public Diplomacy", American Diplomacy, (May 2008) as well as book reviews in Parameters and The Foreign Service Journal. Recent publications include: The Last Three Feet: Case Studies in Public Diplomacy (2012), The Eagle and the Elephant: Thai-American Relations Since 1833, (2010) Global Intentions Local Results: How College Can Create International Communities, (2008); "Seduced and Abandoned: Strategic Communication in the National Security Process" in Affairs of State: The Interagency and National Security (2008); and "The Case for Localized Public Diplomacy" in The Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy (2008).
He is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, the National Press Club, The Penn Club of New York, The Internet Society, DACOR, the Public Diplomacy Alumni Association, the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and the American Foreign Service Association, Washington. His foreign languages are Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Czech, Finnish and Thai. He is married to former Foreign Service Officer Pamela Francis Kiehl.
