Charlie Wick, the ex-Hollywood agent and producer, took no end of guff when then-President Ronald Reagan appointed him to head the U.S. Information Agency. But Wick proved his critics wrong.

He had Reagan’s ear, he had energy and he understood the importance of communication in Reagan’s ideological struggle against communism’s “evil empire.”

Wick won huge increases in USIA’s budget, expanded exchange programs, launched a global satellite TV network and founded RadioMarti, which broadcasts to Cuba. Even jaded government bureaucrats ended up cheering his achievements.

Unfortunately, when the Cold War was won and it looked as though ideological struggle was passe, the Clinton administration helped right-wing Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., kill the USIA by folding it into the State Department, where public diplomacy was a backwater.

But now, the Charlie Wick spirit is back in the person of Karen Hughes, President Bush’s former White House communications director, who last year became undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

Critics, as they did with Wick, are laughing at the idea of a presidential crony, an alleged foreign-policy naif, trying to combat an international adversary with images – in this case, fighting terrorists by visiting with Muslim women and getting the president to talk respectfully about Islam.