J. William Fulbright

James William Fulbright
United States Senator from Arkansas
In office January 3, 1945 – December 31, 1974
Preceded by	Hattie Caraway
Succeeded by	Dale Bumpers
Personal details
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Elizabeth Williams

James William Fulbright (April 9, 1905 – February 9, 1995) was a member of the United States Senate representing Arkansas. Fulbright was a Southern Democrat and a staunch multilateralist, supported racial segregation, supported the creation of the United Nations and opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee. He is also remembered for his efforts to establish an international exchange program, which thereafter bore his name, the Fulbright Fellowships. Fulbright was also the longest serving chairman in the history of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Early years

Born in Sumner, Missouri, he obtained a political science degree from the University of Arkansas in 1925, becoming a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. He later studied at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Pembroke College graduating in 1928, and received his law degree from The George Washington University Law School in 1934. In 1934, Fulbright was admitted to the bar in Washington, D.C. and became an attorney in the anti-trust division of the US Department of Justice.

From 1936 until 1939, Fulbright was a lecturer in law at the University of Arkansas. In 1939 he was appointed president, making him the youngest university president in the country. He held this post until 1941. The School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas is now named in his honor.

Fulbright's great-nephew is the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who is a grandson of Fulbright's sister, Roberta; she married Gilbert C. Carlson, the head of the Swanson frozen-foods conglomerate.

Congressional career

House of Representatives

In 1942, Fulbright was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served one term. During this period, he became a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In September 1942, the House adopted the Fulbright Resolution which supported international peace-keeping initiatives and encouraged the United States to participate in what became the United Nations. This brought Fulbright to national attention. In 1944, he was elected to the Senate, where he served five six-year terms.

In 1946 he promoted the passage of legislation establishing the Fulbright Program, a program of educational grants (Fulbright Fellowships and Fulbright Scholarships), sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State, governments in other countries, and the private sector. The program was established to increase mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and other countries through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills. It is considered one of the most prestigious award programs and it operates in 144 countries.

Senate

In 1949 Fulbright became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and served as chairman from 1959 to 1974 — the longest-serving chair in that committee's history.

His Senate career was marked by some notable cases of dissent. In 1954 he was the only senator to vote against an appropriation for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy in turn, repeatedly called him "Senator Halfbright."

For most of his life and public service, Fulbright was a supporter of racial segregation. He signed The Southern Manifesto opposing the Supreme Court's historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. He subsequently joined with the Dixiecrats in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as voting against the 1965 Voting Rights Act. However, during the Nixon administration Fulbright voted for a civil rights bill and led the charge against confirming Nixon's conservative Supreme Court nominees Clement Haynsworth and Harold Carswell. [1]

In 1961, Fulbright raised serious objections to President John F. Kennedy about the impending Bay of Pigs invasion. On 30 July, 1961, two weeks before the erection of the Berlin Wall, Fulbright said in a television interview, "I don't understand why the East Germans don't just close their border, because I think they have the right to close it." It has been suggested that President Kennedy asked Fulbright to make this statement as a way of signaling to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the building of a wall would be viewed by the United States as an acceptable way of defusing the Berlin Crisis.

In 1963 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright claimed that five million tax-deductible dollars from philanthropic Americans had been sent to Israel and then recycled back to the US for distribution to organizations seeking to influence public opinion in favor of Israel. This statement led to friction with the organized Jewish community in the U.S.

Perhaps his most notable case of dissent was his public condemnation of foreign and domestic policies, in particular, his concern that right-wing radicalism, as espoused by the John Birch Society and wealthy oil-man H.L. Hunt, had infected the United States military. He was, in turn, denounced by ultra-conservative Senators J. Strom Thurmond and Barry M. Goldwater. Goldwater and Texas Senator John Tower announced that they were going to Arkansas to campaign against Fulbright, but Arkansas voters reelected him.

Vietnam War and U.S. foreign policy

On August 7, 1964, a unanimous House of Representatives and all but two members of the Senate voted to approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to a dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War. Fulbright, who voted for the resolution, would later write:

Many Senators who accepted the Gulf of Tonkin resolution without question might well not have done so had they foreseen that it would subsequently be interpreted as a sweeping Congressional endorsement for the conduct of a large-scale war in Asia.

As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright held several series of hearings on the Vietnam War. Many of the earlier hearings, in 1966, were televised to the nation in their entirety (a rarity in the pre-C-Span era); the 1971 hearings included the notable testimony of Vietnam veteran and future-Senator John Kerry.

In 1966, Fulbright published The Arrogance of Power, in which he attacked the justification of the Vietnam War, Congress's failure to set limits on it, and the impulses which gave rise to it. Fulbright's scathing critique undermined the elite consensus that U.S. military intervention in Indochina was necessitated by Cold War geopolitics. Some critics of U.S. foreign policy argue that U.S. policy has changed little since Fulbright wrote his book, and find his words applicable today.

In his book, Fulbright offered an analysis of American foreign policy:

Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But... when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.

Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work.

He was also a strong believer in international law:

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.

Final election and legacy

File:Fulbrightstatue.JPG

Fulbright Statue at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas

Fulbright retired from the Senate in 1974, after being defeated in the Democratic primary by then-Governor Dale Bumpers. Previously the same year Anti-Defamation League, the leading Jewish defense organization, claimed that Fulbright was "consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters in this country". In response to this Bumpers received considerable financial support from the pro-Israel community, but it is unclear to what extent this affected the outcome of the election. At the time that he left the Senate, Fulbright had spent his entire 30 years in the Senate as the Junior senator from Arkansas, behind John Little McClellan who entered the Senate two years before him.

Fulbright died of a stroke in 1995 at the age of 89 in Washington, D.C. A year later, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary dinner of the Fulbright Program held June 5, 1996 at the White House, President Clinton said, "Hillary and I have looked forward for sometime to celebrating this 50th anniversary of the Fulbright Program, to honor the dream and legacy of a great American, a citizen of the world, a native of my home state and my mentor and friend, Senator Fulbright." [2]

Fulbright's ashes were interred at the Fulbright Family plot in Evergreen Cemetery in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

On October 21, 2002, in a speech at the dedication of the Fulbright Sculpture at the University of Arkansas , President Bill Clinton said, "I admired him. I liked him. On the occasions when we disagreed, I loved arguing with him. I never loved getting in an argument with anybody as much in my entire life as I loved fighting with Bill Fulbright".

Fulbright Program

The Fulbright Program was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by then Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State.

Approximately 279,500 "Fulbrighters," 105,400 from the United States and 174,100 from other countries, have participated in the Program since its inception over sixty years ago. The Fulbright Program awards approximately 6,000 new grants annually.

Currently, the Fulbright Program operates in over 150 countries worldwide.

Further reading

• Fulbright, J. William (1966). The Arrogance of Power, New York: Random House. ISBN 0-8129-9262-8
• Fulbright, J. William (1985). Advice and Dissent, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
• Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. Vintage. ISBN 1-4000-3003-X.
• Johnson, Haynes and Gwertzmann, Bernard (1968). Fulbright: The Dissenter. Doubleday.
• Woods, Randall B. (1995) "Fulbright: A Biography," Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-48262-3

External links

• US Department of State biography