J. William Fulbright
James William Fulbright (
April 9 1905–
February 9 1995) was a well-known 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. Further, Fulbright was an outspoken critic of the organized pro-Israel community in the US, and was in turn labelled "consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters in this country" in 1974 by the
Anti-Defamation League, the leading Jewish defense organization.
Born in
Sumner,
Missouri, he obtained a
political science degree from the
University of Arkansas in
1925. 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, DC 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.
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 1949 Fulbright became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. From 1959-1974 he served as chairman, the longest-serving chairman of that committee in 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". In 1961, he also raised serious objections to President
John F. Kennedy about the impending
Bay of Pigs invasion.
Fulbright, for most of his life and public service, was a supporter of
racial segregation. He opposed the
Brown v. Board of Education ruling by signing
The Southern Manifesto and opposed major
civil rights legislation by joining with other
Dixiecrats in filibusters of the
Civil Rights Act of 1957 and
Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also voted against the 1965
Voting Rights Act, in fact, he did not vote for a civil rights bill until
1970, during the Nixon administration, when he led the charge against the confirmation of anti-civil rights Nixon supreme court nominees
Clement Haynsworth and
Harold Carswell.[
1]
His most notable case of dissent was his public condemnation of foreign and domestic policies, including his belief that right-wing radicalism had infected the United States military. This led to his being denounced by two
conservative senators: Senator
J. Strom Thurmond of
South Carolina, and Senator
Barry M. Goldwater of
Arizona. Goldwater,
John G. Tower, the
Texas conservative senator, and some radical right-wing leaders had announced that they were going to Arkansas to campaign against Fulbright, but Arkansas voters reelected him. A plot to assassinate Fulbright by the Minutemen, an extremist group, was uncovered.
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 speculated that
President Kennedy asked Fulbright to make this statement as a way of signalling to the
Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev that the erection 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 organisations seeking to influence public opinion in favour of Israel. This statement led to friction with the organized Jewish community in the US.
On
August 7 1964, a unanimous House of Representatives and all but two senators passed the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to the further 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.
In 1966, Fulbright published
The Arrogance of Power (ISBN 0812992628) 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.
Fulbright retired from the Senate in 1974, after being defeated in the Democratic primary by then-Governor
Dale Bumpers. Previously the same year
ADL, 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.
Fulbright died of a
stroke in 1995 at the age of 89 in Washington, DC. During the 50th Anniversary Dinner of the Fulbright Program 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] In a speech at the dedication of the Fulbright Sculpture at the University of Arkansas on October 21, 2002, 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 is buried at
Evergreen Cemetery (Fayetteville, AR) in
Fayetteville, Arkansas.
*Clinton, Bill (2005).
My Life. Vintage. ISBN 140003003X.
*Johnson, Haynes and Gwertzmann, Bernard (1968).
Fulbright: The Dissenter. Doubleday.
*
*
US Department of State biography
