Everything about William Fulbright totally explained
James William Fulbright (
April 9,
1905 –
February 9,
1995) was a
United States Senator representing
Arkansas from
1945 to
1975.
Fulbright was a
Southern Democrat and a staunch multilateralist, 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. Fulbright supported
racial segregation and opposed the
civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s.
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.
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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've 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 organized pro-Israeli Zionist Jewish communities 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 apply 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've reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we're 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
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's 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've 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."
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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, 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.
Quotes by J. William Fulbright
- "Israel controls the United States Senate. Around 80 percent are completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants it gets. Jewish influence in the House of Representatives is even greater.”
Further Information
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