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 remembered for his efforts to
establish an international exchange program, which thereafter bore
his name, the
Fulbright
Fellowship. Fulbright was the longest serving chairman in the
history of the
Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.
Early years
Born in
Sumner
, Missouri
, he earned a
political science degree from the
University of
Arkansas
in 1925, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. He was elected
president of the student body and a star 4-year player for the
Razorback
football team from
1921-24.
Fulbright
later studied at Oxford University
, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Pembroke
College
graduating in 1928. He received his law
degree from George Washington
University Law School in 1934, and was admitted to the bar in
Washington,
D.C.
and became an attorney in the Antitrust
Division of the U.S.
Department of
Justice
.
Fulbright
was a lecturer in law at the University of Arkansas
from 1936 until 1939. He was appointed
president of the school in 1939, 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 named in his honor.
Fulbright's sister, Roberta, married Gilbert C. Swanson, the head
of the
Swanson frozen-foods conglomerate,
and was the maternal grandmother of media figure
Tucker Carlson.
Congressional career
[[Image:Industrial-Chicken-Coop.JPG|thumb|right|260px|
Senator
Fulbright and the
Chicken
Tax
U.S.
intensive
chicken farming led to the 1961-1964
Chicken War with
Europe.
With imports of inexpensive chicken from the U.S., chicken prices
fell quickly and sharply across Europe, radically affecting
European chicken consumption. U.S. chicken overtook nearly half of
the imported European chicken market. Coming on the heels of a
"crisis in trade relations between the U.S. and the Common Market,"
Europe moved ahead with tariffs.
Senator
Fulbright, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and Democratic Senator from Arkansas — a chief
poultry-producing state — interrupted a NATO
debate on
nuclear armament to protest trade sanctions on U.S. chicken, going
so far as to threaten cutting US troops in NATO.
The U.S. subsequently enacted a 25% tariff on imported
light trucks, known as the
Chicken tax — that remains in effect as
of 2009.]]
House of Representatives
Fulbright was elected to the
United States House of
Representatives in 1942, where he served one term. During this
period, he became a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
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 in September 1942. This
brought Fulbright to national attention. He was elected to the
Senate in 1944, where he served five six-year terms.
He
promoted the passage of legislation establishing the Fulbright Program in 1946, 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
Fulbright became a member of the
Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in 1949, and served as chairman
from 1959 to 1974 he was the longest-serving chair in that
committee's history.
He was the only senator to vote against an appropriation for the
Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations in 1954, which was chaired by
Senator
Joseph McCarthy . McCarthy
in turn, repeatedly called him "Senator Halfbright."
Fulbright 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 [42593].
Fulbright raised serious objections to President
John F. Kennedy about the impending
Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, and
also to President
Lyndon B.
Johnson on the
1965 Dominican Civil
War in Santo Domingo
[42594].
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."
[42595].
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.
Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1963,
Fulbright claimed five million tax-deductible dollars from
philanthropic Americans was sent to Israel and then recycled back
to the U.S. for distribution to organizations seeking to influence
public opinion in favor of Israel. This statement led to friction
with organized pro-Israeli groups 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 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.
Despite serving in the Senate for 30 years, Fulbright remained
Arkansas'
junior
senator throughout his tenure, serving alongside senior senator
John L. McClellan. He is the longest-serving
senator in history to never become his state's senior
senator.
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 not only voted for,
but sponsored, 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 and Senate Foreign Relations Chair
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 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
Fulbright retired from the Senate in 1974, after being defeated in
the Democratic primary by then-Governor
Dale Bumpers. As the sections above have
documented, his early condemnation of the Vietnamese war, and his
anti-isolationist programs, had long made him a target of his
party's far right wing.
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. After his retirement,
Fulbright practiced law in the Washington, DC office of
Hogan & Hartson.
On May 5, 1993, he was presented with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom
by President
William Clinton.
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
Bill 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."
[42596]
Fulbright's ashes were interred at the
Fulbright Family plot in Evergreen Cemetery in
Fayetteville, Arkansas
.
In 1996,
George
Washington University
renamed a residence hall in his honor. The
J. William Fulbright Hall resides at the corner of 23rd and H
Streets, NW.
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.
Sources
References
-
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE7DB1E30F933A25751C0A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
-
http://www.hogwired.com//pdf4/133090.pdf?SPSID=30726&SPID=2419&DB_OEM_ID=6100
- David Harris, "Swanson Saga: End of a Dream", The New York
Times, 9 September 1979
- Verdict on Santo Domingo
- Johnson, Haynes and Gwertzmann, Bernard (1968). Fulbright:
The Dissenter. Doubleday.
Further reading
- Fulbright, J. William (1966). The Arrogance of Power,
New York: Random House. ISBN 0-8129-9262-8
- Fulbright, J. William (1971). The Pentagon Propaganda
Machine, New York: Vintage Books
- Fulbright, J. William (1985). Advice and Dissent, Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press.
- Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. Vintage. ISBN
1-4000-3003-X.
- Finley, Keith M. Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and
the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938-1965 (Baton Rouge, LSU
Press, 2008).
- 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