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.

Early years

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.

Congressional career

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.^*

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.

Post-Senate career

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." ^* 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.

References

• Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. Vintage. ISBN 140003003X.
• Johnson, Haynes and Gwertzmann, Bernard (1968). Fulbright: The Dissenter. Doubleday.

External links

• US Department of State biography

1905 births | 1995 deaths | American lawyers | American legal academics | People from Missouri | Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients | Southern Manifesto | Members of the United States House of Representatives from Arkansas | United States Senators from Arkansas | American Rhodes scholars | Former students of Pembroke College, Oxford | Former students of University College, Oxford | People associated with the University of Arkansas

James William Fulbright | J. William Fulbright | J. William Fulbright | J・ウィリアム・フルブライト