| James William Fulbright | |
|---|---|
| United States Senator from Arkansas |
|
| In office January 3, 1945 – December 31, 1974 |
|
| Preceded by | Hattie Caraway |
| Succeeded by | Dale Bumpers |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Arkansas's 3rd district | |
| In office January 3, 1943 – January 3, 1945 |
|
| Preceded by | Clyde T. Ellis |
| Succeeded by | James William Trimble |
| Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations | |
| In office January 3, 1959 – December 31, 1974 |
|
| Preceded by | Theodore F. Green |
| Succeeded by | John J. Sparkman |
| Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency | |
| In office January 3, 1955 – January 3, 1959 |
|
| Preceded by | Homer Capehart |
| Succeeded by | A. Willis Robertson |
| Personal details | |
| Born | April 9, 1905 Sumner, Missouri |
| Died | February 9, 1995 (aged 89) Washington, D.C. |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Elizabeth Williams, Harriet Mayor Fulbright |
| Alma mater | University of Arkansas Pembroke College (Oxford University) George Washington University |
| Religion | Disciple of Christ |
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 who supported the creation of the United Nations and the longest serving chairman in the history of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was also a segregationist who signed the Southern Manifesto. Fulbright opposed McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee and later became known for his opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. His efforts to establish an international exchange program eventually resulted in the creation of a fellowship program which bears his name, the Fulbright Program.
President Bill Clinton cited him as a mentor.
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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.[1][2]
Fulbright later studied at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Pembroke College graduating in 1928. He received his law degree from The 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.[3]
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, unseating incumbent Hattie Carraway, the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate. 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 155 countries.
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. [7]
According to historian and former Special Assistant to President Kennedy Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Fulbright was Kennedy's first choice as Secretary of State, but it was felt he was too controversial. Rather the "lowest common denominator", Dean Rusk, was chosen.[8]
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.[9] 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." .[10] 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,[11] 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.
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.
| U.S. Congressional opposition to U.S. involvement in wars and interventions
|
|---|
| 1812 North America |
| House Federalists’ Address |
| 1847 Mexican–American War |
| Spot Resolutions |
| 1917 World War I |
| Filibuster of the Armed Ship Bill |
| 1935–1939 |
| Neutrality Acts |
| 1935–1940 |
| Ludlow Amendment |
| 1970 Vietnam |
| McGovern–Hatfield Amendment |
| 1970 Southeast Asia |
| Cooper–Church Amendment |
| 1971 Vietnam |
| Repeal of Tonkin Gulf Resolution |
| 1973 Southeast Asia |
| Case–Church Amendment |
| 1973 |
| War Powers Resolution |
| 1974 |
| Hughes–Ryan Amendment |
| 1976 Angola |
| Clark Amendment |
| 1982 Nicaragua |
| Boland Amendment |
| 2007 Iraq |
| House Concurrent Resolution 63 |
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.
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 left 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-interventionist programs, had long made him a target of his party's right wing. Bumpers won by a landslide.
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 international law at the Washington, DC office of the law firm Hogan & Hartson from 1975 - 1993. [12]
On May 5, 1993, President Bill Clinton presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Fulbright at the Fulbright Association's eighty-eighth birthday tribute. [13]
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." [3]
Fulbright's ashes were interred at the Fulbright Family plot in Evergreen Cemetery in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
In 1996, The George Washington University renamed a residence hall in his honor. The J. William Fulbright Hall is located 2223 H Street, N.W., at the corner of 23rd and H Streets. The Hall received historic designations as a District of Columbia historic site on January 28, 2010, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 18, 2010. [14] [15] [16]
On October 21, 2002, in a speech at the dedication of the Fulbright Sculpture at the University of Arkansas, Bill Clinton said,
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 294,000 "Fulbrighters," 111,000 from the United States and 183,000 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 155 countries worldwide.
| United States House of Representatives | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Clyde T. Ellis |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Arkansas's 3rd congressional district 1943–1945 |
Succeeded by James William Trimble |
| United States Senate | ||
| Preceded by Hattie Caraway |
United States Senator (Class 3) from Arkansas 1945–1974 Served alongside: John Little McClellan |
Succeeded by Dale Bumpers |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Theodore F. Green |
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 1959 – 1974 |
Succeeded by John Sparkman |
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